This was published 11 years ago
Bottoms up while flat out is the ultimate laid-back way to indulge in a drink
By Sam de Brito
Feel that chill in the air? Time for some drinking in bed, I reckon.
Boozing's been getting a bad rap lately, so my tip for dealing with all the unnecessary public violence and sexual aggression it causes is simple. Imbibe horizontally.
It's comfy. You know you won't wake up on a stranger's mattress 'cos you're already sprawled on yours. There are no fights over the pool table, no awkward rejections when you lean in to pash a 21-year-old at some abattoir-of-the-soul nightclub and no taxis to catch home.
There's pretty much no downside to drinking in bed, except you ruin a lot of sheets if you're on the red wine or you fall over returning to said bed from the bathroom and bleed a lot onto your pillow cases.
Many years ago, I read Charles Bukowski's novel Factotum, in which he writes: "Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat."
I didn't think much about that quote until a few years later, when a girlfriend reintroduced me to the concept of drinking in bed and we lorded it up on my futon (it was the '90s) for at least 60 per cent of our three-week relationship.
A mate of mine – I'm pretty sure I've mentioned him before – is a big bed drinker (shiraz) and only buys his manchester in darker colours.
He reckons navy blue sheets can hide a multitude of sins. What they can't always hide are the remnants of a good shiraz.
"Rockford Basket Press does not [wash out]," he says. "Or it doesn't if you leave it for four days and set the stain with your body heat."
Drinking in bed? How dissolute! How immoderate!
How about you argue the point with half of Rome's emperors, swathes of European royalty and Joan Crawford, because they were all experts at horizontal drinking. It's the new black, I'm telling you.
If there's a continuum of life's most self-indulgent practices, golf sits about in the middle, beaten soundly by crowd-funding your own album, heroin, then drinking in bed. The good news is it's one of those cheeky little extravagances we can all slip into our schedule.
During the deluge of bad publicity alcohol has attracted, I read this perplexing advice: "Never drink spirits. At home. Alone."
Seriously, where's the fun in that, I thought. Where's the bed?
Of course, horizontal boozing is much more fun when there's two or more of you, but you're never going to lose friends if you insist on doing it by yourself.
Drinking alone's underrated. You never realise quite how drunk you are because you don't talk to anybody to slur your words.
Just switch off your phone, don't go near Twitter and you offend no one, except the people downstairs when you fall over coming back from the bathroom.
Of course, you also wake up in the morning with your bedroom looking like a crime scene, sheets a veritable Rorschach test proffering clues to the adventures of your inebriated self.
Whose blood is that?