In a survey about the effects of alcohol conducted by me a few minutes ago, 50% of my housemates confirmed that, yes, he regularly suffers from blackouts, while the other one said “Fuck off, I’m on the phone.” I’ll chalk that one up as a “Don’t know”.

The reason I’d asked was because another pal of mine had sent an e-mail, in which he’d voiced grave concerns about the fact that he couldn’t remember how he’d got home the previous Saturday night. This had never happened to him before and he was very worried.

I was equally concerned, but not for him. I’d always assumed that nobody under the age of 50 who drinks with any sort of gusto can ever remember how they get home on a Saturday night, but here was a man who had dedicated the best part of 12 years to pickling his liver with alcohol, tearing his hair out because he couldn’t recall how he’d spent approximately 25 minutes of his weekend leisure time.

I’d always assumed it was high spirits that were responsible. Until recently, the roots of the vast majority of my most toe-curling antics could be traced back to the bottles that are kept on the top shelf. So I stopped drinking shorts and stuck to pints of beer instead. Sadly, there was no change, and I continued to labour under the delusion that all those mildly diverting Channel 4 nostalgia shows from I Love 1991 on were made specifically for the benefit of people like me who couldn’t remember a thing about the decade that began in the year when I became old enough to get served.

Of course, there are certain rules to having a blackout that make the whole experience less disconcerting and easier to handle. For a start, no matter how little you can remember about getting home, you invariably complete the journey and manage to end up in bed.

This doesn’t seem all that impressive until you consider some of the hair-brained schemes some people hatch when addled with alcohol, and realise the sheer diversity of alternative destinations you could have headed for once the pub shutters have been pulled down: a shit party with lots of people you don’t know, the nearest outdoor swimming pool, Luxembourg… the possibilities are endlessly unappealing in the cold light of day. And yet, somehow, you end up in your own nice warm bed. You’ve no idea how you got there, because your last memory is throwing a shot glass of Sambuca down the hatch and falling over. But then again, it doesn’t really matter.

Except sometimes it does. Certain people among us have a responsibility not to have blackouts. Explorers, for example. It took Sir Francis Drake some three years and 36,000 miles to circumnavigate the globe back in the 16th century. It would have been quite the debacle expedition if, after all that time, he’d returned with a ship full of monkeys and tobacco, only to report back to his patrons: “Well, I remember setting off, then somebody cracked open a cask of rum and the rest is a complete blank. I woke up this morning back in Southampton to find this hairy little fucker sitting up in the bunk beside me sucking on a Benson & Hedges.”

Yes indeedy, history could certainly have taken some interesting turns if everyone embraced the same cavalier attitude to alcohol-fuelled amnesia as today’s young drinkers. What would have happened, for example, if on the morning of May 30, 1953, Edmund Hilary had woken up with some vague recollection of climbing something big the previous day and thought about it for a while before dismissing it out of hand as some weird absinthe-fuelled fantasy? Or if Neil Armstrong had rung up his old mucker Buzz on July 21, 1969 to fill in the blanks of the previous evening.

Neil Armstrong: “Hey Buzz, what did we end up doing last night?”

Buzz Aldrin: “I can’t remember mate, I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.”

For that is the second rule of having a blackout. Nobody who was with you can ever recall what you did either, unless it was something impressive like getting off with a sexy lady
or being the first man to set foot on the moon. (Unless of course you did something excruciatingly embarrassing, in which case everybody remembers everything in glorious Technicolor.)

The final rule of the blackout, is of course, an economic one. You’ve woken up, you don’t where you were, who you were with, what you did, how you got home and you can’t find your shoes. Assuming you’ll never find out what happened, the one thing that’s a stone-wall certainty is that when you check your pockets, wherever you’ve been and whatever you were doing – whether it was conquering wild frontiers, circumnavigating the globe or skinny-dipping in Michael Barrymore’s swimming pool – it will have cost you all the money you brought out with you the previous evening, save for about a tenner in loose change.

At least that’s what you hope. So you go to the ATM to check your balance, and you’re sure everyone’s looking at you but you can’t figure out why. b