My Secret Shame

I am a boring drunk. Other people get flirtatious. Other people start to dance. Other people wear the soup bowl as a hat, tumble over the hedge and wake up streaked in vomit with stories to tell. I get sanctimonious. I “keep an eye out” for others who I calculate have had too much and I absolutely must have very serious conversations. In short I am a total *$%£ing knob when I’ve had so much as a whiff of the Sherry bottle.

P has learned to deflect me away from booze-induced big-headedness. She waits till I draw breath in mid-opinion and points out that I spend a lot of time playing computer games. It is true. All day I pose about in as business-like a way as I can but having done the washing up I sneak away to kill things on a screen. When P imparts this information my friends cough and sneeze with suppressed amusement. If she feels the moob’s bonce could deal with further deflation she will say “he plays a big green monster that casts spells”. Wine is spilt; hands shoot up into the air; someone chokes on a grape. I am suddenly a living H M Bateman cartoon. It is true.

I have played computer games for 30 years. I started when my friend Richard acquired a “pong” game for christmas (he also introduced me to Pot Noodles – I owe him everything). From there I moved to Space Invaders and 10p pieces shoved in to the Galaxian machine in the buffet on Colchester Railway Station. By my teens, Richard, Julian and I were setting off for healthy sounding bike rides that would end playing “Joust” in the arcades in Clacton. I spent many a sunny afternoon spurning the beach for the “Battlezone” machine in the bowling alley on Walton pier.

The pleasure is in slipping from the world for a bit. Music can do that for me and so can books but I love games too. P gets jealous. She goes to bed and I stay up. Conjugal bliss is postponed till I have finished one more level and collected some non-existent and meaningless decoration. Sometimes I go too far. A game called Black and White was so stupefyingly addictive that having slipped away from my visiting parents-in-law for a 5 minute session I snapped out of my trance at 6:30 am the following morning, bleeding from the eyes and shouting at the screen. I played so much Doom that trips to the Royal Courts of Justice had me edging around corners (I really wish I was exaggerating this). Then came Everquest and World of Warcraft. I loved these games because you play against real people. People with whom you chat and joke as you play. I’ve met people for dinner that I’d only previously spoken to online. People, I should point out, that are my age. But that’s the point. Increasingly the people one meets online are not my age. They are 13 year old Icelanders with scary spelling and an obsession with Metallica. Whereas my very being there suggests that I have extensive collections of Gary Glitter and Jonathan King. So it’s time to make my wife happy and give it up. Perhaps I’ll find something else to do. If only I could find a community of adults online with a shared perspective.