High Sobriety (20 page)

It sounds archaic. But then I compare it to what my friend Joanne told me recently about the way some Scottish women carry on in pubs these days. Having worked as a manager in the Glasgow pub trade for more than ten years, she's seen it all. On Old Firm match days — a football derby between archenemies Rangers and Celtic that has a shocking history of sectarian violence — she's seen alcohol-fuelled fights become full-scale riots. Predominantly, they involve men. But what really shocks her is the way that some women are now behaving. You would think that the reunion of a '90s boy band would be a sedate affair, but when English pop group Take That staged a comeback tour in June, the streets of Glasgow were overrun with wasted middle-aged women. Many had been on marathon drinking sessions before the gig even started; some were so boozed, they collapsed. Others flashed their boobs at passing cars and urinated in the street. Joanne says that they were feral in the pub after the show: verbally abusing bar staff and generally being obnoxious. It's hard to say what's more offensive — women being branded as sluts for daring to have a drink in a man's domain, or women getting so tanked that they relieve themselves in the gutter and pick fights with strangers.

After dinner, instead of setting up camp in the bar, Mum and I climb the twisty stairs to our bedroom and drink cups of tea while we huddle together over my laptop, watching
Downton Abbey
on DVD. It's not very rock 'n' roll, but these moments shared with Mum are special.

Throughout our journey, the scenery continues to amaze us. We pass Ardverikie House, more famously known as Glenbogle Castle in the BBC series
Monarch of the Glen
. Its fairytale turrets are even more impressive in real life. We travel miles without seeing another car, stopping occasionally to admire the stately homes and grand buildings nestled among the forests. In Australia, 1950s bungalows and austere office blocks are often heritage-listed attractions; in Scotland, centuries-old properties are so plentiful that many don't even merit a mention on the map.

As we get closer to Whitebridge, we mistakenly take a trip down a gravelly road that leads us deep into another Highland estate. Our only companions are sheep, ambling across the unsealed road. We pass another grand residence, perched next to a river that runs under a stone bridge and into an expansive inlet flanked by mountains. It's the kind of scenery that's hard to comprehend: a view so impressive that it feels like a guilty pleasure just being there. I get out of the car and absorb the serene silence, not a soul in sight. The stress of city life, the redundancies, my troubling thoughts about addiction, and my past and my future, all drift away from me like mist. After months of noise, finally some peace.

WE ARRIVE TO
spend the night in a lovely bed and breakfast, where the owner recommends we try the pub at the end of the road. Mum tells him that I don't drink. ‘I don't drink just now,' I clarify, perhaps a smidgen too hastily. After all this time, it's weird that I still don't want to be judged by strangers as a boring teetotaller. Living so far from my homeland, I feel my Scottishness is being slowly chipped away with each year that passes. I worry that my abstinence only highlights my foreignness.

We wake to see a family of pheasants pecking around outside our bedroom window. The stillness of the Highlands is soothing. I feel my body and mind relaxing into the endless space around us. We head off to visit Aunty Cissie's house, an old croft at the end of a single-track road, nestled in a thick forest. The trees were knee-high saplings when Mum was a girl. She remembers running in and out of them with her brother and sister during their school holidays. Cissie, who Mum always called Atta because as a child she couldn't pronounce ‘aunty', died in 1964. Mum has been back to visit her home a couple of times, but not for many years. As we stand outside the house, an elderly neighbour, with ruddy cheeks and billowing cotton-wool hair, approaches. He greets us with a broad smile. When Mum tells him who she is, he bundles her into an embrace and says he knew of Aunt Atta. His nephew now owns the house Mum spent so much of her childhood in. He asks if we want a dram. ‘I find it very lubricating,' he says. ‘It eases the joints. Very good medicine.' We politely decline. It's ten o'clock in the morning.

Everywhere we go, we're greeted by strangers as if we're family. My Scottish accent, tinged with that upward Aussie inflection, returns with full force. It's no longer ‘yes' but ‘aye', ‘cannae' not ‘can't', ‘tatties' rather than ‘potatoes'. The scenery grows more breathtaking with every bend rounded. Driving near Whitebridge, we see deer grazing on a hillside, just metres from us. As we pull over, they stop eating and look up, the stag staring directly at me, transfixed. Later, at the Falls of Foyers, a waterfall that feeds into Loch Ness, something unexpected happens: the sights, smells, and sounds of my homeland prove too much. As the water thunders, I look across the canopy of trees to a deep gorge, which rises up to a cliff top lined with pine trees. It's a view of such uncompromising beauty that I find myself in tears. As I take in the vivid green fields and the storybook mountains beyond, the emotion pours out of me. I am home, at peace, and totally alive. I have a sense of my place in the world that seems to ground my soul to the Highland soil. Mum puts an arm around my shoulder and I rest my head against hers. We look on in awe at the show our country is putting on for us. I'm so lucky.

Later, as the late-evening sun sets and the horizon turns to fairy floss, we crank up the volume on Frankie Miller's version of Dougie MacLean's ‘Caledonia', an unofficial Scottish national anthem, and belt it out as we drive through twisty roads carved into a glen that stretches on for miles. ‘
Let me tell you that I love you / That I think about you all the time / Caledonia, you're calling me / And now I'm going home.
' In that moment, fingers intertwined, we are the only two people on the planet. I worried that a homecoming without alcohol would make my national identity disappear, but I've never felt more Scottish. I know now that national pride is not built on alcohol. I worried that not drinking would prevent me from reconnecting with the ones I love, but my heart's so full there's no room for booze.

WHEN WE RETURN
from the highlands, it's not long before we're back on the road. This time, we're off to the Lake District for Mum's sister Kitty's 70th birthday party. Dad's coming too, and Neil and his family. It will be the first time all of us have been together in the same country at the same time for many years. We'll be staying at an old mansion that my cousin and her husband have bought and turned into holiday-rental accommodation. We leave Edinburgh in convoy for the three-hour journey, and I drive with dad.

When we arrive, on a beautiful, blue-sky afternoon, I do feel like a beer, but the moment is fleeting. I immerse myself in our family reunion and enjoy a weekend full of laughter. Previously, I would have marked this occasion by drinking my weight in wine; but being drunk can muddle some of the rich detail. This time, when I watch my aunty — who was widowed before I was born — slow-dance with her new partner, there are no beer goggles to obscure the sight, only my happy tears. The entire family, Scottish and English, bounces around the pub's dance floor, singing Proclaimers songs at the tops of our lungs, and I don't need wine to keep up. Later, as Mum clambers onto the bar — fuelled by malt whisky and an unwavering determination to cram as much fun into this lifetime as possible — I jump up with her, linking arms, partly to make sure she doesn't fall off and hasten the need for a second hip replacement, and partly because dancing on the bar with your 65-year-old mother just seems like something we should all do at least once in our lives. It's a reminder of the most important lesson I've learned in the last six months. When you take alcohol away, you have a choice: you either do the things you're scared to do completely sober, or you don't do them at all.

This weekend, I also tick off a goal I've been putting off for a very long time. For years, Mum has been asking me to sing for her. I've always made excuses. The last time she heard me sing publicly was at my high-school concert in my final year, when I was 18. Since then, due to a lack of confidence, the occasional drunken karaoke song is the closest I've got to live performance. When I stopped drinking, I ran out of excuses. So, every Monday night for the past few months, I've been brushing up on my skills by taking singing lessons, practising the song that Mum wants played at her funeral. ‘Ain't Nobody's Business' is a sultry old jazz number that speaks of one woman's refusal to play by society's rules. It's an anthem for the way Mum lives her life, and the way she and Dad taught me to believe in myself and follow my own road, no matter what anyone says. If I wait until they're no longer around to hear me sing it, I'll regret it for the rest of my life.

So, in a pub full of people, mostly family, I get up and belt it out. I'm so nervous that it doesn't turn out to be the best performance I've ever given: I'm breathy, and my voice breaks a little when the emotion of the moment catches up with me. But I look at Mum, with tears streaking down her face, one hand over her mouth and the other raised in rhythmic salute to the music, and it's worth it. Few moments in life have given me greater satisfaction.

LEAVING DOESN'T GET
any easier. Just when I'm wearing my scottishness like a comfortable pair of old slippers, I'm off again. I'm lucky to have two incredible countries to call home, but this endless tug of war is no good for my heart.

I meet Fiona and her son, Jude, for a farewell coffee. I won't be here for his fifth birthday next month, so I give him his present now. His face, when he opens the gift, is a picture of delight. As I watch him, this good-natured wee boy with deep-blue eyes and a mop of blond hair, I'm in awe of my friend, who has raised two such wonderful children. She's not one for public displays of emotion; I'm the sappy, demonstrative one. I'll usually wait till we've had a few glasses of wine before I start gushing. But now, I say it anyway: I tell her those children are an absolute credit to her, and I'm proud of the family she's created and the success she's made of her life. We live on opposite sides of the world and I miss her terribly, but I've never seen her more contented — and that makes me happy.

When I get back to Melbourne, the first few weeks are hard. It's the same every time. I miss my parents, I miss my friends, and I miss my homeland. I vow, as I always do, that I will keep my accent. This time, without alcohol, which usually brings my Scottish enunciation charging back to the surface, it's even harder to hang on to. For a fortnight or so, I amuse my Melbourne friends by defiantly using Scots slang, and talking in a lilting brogue that's somewhere between an east-coast Billy Connolly and Begbie from
Trainspotting
, but it doesn't last. The Aussie inflections come back, my vowels lose their edge, and I'm once again fighting the urge to pound my chest and scream, ‘Freedom!' when strangers hear my accent and ask if I'm American.

As I settle back into Melbourne life and reflect on the trip, I can't stop thinking about my past. Realising that I was drunk for much of my youth was confronting. I call Jon Currie and ask him to make arrangements for the brain scan and tests. That might be the only way to know if all that partying and waywardness has taken its toll. He tells me that it may take several months to get an appointment. That's okay — I'm curious, but I might need time to prepare for the results.

Many of the experiences I had in my teens and early adulthood were fun, and I wouldn't swap them; it was all part of growing up. But it makes me sad to think I relied on booze so much that even though I was bored with getting drunk, I felt socially paralysed without it. And it staggers me that the tempestuous relationship I developed with alcohol as a shy teenager carried on, unquestioned, for another 20 years. The myth that being boozed can help me to get a guy, boost my self-esteem, and make me more popular seems like lunacy after half a year without a drink.

A research project based on some of the
Hello Sunday Morning
blogs reveals that many young Australians see alcohol as a crucial element in their social life. As one blogger, Patrick, said: ‘You celebrate you have a drink, you're depressed you have a drink, you finish an exam you have a drink, you finish work you have a drink, the footy's on you have a drink.'

Another observed: ‘If my social circle were a pie chart, alcohol would account for about 90 per cent of it.'

But perhaps I'm not giving today's young people enough credit — maybe there are many 21st-century teens who are way too cool to believe that confidence is a liquid commodity. The Gen Y teen may be a more sophisticated beast than its grungy '90s predecessor. The only way to know is to ask them. My editor often speaks of her daughter Beth, a mature, savvy young woman who spent six months backpacking around Europe after she finished high school, and is now studying a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Melbourne. The tales she brings home about boozy campus life have shocked even her usually unflappable mother. She talks of drinking games that start at ten in the morning and go on well into the night and the next morning. Getting pissed is such a part of uni life that Beth's already complaining she's over it. She's 19.

I decide that I must meet this girl. I've been knocking back booze longer than she's been alive, yet it's people like her who are in the eye of this binge-drinking storm. She might help me to understand whether today's teenagers and young adults really are bigger drinkers than previous generations, or if they're merely carrying on a way of life they inherited. And if they are huge drinkers, why do they place such importance on getting drunk?