When Is A Church Not A Church?

Staying Dry Beyond January

Cauliflower, Fennel and Mushroom Pasta Bake

Still Life

French Mushroom and Tomato Pasta

Tenderstem Broccoli and Mushroom Risotto

The Big Electric Confidence Trick

My Big Ferry Love Affair

Milk-Free Gratin Dauphinois

Into The Unknown

Utterly Alive

It’s Not ChatGPT That’s The Problem

What Is Progress?

The Age of Bluffing

Sense of Self

Mushroom, Leek and Potato Soup

Rekindling a Passion for Books

Beware of Intentions

Why Would You Want to Go There?

Life? Or Theatre?

Chicago Blues

Whose Image Is It Anyway?

Borlotti Bean and Red Lentil Soup

Over The Hills and Far Away

Loneliness Hotel

All The People, So Many People

Roasted Seed Mix

The Edge

Water, Water Everywhere

Wellness-to-Woo

The Window

Evolving Relationships

Something in the Air

A Little Care

Facing Up To Our Hypocrisy

A Curious Farewell

The Decline of Liberty

Public Not Private Transport

The Addiction Paradox

White Fish and Courgette Tomato Pasta

A Neglected Corner of English Music

Art? Or Theatre?

Evolutionary Misunderstanding

A Time to Remember

NOLA 2010

NOLA 2011

In this compelling new volume, Pushing the Wave 2023, L.A. Davenport continues his richly observed journey through the shifting currents of modern life. Following in the wake of his collection covering 2017–2022, this latest instalment gathers a year's worth of essays, reflections, recipes, and stories that are at once deeply personal and universally resonant.

From ferry crossings and food memories to reflections on technology, addiction, art, and identity, Davenport’s prose navigates the ordinary and the extraordinary with equal finesse. With wit, candour, and an eye for life's quiet profundities, he charts a course through a world at once familiar and strange—a world where a walk through the city can reveal a philosophical truth, or a bowl of soup can stir echoes of the past.

At turns humorous, provocative, tender, and defiant, Pushing the Wave 2023 is an invitation to pause, reflect, and reconnect—with others, with nature, and with ourselves.

Whether you're a returning reader or new to Davenport’s work, this volume offers a timely reminder of the power of paying attention—to the fleeting, the beautiful, the unjust, and the quietly miraculous.

It’s January. Everything is quiet and there’s not much going on. So there’s plenty of, perhaps too much, time for reflection after the festive mayhem of Christmas, and to ponder on the hope/guilt surrounding those hastily chosen new year resolutions we’re now so desperate to keep.

A common way of tackling this rather dark and potentially emotional precarious period is to have a bit of time off from the drink and focus on our health. After all, we’re a little flabby, inside and out, from sitting around eating and drinking non-stop over the holidays, and it would be good to get back in shape and restore some of our former sharpness. In any case, surely it’ll be good for the body not to be constantly swilling in booze, at least for a few weeks.

The science behind this is good: studies have shown that even a short period of time without alcohol can allow the liver to recover, at least partially, from the damage that drink inflicts, and even patients with serious liver disease benefit from abstinence. But science aside, it’s become rather trendy to stop drinking in the weeks after Christmas as part of a health kick, so much so that it’s got a name: Dry January.

I was thinking about this recently when I read an article in The Guardian by Jill Stark, who ended up a so-called poster girl for teetotalism when she wrote the book High Sobriety.[1] She subsequently went on to have a more complex relationship with alcohol than simply to give it up for good and espouse some kind of modern temperance movement.[2] And the realisation that, for many of us, it is not a case of all or nothing can be difficult to handle. 

I speak from experience as, just over a decade ago, I decided, for the second time in my life, to give up the booze. I wasn’t sure how long it would last, but I knew that I needed to do this, for myself as a person and for my life in general.

It is an interesting step to take, because, for anyone who lives in a Western culture, it is by no means a simple case of deciding whether or not to continue consuming alcohol. Drink is, for better or for worse, woven into our societies so tightly that we don’t often see its threads and how they constrict our worldview.[3]

It is different from smoking, which has undergone a fall from grace in many countries; from a habit that was considered essential for any adult to be an adult to an almost dirty, morally suspect activity that should be done, if it must at all, out of sight of polite society.

I remember very clearly the death throes of smoking, when silly people would parrot the nonsense arguments of Big Tobacco and pretend that there was something stylish or clever about the habit. I was one of those silly people. I started at a young age, and I came up with all sorts of convoluted reasons as to why I should continue when it became increasingly, and worryingly, clear that I should stop.

I used to say that the difference between smoking and alcohol is that you can smoke any time of day, but society dictates that alcohol be taken only during specific times and activities, such as eating meals or when a pub or bar is open. That means you can smoke from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed (I knew someone who would even get up in the middle of the night for a cigarette), and I would have a battle simply to stop myself reaching for my first Camel Light before 9am.

And then it stopped. The desire to smoke, I mean. One day, after having argued with myself constantly over my habit for weeks and weeks, I just didn’t want to look at another cigarette, let alone put it in my mouth and light it. And that, apart from the odd moment of wondering whether I could have one, just one, cigarette, was that. No more smoking. And because the culture around it has moved on, it’s actually quite easy to stay quit.

There is none of that with alcohol.

Giving up booze is, on a physical level, relatively easy. You just decide that you’re not going to drink today, and then you decide the same thing again the next day, and then again the day after that, until your body gets used to it. There are no real cravings to speak of, outside of those invented by your brain to torture you and make you pour anything alcoholic down your throat. Within a day or two of internal battling, you start to feel better, much better, and you can use that to encourage yourself in the coming days any time you want to crack open a beer or pour a glass of wine. 

(These internal battles are, of course, a source of great torment to alcoholics, but there is a strong argument to suggest that alcohol, as a chemical, is not addictive. It’s the compelling sense of escape it offers, and the terrible emotional crash that comes with the hangover the next day, that drives people further and further into drink. This cycle, and having to confront the apparent awful truth of one’s existence when sober, not the liquid itself makes quitting alcohol sometimes too much to bear.)

After a week or two, you feel reborn. You are capable, fresh and properly awake every morning, and you are so much more efficient at work. Fitness comes easily, and you are, finally, happy with yourself.

“Of course it’s like this,” you say as you reflect on the changes, “I always knew it would be. Why didn’t I think of doing this sooner?” It is all rather wonderful, and self-sustaining.

The problems start, however, when you mix with other people, as the pressure they impose on you as a non-drinker can be immense. In a pub or a bar, if you are among a group and aren’t partaking of booze, you can quickly become a pariah. (Less so now with widespread availability of non-alcoholic beers, but the problem has not gone away by any means.)

To give you an example, I was once out with a group of friends and acquaintances in a London boozer. Everyone was drinking hard and having fun. I had settled on a non-alcoholic drink I always ordered when I was out—lime and soda—and was sipping away in sync with the rounds. I was enjoying myself and being as silly as everyone else; after all, why not? They wouldn’t remember the next day.

Out of nowhere, apropos of nothing, a big burly lad dressed in an overly tight suit and thin tie, with a red face and receding blond hair, came up to me. “You are ruining my evening,” he bawled at me over the din of the conversations all around us.

“Why?” I asked, although I knew what he was about to say.

“Because you’re not drinking.” Before I could I reply, he was back off among his friends. Occasionally, he would glare at me out of the corner of his eye.

I initially felt defiant but quickly became deflated, and wondered how many of my friends thought the same but didn’t want to say anything. Was I no longer really part of the group? Did they not want me there? Did they even like me anymore?

On another occasion, at Glastonbury festival, a friend of a friend bent my ear for two hours as to why I wasn’t drinking, so much so that my friend later apologised on his behalf. Over and over again, I was compelled to justify myself and my choices, and made to feel like I was the deviant, doing wrong, putting a dampener on everyone’s evening with my boring party-pooping ways.

And of course, there’s the problem of being around drunks. For someone who is pissed, it is not possible for a sober person to participate in a conversation with sufficient conviction. Every time you react to what they say, it’s not enough: they need more emotion, more response; more, in fact, than you can give. That and the endless repetition once they start talking in circles pushes you out of the moment, so much so that you have to go, whether home or simply to be around people who aren’t drinking.

(Before you get all misty-eyed and think this is a problem only experienced in the UK or Ireland, where we like to think of ourselves as having a romantically dysfunctional relationship with alcohol, the cultural pressure is the same, if not worse, in France, Germany and Spain.)

Despite all that, I stopped drinking for four years. Four whole years. To be honest, it was a great period in my life and I saved a hell of a lot of money, but there was an issue. I didn’t want to be unable to drink (I had stopped because I recognised I was drifting into alcoholism), and it had become clear to me after a while that being sober was, for me, simply the inverse of being an alcoholic—an extreme position that implied I was not in control of my decision-making.

So, little by little, I started drinking again. It was hard, much more so than stopping the booze in the first place. It was a real challenge, in fact, and it took me many years to address and properly deal with the impulses that pushed me towards alcoholism. Now, I am happy to say I have a handle on it, and on myself. Occasionally, my grip on the handle slips but I don’t really think too much about it anymore. I just enjoy having a drink, and my recognition of the need for self-limitation stops me going too far. Most of the time, anyway.

But what of Dry January? I don’t bother with it. Nowadays, I only drink on a couple of days per week, so there doesn’t seem to be much need. To me, that is a better approach: don’t impose complete sobriety for one month and inevitably go back to excess afterwards; instead, introduce some sobriety into your life all year long.[4]

A sense of loss

Last week, I moaned not so much about having lots of spam mail but more that it was all apparently sent by the same person, one Eric Jones. Not that I didn’t like the name, but I craved a little variety.

Well, it seems the internet gods were listening, as at the time of writing I haven’t had one single spam email from Mr Jones. Instead I’ve had a whole flood from people with names that could have come straight from my character suggestions for authors:[5] Lashawn Main, Duane Threatt and Joann Betz, to name a few.

I should be satisfied, yet somehow I miss Eric Jones. I find myself wondering what he is up to, wondering whether he is okay. Maybe he’s on holiday. In any case, I’m sure he’ll be back soon.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/07/i-became-the-poster-girl-for-sobriety-then-returned-to-big-nights-on-the-lash

[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/temperance-movement

[3] In the intervening years since my last period of teetotalism, much has changed in terms of the expectations around alcohol and abstinence. When I first gave up the drink, in the late 1990s, it was unheard-of and you were presumed to be ill, or to have adopted a religion that outlawed the sauce. Now, a substantial proportion of young people do not drink at all, which I personally applaud.

[4] Since writing this piece, I have given up alcohol for good. I am a better person without it, and flirting with the less palatable sides of my personality is not worth the pleasure of the odd tipple from time to time.

[5] https://pushingthewave.co.uk/more/thoughts/callingallauthors/