Big night out
Nightclubs are closing in their droves. More of us are opting for sobriety over sambuca. But what does this mean for partying? Extreme extrovert Catriona Innes finds out…
I’m in a basement bar, bottles and cans stacked up on the shelves all around me. I’m smiling, laughing, trying to impress the DJ I’m speaking to. A few hours later, I’ve hopped from that bar to the next and I’m awash in soft pink lighting. I’m holding a margarita in one hand, stood with a group of women talking feminism, horoscopes, careers… at one point, the illegal animal shipping trade. You know, girl chat.
Nothing about this night out is unusual. Well… except, maybe one thing. That margarita I’m clutching? It’s alcohol-free. The bottles I’m surrounded by? Each one of them, from the ‘absinthe’ to the ‘whisky’, is as well. The entire bar is. The DJ has been sober for the past five years and hosts wild parties, within that very basement, where inhibitions are lowered, yes, but not by any liquid or powder.
We’re living in the era of ‘dry’ partying. Supposedly the soberest generation in recent history, we are either staying home or, if we’re out, we are drinking 0% beers and hitting the gym the next morning. Hedonism? Out. Health? Very much in. Or, at least that’s what the headlines and statistics tell us. But is it the truth? I hit the party ‘circuit’ to find out…
Pulled into the group, a tangle of trembling limbs, feeling unsure as to whose hand was whose, Cara* was surprised at how easy she found it all. How hot the experience was. How willing she was to join in, without swallowing down some liquid courage in the form of a G&T.
‘I hadn’t even pulled sober before, now I was having my first threesome without having had one drink.’ She’d gone to a kink party, choosing not to drink as she didn’t want it clouding her judgment. She connected ‘almost instantly’ with a couple and went back to their hotel for an ‘after-party’. Afterwards, reflecting on her evening, which she describes as ‘almost not real’, like ‘being in a fever dream, in the best possible way’, Cara wondered if – after almost two decades of drinking alcohol, thinking it led to a wilder, more expansive life – she’d been hoodwinked. ‘Maybe it sounds obvious to some, but it took that night for me to realise I don’t need a drink to be fun, to be sexy… I feel, in many ways, freer without it.’
I have to confess, I searched really hard for a story like Cara’s. It’s not good for a journalist to have an agenda… but I had one when I started writing this story. Because, slightly selfishly, I don’t like the statistics emerging about the supposed sobriety boom and the death
