There it was again.

This whole drinking carry-on. Seemed to be, from what I could tell, via the utilisation of various diagrams and complex pie charts, this drinking malarkey in some way attributed to ones social status. If one didn't play football, if one no more cared to run around a field half naked covered in shit and snotters than they desired to insert disproportionately jagged objects into sensitive orifices, then the only way to get anyone's attention was to drink and throw up and tell folks they know the score.

No matter how many pints, shots, cap-full's and quarter-bottles I have ingested, I am still no closer to knowing what "the score" actually is. Yet, everyone I have ever came into contact with during my drunkenness, knew precisely what it was. Sometimes very loudly.
And sometimes they may return the compliment.

"This fucker here", says I, my arm around this fucker here's shoulders, "He knows the score so he does."
"No!", says my acquaintance, "You know the score. You know the fuckin' score, son, you know the score."
Usually, both parties conclude that they each hold some knowledge regarding the score, and everything is settled.

But I was lying every time. Whatever the score was, I knew damn all about it.

But I presumed it would arrive at some point, this knowledge of tally's, this enlightenment regarding numerical results.

At age 13 the thing to do for an evening was suddenly changed from standing around at the bus-shelter talking about stuff, to heading off into town, hanging around street corners and, well, talking about stuff. But with much more swearing.

A friend, the self same, coincidently, who shared that first garbage-laced tipple, took me one fine summer's eve to the house of a relative. There, hidden away behind a bed in one of the rooms, was a bottle of cider. I can't recall the exact volume of the container, so engrossed was I in the fact that this friend's cousin had suddenly became rather attractive in defiance of all laws of physics, but I do recall it was quite large. The bottle of cider, I mean. The bottle was quite large.

And there were cigarettes also. A veritable den of rebellion hidden away behind this unassuming headboard. We didn't drink from the bottle, as I recall, but the very knowledge that this acquaintance, barely a year older than myself, had in his possession a vast quantity of alcoholic beverage, was enough to convince me that the time had arrived. Those words were going to be put into place alongside my name, like some folks slap letters after theirs on account of degrees in social management skills. The Duke - Mature. Grown-Up.

When you head into a recovery group for the first time, you hear a lot of jargon tossed around. What the hell most of it means is anyone's guess, but some of it is painfully obvious. Blackout Drinking was one such term I remember hearing very early on in my sobriety. The bizarre enigma of getting up all sorts of bizarre shenanigans, and having "the best night ever, man", apparently, and yet remembering not one solitary detail. Or maybe you do remember a few, but they're kind of soft-focus, and not really in the right chronological order. Like late-period Fellini, in fact.