“You don’t need a free bar two hours before the meal” - Noel Cunningham on hosting a recovering alcoholic
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Well, now, for many people, summer is the season for boozy barbecues, bustling beer gardens and sipping sangria in the sun with your pals. But how difficult is it to navigate social events when you're trying to avoid alcohol or to ditch it completely? Hotelier and author Noel Cunningham has joined us this morning, or this afternoon now, to talk about his journey to sobriety and why he is passionate about reframing the way we think about alcohol and social gatherings. You're very, very welcome, Noel.
Well, I am so delighted to be here and I do not want to be that curmudgeonly old uncle who wags the finger and tells the children to stop drinking and start behaving themselves. I want people to embrace summer, embrace our beautiful weather, have a barbecue, enjoy it. And a few maybe little tips along the way as to how to overcome some of those hurdles we face as recovering alcoholics, because it's not easy.
I don't think the word curmudgeonly could be applied to you in any context, Noel. But one phrase that we can apply to you is that you are a recovering alcoholic. And I just wanted to bring you back to when you first realised that you had a problem with alcohol because you worked in hospitality. It's everywhere.
Yeah, you know, it's one of those things, it's very hard to pinpoint when you cross that line, when you suddenly go from being a person who enjoys a drink to a person who has a real problem. And I suppose my problem began very early in life because part of my own insecurity was, probably some bullying, my own situation sort of in rural Ireland being gay. There were so many combinations of things going on that alcohol became a friend from when I was very young because it gave me that I didn't have that little bit of confidence to just face the world and try to, in some way... get through the day, get through the time that lay ahead and hope that somehow or other things would get better.
And it's interesting that choice of word you use, friend, because so many people who have struggled with addiction have talked about how it comes into their life as a friend or what appears to be a friend. And then suddenly you develop this dependency so that... It comes in, you think that's helping you out, but it actually then impacts hugely, it turns.
It turns and I honestly, as I said, I can't pinpoint where I did that turn from having a job a nice place to live, my car, all of those things that we kind of take for granted when you're working hard and doing quite well, to a point where I lost my job, my home, my car. I was rummaging around, you know, in my sitting room, seeing if some coins went down the back of the cushions, that I could go out and buy some more wine. And it's very hard, as I say, to pinpoint when that change took place. It was... In my case, honestly, a gradual thing from when I was very young, of that I'm sure.
And can I bring you back, you know, you grew up in, what, 50s, 60s Ireland. It was a very, very different time. As you say, you grew up in a rural area. Do you think that those struggles, whether it was with bullying or your sexuality, were implicitly sort of linked or a precursor to the addiction that developed?
absolutely because one thing people like me can't avoid is the fact that we are who we are and from an early stage we are sort of picked out as being different you know in whatever way you want to kind of uh put a label on that you know even back in the 50s and 60s somehow or other you stood out from the crowd who went playing ga at weekends who were involved and encouraged to play, who were encouraged to take up farming, who were encouraged to be one of the boys. But you were isolated somewhat. You were left on the fringes of that because you were different. And nowhere like rural Ireland in those days to hammer that home, even though It was hard to put a name on it. You know, Oscar Wilde talked about the love that dare not speak its name.
Whereas in rural Ireland in the 50s, you were just that queer, that strange individual who was different.
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