You know what it’s like, right? You go on holiday abroad for a little while and by the end you’re convinced you’ve become a better person. You think about all the ways in which you used to behave in Britain and you think: “pah, never again. I’m more wholesome now – more relaxed, healthier. I’m going to go home but I just won’t be the same person I was before I left. This is The New Me.”
The first time this happened to me was when I lived in Venice for a few months. Every day, at lunch, I’d have a wide selection of vegetables, maybe a few slices of cold meat or fish, and a slice or two of nice cheese, with a piece of bread. The ingredients often changed but the format did not.
It was heavenly, and made me feel good, both physically and about myself. Who knew that wolfing down a cheap and greasy sandwich most days just made you feel tired and a bit gross, especially when over 30? “When I get back to London,” I told myself, “I’ll make a real effort to eat lunches like this again.” A new dawn had broken, and all that.
In the end, I would say it took me only a few days to break and give into the call of the grim sarnie. It was cold and wet and still getting dark quite early, and I needed all the comfort I could get. Plus I’d returned to a country where most affordable vegetables taste of drain water, and where tasty mozzarella costs about as much as a small house. The experiment, in short, was a failure.
That doesn’t mean my optimism was dimmed in any way. As you may know, I have just returned from a second month-long stint in America. It is fair to say that their culinary offerings aren’t as good as Italy’s, but they do have something we do not. New Yorkers, at the very least, are pretty good at drinking in moderation.
They say they’ll go out for one or two drinks and – this may shock you! – that is what they actually do, especially on weeknights. Over my four weeks in the US, I only woke up with a hangover one time, and the person to blame was actually a French friend of mine, with whom I shared roughly a gallon of wine.
A few other mornings felt very vaguely unpleasant for an hour or so, but that was it. Gone were my days of drinking like a Brit; I’d been taught how to go out and only sip on the occasional drink, and it felt good. There was a new Marie in town and, to quote a slogan which now feels somewhat triggering, we weren’t going back.
Of course, I’d been lying to myself. I got back to Britain and quickly found myself throwing glass after glass of barely drinkable white “wine” down my gullet again, and surrounding myself with people doing the same. In our collective defence, though, I’m not convinced it’s entirely our fault.
Italians eat better than us because their ingredients are tasty and inexpensive, and New Yorkers get to be abstemious, at least most of the time, because their weather allows it. I was in the US for 28 days and the sun failed to come out on only one of those days. It rained, in total, for two hours during the time I was there.
Amazingly, it turns out it is quite easy to feel chipper and wholesome when the sun will simply not stop shining on your face. If, however, you spend most of your life getting rained on, walking against strong, damp winds and wondering if you’ll ever look up and not see grey again, the appeal of the pub is hard to resist.
If anything, the urge to drink roughly 75 pints while hiding in a building with non-existent windows is at its strongest right about now, with the days getting ever shorter, the temperature plummeting and spring feeling like it may only come in half a lifetime. November in Britain is a time for getting sozzled; perhaps the best one. What else is there to do?
The person I was in New York and Venice was an optimistic one. This version of myself, however, is more realistic. We do what we can to survive, when living on a wet island off the north-western coast of Europe, and maybe, sometimes, that is all we can do. Cheers!
