My name is "Mobi"; I'm an alcoholic

Today I have been sober for 31 days.

MOBI’S STORY – (PART 10)

THE INSURANCE YEARS (CONTINUED)

For the next two years, I went through some intense learning with regard to the intricacies of the insurance underwriting business, and in particular tried to familiarise myself with the nuts and bolts of insurance accounting.

I have stated earlier in my blog that you can apply accounting principles to almost any kind of business venture you care to name, from manufacturing, to ‘Joe the Plumber”.  While to some extent I would still hold that to be true, there is no doubt that without any in depth knowledge of the insurance business, how it works, and how it is accounted for, any accountant would be truly perplexed, were he (or she) were to have an insurance accounts department dumped in his lap. My predecessor did indeed have considerable knowledge of the business, and in spite of this she suffered from a nervous breakdown!!. So what hope was there for little me?

Nevertheless, I persevered, and worked very hard, and slowly began to see the light. Everything started to fall into place, and  as time went on, I was able to run the department with some degree of expertise and even made  substantial inroads on the mess I had inherited.

before long,  in some respects, I now knew more than my bosses – certainly from the ‘ground upwards’, of which they had little or no knowledge.

So about two years into my tenure, I was called to the GM’s office one day to receive the news that The AGM (Finance) was leaving, and his position would not be replaced. He had told the GM that he was fast becoming “surplus to requirements” and that I was more than capable of taking over his role.

So the GM told me that he would be promoting me to Financial Controller, and that the Company Secretary, who was nearing retirement, and the other senior manager who was responsible for the computer systems, would also report to me. I would report directly to the GM. (The GM confided in me that the Computer Manager was a pain in the ‘arse’ and he would be eternally grateful if I could manage this man, as the GM had no desire to take on this particular challenge in man management.)

The GM was correct, the Computer Manager was a ‘pain’, but I managed to develop a good working relationship with him and succeeded in motivating him to help me run the department, even though he had made it clear that he deeply resented me being promoted over him.

Of course  generous salary increases came with the new position, and within the next year I moved yet again to another, slightly more ‘up market’ house, but still within the a same area of South Essex. As a family, we seemed to have put our roots down there.

My ‘stock’ within the London Company grew higher and higher, and I was now starting to be noticed by the folks in Head Office. The CEO and FD of the main company were frequent visitors to our London office, and now that the previous AGM was gone, I was the senior financial man in London, and as such, became involved in high level meetings, and also started to socialise with these people at top London restaurants and other entertainment spots.

Over the next year or so a couple of events occurred that had a significant effect on my future insurance career.

Firstly there was the Lloyds of London Collapse.

The infamous ‘reinsurance cycle’ had finally imploded, and many Lloyd’s syndicates were bankrupted, and the whole of the Lloyds insurance market came perilously close to melt down. (In fact it took many years and a great deal of ‘wheeler dealing’ and government initiatives before the market was able to return to some semblance of normalcy and financial stability.) But it wasn’t only the Lloyds market that was in “semi melt- down”. The whole of the London insurance market became affected by what was going on in Lloyd’s, and there were many insurance and reinsurance company casualties. Mergers and take-overs were rife, and hundreds of famous insurance company names, which had been operating in the London market for centuries, suddenly disappeared without trace.

Allied to this, redundancies and unemployment in the London insurance sector spiraled, and all of us at my little insurance company breathed a sigh of relief that we had escaped the worst of the financial ravages.

However, we were not out of the woods, as our business was very small, our overheads were increasing, and on top of that we did suffer some financial fall-out from the Lloyd’s fiasco.

The Head office “wallers” came over for discussions on our future, and the GM was charged with putting together some  plans  for consideration, which hopefully, would improve the company’s profitability and justify our continued existence.

So for the next few months it was “all hands to the pumps” and “burning the midnight oil” ( don’t I just love these clichés??), and of course Mobi was in the thick of it, crunching and re-crunching spread sheets to try and arrive at the magic solution.

In due course it became clear that the only way we could survive was to decimate part of our business and cease to ‘write’ unprofitable “lines” of insurance. These unprofitable lines were not only transacted in London, but also at a network of provincial offices that we maintained throughout the country. In effect, it meant that all the provincial offices, bar one or two, would be closed down, and all the staff from those offices and a substantial number of people from our London office would have to be made redundant.

The plan was submitted to Head Office and we obtained the necessary approval to put it into effect.

We then had “D” day, when all the senior managers were dispatched to different locations to break the news to those who would be made redundant, and to inform them of their redundancy packages. It was an emotional and difficult day, and I had more than my fair share of “bad news” to impart.

I think the experience of going through that day taught me a lot, and in some way hardened me for my future role as a manager. Up to that point, I had always adopted a patient, softly, softly approach to management, but this event seemed to change me. Was it a change for the better or for the worse? Who knows?

My drinking was also continuing apace, and as previously stated, I would always have very drunken lunches, to be followed by even longer periods of drinking when work was finally done for the day. My drinking was mainly done in the company of work colleagues, but occasionally, when no one was free, or there were no official social engagements to attend, I would pub crawl in the City alone. I would invariably end up at one of my locals near Fenchurch Street Railway station, or even at a bar in the station itself, before staggering onto the last train for home, often without having had an evening meal.

The ‘dramas’, before and during “D” day, had caused my drinking habits to become  more serious than ever and probably contributed to my hardening work management attitudes.

Once the “D Day” deed was done, we were a new and even smaller player in the market, but it wasn’t long before this ‘state of being’ once again started to lack viability. Although our business was now profitable at the gross insurance level, (i.e. insurance claims being paid were less than insurance premiums received), the necessary overheads to maintain a London Insurance Company were such that the insurance gross profits were insufficient to carry our overheads. In addition we still had to keep extra staff for an indefinite period to service the business that we had now discontinued, as claims on that business would still arise and need to be dealt with for many years to come.

So once again we had come to bitter cross-roads, and once again we were being pushed very hard by our masters in head Office to produce yet another plan to justify our continued existence.

This time around it didn’t look as though we had much hope for survival.

Today I have been sober for 29 Days.

Well, I am delighted to report that Bob and I had a good time in Phnom Penh.

We arrived early afternoon, on time, on a comfortable flight on the excellent Air Asia. If you book up at least 3 days in advance you get a good price reduction, and if you book as much as a month ahead, the tickets barely cost 2,000 Baht round trip. We paid just over 5,000 Baht each for our round-trip tickets, and that included an extra charge to get our comfortable front seats, and be the first off the plane and through immigration.

As mentioned yesterday, my Cambodian based cobber mate, Steve, met us at the airport and dropped us off down-town at our guest house, the ‘Velkommen Inn’, on 104 Street.

The female staff at the Guest House gave me an overwhelming welcome; screaming, hugging and kissing me and looking genuinely happy to see me again. (I had stayed there for several weeks earlier in the year during my last abortive attempt to leave my wife). Bob was suitably impressed and not a little jealous of my ‘over the top’ welcome, but he soon made friends with the young ladies, and before our trip was over he was speaking Aussie /Cambodian to them. As you may have guessed, I like to stay at the Velkommen Inn as I feel so welcome there!!

After a hasty shower , we worked our way down the bars of 104, thence to ‘Sharkeys’, a large pub/bar on Street 130, and finally to the Black Cat on 178 Street, which is just down the road from the Heart of Darkness, one of Phnom Penh few discos. Bob fell in love with a beautiful girl in the Black Cat who spoke impeccable English and was working her way through college.  I met up with an old flame.

It must have been past 3.a.m when arrived back at Velkommen Inn where we had to wake up the security guard to open the door before clambering over some  motor cycles which had been parked inside the bar area for safety, and at long last crawl thankfully into our beds, alone.

Saturday saw Bob have lunch with his lawyer friend by himself.  I wasn’t used to such late nights and I slept through it. Late afternoon found the two of us back in the bars for another long reconnoiter, which again finished in the small hours.

This was Bob’s first bar crawl for over 7 years, as he is just extricating himself from his own unhappy marriage to a Thai Lady, and being the decent, honorable man that he is, he had not strayed during the entire 7 years of his marriage, even though his wife had become notable for her lies and infidelities. (Does this sound familiar?)

(I went to visit Bob in 2006 with my wife, and the four of us spent a week together at his home in Noosa, on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. Towards the end of that trip, the two girls insisted on having a “ladies night out” at the local Disco, and Bob, being the decent, honest, but highly suspicious man that he is, turned up at the disco at around 2 a.m., just in time to see our wives get into the back of a car with two handsome Aussie lads.

Of course denials were the rule of the day, and my wife insisted that she was just “going along for the ride” ( I wonder what kind of ride??) and it was Bob’s wife that was the instigator. Bob’s wife had told Bob the exact opposite story.

For both of us, this incident was just one of a long line of incidents of a similar nature. Recently, Bob has  succeeded in legally extricating  himself from his wife who has now moved to Sydney.  Hopefully, I am not too far behind him in this regard.

Sunday was a lazy morning before we met up with Steve again for the drive back to the airport in the late afternoon. I had left my car at the short stay car park at Suvarnabhumi and we were soon heading off to Bangkok to pay a quick visit with our sick friend.

Dave was looking at lot better and was managing to get around a bit in the house. We had a long ‘heart to heart’ with him about the future and his need to stop drinking. We impressed upon him the unpleasant truth that if he ever picked up another drink he would be surely dead within months. He gave us an honest undertaking that he would do his very best in this regard.

One of the things that we related to Dave was that although it is not a practice to be recommended, particularly in the early days of sobriety, we had navigated our way around dozens of bars for two nights and not once did either of us feel tempted to pick up a drink. I think we both derived support and benefit from each other, for there is nothing worse than a sober alcoholic bar hopping with a drunk, or indeed doing it alone, as I have found to my cost.

Finally, a nightmarish late night drive back to Pattaya in torrential thunderstorms, which only came to a halt after we arrived home. There I found my wife had finally returned from her week (plus) of drunken sojourns and was playing cards with friends. She barely acknowledged our arrival before returning her game. (She hadn’t seen me in over a week, and hadn’t seen Bob since 2006, yet the way she behaved you would think we had just popped out for a few minutes.)

I crashed before midnight, but couldn’t sleep well, and the wife finally came to bed at 4 a.m.

I am no longer emotionally traumatized by her “un-wifey’ behaviour, which in the past, would have led me to pick up a drink; but it does set off a kind of “deep resentment” within me that someone, who I had given so much to, could treat me in such an unfeeling and uncaring manner. These days, it doesn’t lead me to drinking; just rather sleepless nights, which on this occasion caused me to miss my morning AA meeting today.

I haven’t been to a meeting since last Thursday and as a result, I have been feeling very fragile, particularly as I missed the morning meeting due to the ‘wifey induced insomnia’, so this evening I made absolutely sure I attended the 5 p.m. session, and as ever it was a good meeting. The main speaker in particular recounted some fascinating personal experiences and some interesting insights on how he came to the path of sobriety and spirituality, which for many years now has given him so much happiness.

I must apologize for not yet getting back to Mobi’s story. Tomorrow I am off back to Bangkok with Bob for a couple of nights, and whilst I am there I will do my best to find time to continue my blog.

I will return on Thursday, and after that I should settle back into my Pattaya routine, and be able to devote more time to the blog.

Today I have been sober for 27 Days.

Yesterday morning I picked up Bob from his hotel in Pattaya and we headed out to the airport for a two day trip to Phnom Penh.

My friend in Cambodia picked us up at the airport and deposited us at a guest house, down town, near the Riverside, on Street 104.

We are here to do a bit of business reconnoitering, and  for Bob to have a look around a town he has never previously visited.

So last night I showed him some of the night spots, and we crashed in the early hours of this morning.

Like me, Bob is trying to quit the booze, and since he has been here with me in Thailand and Cambodia, he hasn’t touched a drop. There is no doubt that two “sober alcoholics” can provide a lot of support for each other when going out to establishments of “temptation” together.

Time permitting I may write more later, but if not, my blog will probably have to await my return to Thailand before receiving my next contribution.

Today I have been sober for 25 Days.

Last night, I attended the evening AA meeting in Pattaya, and then went out for a sea food meal in Jomtien with Bob and a couple of female companions.

It was a good evening, and as none of us drank anything stronger than water, the bill was extremely reasonable.

Later, Bob went to a hotel with his lady, and me, being the chaste person that I am, dropped my companion back home, and drove back to my house to sleep alone, once more.

Today, I went to the morning meeting, and met Bob and his lady after the meeting, and we dropped her home before returning to my house.

My wife is still not back, but has sent a message that she will be returning tomorrow. I will be surprised if she does come back tomorrow, as I am sure the temptation of staying in Bangkok with her friends over the weekend will prove to be very strong.

In any event, tomorrow, Bob and I will be driving to Bangkok after my morning AA meeting to see how Dave is getting on, and then we will be jumping on a plane to spend a couple of nights in Phnom Penh with  my mate who lives there, returning on Sunday night. The trip is partly pleasure (Bob has never been there before), and also partly business, as we are looking at the possibilities of doing some business over there.

I will now write a little bit more about my past life.

MOBI’S STORY – (PART 9)

THE INSURANCE YEARS (CONTINUED)

When I reported for work at my new position on 1^st March 1986, I knew very little about insurance. The accounts department of an insurance broker is a million miles from the complexities that are inherent in insurance company accounting. In essence, a broker is a trader, he sells insurance and earns commission. O.K. he does receive the insurance premiums, which have to be accounted for and then paid over to the underwriter, net of commission. But the specially tailored accounting systems that are put into place to account for these transactions pale into insignificance when comparing it with the systems that are required to account for insurance premiums, claims, insurance reserves, and investments, that are part and parcel of an insurer’s daily business.

I had read up a little on these matters prior to my starting my new job, but nothing could have prepared me for the levels of financial complexity and the unfamiliar lexicon of arcane and specialist technical insurance language and terminology that I was bombarded with from the very first moments of my new job.

That first morning, I sat in my new office with the Assistant General Manager (Finance), a qualified chartered accountant who had been working in the insurance industry all his working life, and he took me through a voluminous list of financial, technical and other problems that required urgent attention.

For some reason that I never did fully understand, he and his colleagues seemed to think that because I had worked for an insurance broker I knew all about insurance accounting, which of course I did not.

So he went through his pile of priority tasks for me to resolve, using all manner of technical language of which I knew nothing, and I sat there, nodded sagely, and pretended that I understand everything perfectly and that I would soon have everything up to date and all the problems sorted.

It was one of the biggest challenges I had ever faced in my life. I had quit my previous position, which had paid me well, and was mine as long as I had wanted it, and walked into this nightmare.  To make matters worse, I had a wife, mother and step daughter at home to support, and if I failed, I would be out of a job and our savings would soon disappear.

So it was a very worried Mobi that knocked off from work that night. Of course fate has a habit of kicking you when you are down. I had picked up my shiny new company car that had been delivered to the office that afternoon, and I had driven about half way home when the engine conked out, and I had to call the dealer who took about 3 hours to come and collect it, leaving to me to continue to my home via train and bus.

So by the time arrived home, I was tired, very worried and full of despair at the direction my life seemed to be going.

A few beers were in order and I have no recollection of passing out on the couch, where I subsequently spent the entire night.

But such were my powers of recovery that the next morning I felt refreshed and bright and determined to make a go of this new job if it were at all possible.

After all, I reasoned to myself, everything in business and accounting is just common sense and logic. Once a person understood the basics of how accounts are put together, these same principals can be applied to any business, be it making widgets, selling cars, farming, restaurants, or indeed… insurance. In accounting, as long as you remember that for every debit there must be a credit, you couldn’t go too far wrong. Or, at least that is what I convinced myself in my cocky, post drinking state of mind.

So my second day at work was approached with a mixture of trepidation, and confidence that all I had to do was apply my ‘wonderful brain’, and all would be overcome.

Well I won’t account in detail how I managed to survive those first few months, while I frantically  raced up the ‘learning curve’ of insurance accounting, and hold onto my job, by convincing all and sundry (including my staff), that I knew a lot more than I actually did. But as I have mentioned before, I cut my teeth in the cut and thrust of one of the most difficult places on earth for foreigners to do business– namely Thailand, and that experience, coupled with “man management:” skills that I had developed in places such as the Grace Hotel and Bangkok’s massage parlours would surely hold me in good stead.

Well strange to relate, it did.

I learned, survived, and started to prosper. I started to understand this weird and intricate world of insurance, and I started to sort out all the messes that I had inherited by the previous incumbent (who you may recall had suffered from a nervous breakdown!). As time went on, I became more and more knowledgeable in insurance matters, and less of a “bull shitter”.

As I consolidated my position, I became increasingly frustrated by the layers of management I had to report to – namely my direct report was the Company Secretary, who in turn reported to The AGM (Finance). They were both nice enough guys, but for such a small operation, it was patently ridiculous to have these levels of management, particularly when I was the one doing all the work, and they just sat around all day awaiting the results of my labour, so that they could put in their ‘two penneth’, and approve my work (or not), pretty much as the mood took them.

And in addition to these two, there was yet another senior manager who was responsible for computer systems, and although I did not report to him, he was on the same level as me, and made the running of the company extremely unweildy and inefficient.

I wasn’t sure how long I could put up with this unsatisfactory state of affairs, but for the time being I kept my head down, concentrated on my work, and reaped the dividends in the form of regular salary increases, which were quickly making my own financial position ever more secure. In fact, about one year in to my new job, I felt sufficiently confident in my career to move my family out of the East End of London, and I put a substantial deposit on a house in South Essex, which was about a 45 minute train ride from the city, and the following June (1987) my family and I moved out into the “country”.

In case you were wondering, my drinking career during this period did not take a backward step.

After the first few weeks in my new position, I fell into the old habit of long, very boozy lunches, and then picked up the drinking rains again at the end of a long day’s work. It was back to the pub with work colleagues for a few hours before staggering home to the wife, my stomach full of beer and gas,  and my slightly pickled brain, thoroughly exhausted.

Today I have been sober for 24 days.

Last Sunday, my wife went to Bangkok.

I also said “farewell” to a friend who had been staying with me for the past two weeks and returned to Phnom Penh on Sunday. This friend is also a member of AA, and it was he who first introduced to me to AA back in January, and took me to my very first AA meeting at his house in Sihanoukville.

So I had one day to myself, (Monday), and then yesterday another very old friend of mine, Bob, arrived from Australia to spend a couple of weeks with me.

On Sunday I had duly attended the morning and evening AA meetings in Pattaya, but yesterday and this morning, I have failed to go.

Bob is not an AA member, but like so many of us, he has been a very heavy drinker throughout his life and is now trying to follow my lead and stop completely. So he won’t be a bad influence on me during his stay, but he will not be going to AA meetings, and as a consequence, I have been a bit careless in my attendances. At the time of writing, (4.45 p.m.), I am determined to go to a meeting tonight, so if I have to cut today’s blog short you will know the reason why.

For those of you who do not have a drinking problem, and in particular, for those who have never been to an AA meeting or have not read their literature, it will probably be difficult for you to understand the value of these meetings, and how therapeutic they are in keeping us alcoholics sober.

There has been many an alcoholic, who has succeeded in quitting the booze, for months, and even years, but has fallen off the wagon when they mistakenly believed that they no longer needed to go to meetings. I will try not to make that mistake.

My wife is still in Bangkok, and I have only spoken to her a couple of times on the phone. I am pretty sure she is up to “no good”, and I am quietly making final plans to deal with the situation. I will write more about this later.

Meanwhile, I have had an excellent two days with Bob, who I have not seen for over two years. I picked him up from the airport yesterday morning, and we drove into Bangkok for a long breakfast in Washington Square, before heading off down Sukhumvit to visit my sick friend, Dave, who has been released from hospital, and is continuing his recovery at home.

The hospital did not want Dave to check out because his liver was in a very delicate state, and they were concerned that it would start bleeding again, but Dave is almost out of money and he could not afford another night there. As it was, it cost him over 200,000 Baht, and his savings are now perilously low.

So Bob and I spent a few hours with Dave, exhorting him to think carefully about his life as the next bout of drinking would surely kill him. He accepts that this is the case, but neither of us is convinced that Dave intends to follow our advice, once he is in slightly better shape. At the moment, although he looks much better than he did a few days ago, he is still in a lot of pain, and is not sleeping well.

In the late afternoon, Bob and I drove back to my home in Pattaya, and we went out and “had a good time” in a few places of entertainment. I will say no more.

Bob has also recently separated from his Thai wife of 7 years, and yesterday was the very first time he has “let his hair down” in all that 7 year period. Needless to say, Bob’s marital experiences, even though he has lived abroad with his wife in Hong Kong, London, and Australia for all of their married life, almost mirror my own marital problems in every respect. Admitted infidelity by his wife, over and over again, together with her deep rooted inability to be honest, were the key features that doomed their relationship.

So as I am now approaching the 7^th year of my own failed relationship, we have much in common, apart from the 35 odd years that we have known each other.

Today, I was so tired that I missed my morning AA meeting yet again, but Bob and I enjoyed a late breakfast on my swimming pool terrace, and it proved very fruitful, as we were able to call an English Doctor who has been looking after Dave for many years ( and helping him financially), and he confirmed to us what we pretty much knew: that Bob’s medical situation was critical, that any one of his last three  crises could have ended in his death, and  the doctor recounted to us a recent occasion when he was holding Dave in his arms and was convinced he was a “goner”, only to se him miraculously recover yet again.

There is no doubt that one more drink, and Dave will no longer be with us.

After breakfast we took my golden retriever, (Cookie), for her annual shots at the vet, stopped off afterward at one of the lakeside bars for lunch, (where everyone made such a fuss of her), before returning home so that I could do a little blogging before heading off to my evening meeting.

At the bar I met yet another of my alcoholic friends, but this time a ‘practicing’ alcoholic, who was well in to his cups by the time we arrived around 3 o’clock. Geoff is a beer drinker. He drinks at least a case – maybe two – of beer a day. As soon as he rises in the morning he has his first beer, and his last one, just before he passes out at night. This has been going on ever since he moved to Thailand to retire, several years ago.

He only ever goes to his favourite bar of the moment out at the Lake near his home, except on Fridays, when he goes to  Pattaya Tai market, where he starts drinking at one of the market bars from early morning – along with many other alcoholic deadbeats.

I have known Geoff for over three years, and during this period his disease has become increasingly out of control. When sober, he is a gentle, quiet, almost shy man of 63, but as soon as the beer takes over, he changes into an angry, confrontational and progressively more unpleasant person.

He has a Thai wife and a 7 year old daughter, with barely sufficient pension to pay for his drinking habits and put food on the table. During the past year his marital relationship has undergone severe strain as he treats his wife very badly when drunk and she has left him on several occasions. The last time that Geoff’s wife left him, he was so distraught that he became very ill, (refusing to eat anything for days), and threatened suicide if she did not return.

Knowing Geoff as I do, I don’t believe he was bluffing.

She is now back with him after that recent separation and today he was relating in his usual drunken state that they had been fighting yet again, and that she had broken his phone and her daughter’s toys in an “unprovoked” rage. Things are not at all good, and I fear that final breakup of his marriage is only a matter of time…..

I also fear for the future of this family, as I am very fond of all three of them and the situation is extremely volatile and charged with drunken resentment and anger. I hope sincerely that they don’t end up in a gruesome picture on the front page of the local Pattaya rag.

I will continue with Mobi’s Story tomorrow – time permitting.

Today, I have been sober for 22 days.

Yesterday afternoon, my wife left for Bangkok, ostensibly to spend 3 days at a special hair dressing school, with a further day added on to see her friends. So I will not see her until next Friday, at the earliest – if then, knowing her track record.

For the past couple of weeks she has been behaving reasonably well, staying home most of the time, (although she did go out with her friend three times during this period and not return until the next morning), but a couple of days ago she started a fight with me when I came home with my friend in the late afternoon, for absolutely no reason, and caused me to reconsider my situation, yet again.

Last night I went to the  evening AA meeting in Pattaya. It was a very good meeting, and I left feeling pretty good.

However, my wife’s latest disappearing act was bothering me, and I realised that even though we rarely fought each other any more, her behaviour was still upsetting me, and it was very difficult for me to remain peaceful and calm and happy while I was still cohabiting with her.

I have now realised that as long as she behaves reasonably well – i.e. stays sober, stays home and acts like a loving wife, I start settling into a period of serenity and some happiness, and start to feel motivated to do things in my life. But as soon as she starts to “play up”, be it pick a fight, get drunk or take off to Bangkok, then my emotions are in turmoil, and I have no desire do anything and get on with my life.

So last night I wandered the bars around Soi Buakow for a few hours thinking about all of this and then drove back to the lake, near to where I live and stopped off a few bars there; finally arriving home at 1.a.m. I didn’t drink any alcohol, but I was acting like a “dry drunk” – I craved a drink, and I got no consolation from the comfort I sought at the bars.

Today I woke a little late, and as on previous occasions when my wife has gone away, I had a thorough search around the house to see if she had left any incriminating evidence of what she is up to. In the past I have found a number of things which established that she had been lying to me and ‘playing around’, and I had subsequently confronted her with this evidence, when drunk and angry. As a consequence, she is much more careful about what she leaves lying around the house, or in drawers and I have not found anything of significance for quite a while.

However, this morning I hit pay dirt.

Firstly I found two new phone boxes tucked away in her drawer, with all the accessories and manuals still inside; one for an up market Motorola, and another for an expensive Nokia. I had previous asked her about an IPhone box that I had found on her dressing table recently, and also about her new telephone that she had been trying hide from me. She told me at the time that she had bough the IPhone from a friend who was given it by one of her “customers” and her friend needed the money. More likely my wife was given it by her own customer, and now she has two more phones to add to her collection. I wonder who paid for them.

Then, after some more rummaging around I found her mobile phone bill which has been unpaid for 2 months and was an incredible 9,000 Baht!! I used to pay her phone bill automatically through my Amex account, (it was never more than around 2.5K), but cancelled that arrangement on the last occasion that I left her. Since then, I agreed that she could pay the bill from the “house shopping money” that I put into her account.

Well, it was so high that she hasn’t paid it at all for 2 months! The only way her bill could be that high is if she is calling overseas, but she has been very careful to throw away the details of her call charges, so I could not check. But this time she left one page behind in error – and sure enough it contains details of a number of calls she has recently made to 2 phone numbers in Germany.

And finally, I found one of these International calling service starter kits from AIS. It’s a “pay as you go” card for overseas calls. She is obviously using that in one of her other phones.

So all in all, not a good day, but all this is helping me to harden my resolve to bring this nonsense to an early conclusion. If I lose the house, then so be it, but no amount of money is worth the hell I have been going through and continue to go through.

I need to get out soon.

Enough of this wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I will now continue with “Mobi’s Story”

MOBI’S STORY  (PART  EIGHT)

THE “INSURANCE” YEARS (CONTINUED)

It was 1986, Thatcher had been in power for a few years and the economy was picking up .

As previously mentioned, my salary had steadily improved and by the time I had resolved to look for a new job, it was at a rate not to be sniffed at, although not at the rates that qualified accountants of my age would expect to receive.

A small subsidiary of an overseas insurer had contacted a few employment agencies with an urgent requirement for a “Company Accountant”.  I read the specs for the job, and it was for an accountant to head up the accounts and administration departments. The salary was slightly lower than my current rate, (which explained why they were prepared to consider candidates without formal qualifications),  but crucially, a company car was included in the package.

Such was my desire to leave my current employer, and prove to him that I was able to find an employer who thought I was ‘worth’ a company car, that I immediately indicated my interest in the position.

Although the company’s insurance business was quite small, it was overloaded with senior management, and I was interviewed by no less than 3 people: the Company Secretary, the Assistant general manager (Finance), and finally the General Manager himself.

It transpired that the previous incumbent in the position, a woman, had suffered a nervous breakdown, and the whole department was in one almighty mess. The woman in question was still on the payroll, but had been removed from the position, and was involved in some computer project, and in the meantime the department was leaderless and becoming more chaotic every day. As I was to discover later, the two men who initially interviewed me, (not the GM), were desperate for someone to take over and sort out the mess, as it was completely beyond their capabilities to even keep things afloat until a new accountant arrived.

So Mobi,  the brash, experienced accountant with the brilliant CV (in which I told a few white lies, including, crucially, that I was the Chief Accountant in my current position), was just the man they were looking for, and I was provisionally given the nod,  with barely a question being asked.

However, before my appointment could be finalized, I had to be interviewed and vetted by the general manager, an insurance industry professional and a “larger  than life” character,  in his late fifties, with very a old fashioned manner and extremely traditional values. Fortunately, we immediately hit it off, but there was one last hurdle.

The GM was on friendly terms with one of the senior directors of my current employers, and told me he would be calling him to obtain a reference.

I waited for a few days, expecting the worst, for I did not know this Director personally, and I felt sure that he would refer the request to the Company Secretary, who by now had become my enemy.

I needn’t have worried, for the Director did not want to admit to my new boss that he had never heard of me, and gave him a glowing reference, and assured him how “Sorry they were to lose me!”.

In the meantime I had given notice to my current boss, who immediately panicked and offered me yet more money, but no car. I was resolved by now, and I enjoyed immensely my notice period, during which I was continually on the phone to my new employers, discussing the specs of my company car which would be delivered the day I started work.

I almost messed the whole thing up towards the end of my notice period, as I was really getting fed up with ‘propping up’ my current boss, and didn’t really approve of the way he treated his staff – he had become much more moody and unpleasant since I gave in my notice – and one day, about a week before I was due to leave, I exploded and told him what I thought of him, my anger no doubt fuelled by a belly full of beer that lunchtime.

Not a good idea. He called the personnel director and I was escorted form the premises, and told to spend the remaining week of my notice period at home. Fortunately, the written reference had already been sent, and no long term damage was done, but as I mentioned previously, the London Insurance market is very small, and it didn’t do to make enemies.

So on 1^st March, 1986, I reported for work, in the heart of the City, for my new job, which was to lead me to “greatness and riches”, beyond my wildest dreams.

Today I have been sober for 21 Days.

Today I will get back to my past story.

MOBI’S STORY (PART 7)

THE “INSURANCE” YEARS.

It was September, 1983, and I had arrived back in England with my Thai wife, her daughter, aged 7, to live with and take care of my ageing mother who lived in a council flat in East London, on the fringes of the County of Essex.

Unemployment was high, I had been out of the UK Job Market since I was around 21 years old, my step daughter spoke no English, and apart from a 2 week trip with me to attend my father’s funeral in the middle of winter the previous year, my wife had never been out of Asia.

The first thing I did was sign on at the local “labour exchange”, as they were still known in those days, and then I started looking for work. I recall all too vividly being told by one major employment agency that it would be extremely difficult for me to find work, what with not having worked in England for many years, having no formal qualifications, and the competition for jobs ‘hotting up’ during a period of high unemployment. He actually told me that he could not help me find a job, but that if I ever did mange to get a job under my belt, then he would be prepared to take me on and look for something better. Thanks very much!

Meanwhile, my wife, whatever her faults, was not lazy, and she made some friends with local mums whose daughter went to the same primary school as ours, and before long she had obtained a job as a cleaner for one of the more well off families in the area. It wasn’t long before this led to other part time jobs of a similar nature, and in addition to evening baby sitting assignments, we were able to make ends meet, and for a short while I became a “kept man”.

I registered at literally dozens of employment agencies in the London area, but despite many interviews, I rarely got further than the proverbial ‘short list’. After a couple of months, I received a call from the local branch of  a major agency, with the news that a firm of insurance brokers were  in desperate need of some temporary accounting help, and would I be interested? Well of course I was interested, and although I had no way of knowing at the time, this was the start of a 20 year insurance career.

If anyone had told me before this date that I would end up in such a dry, uninteresting business as insurance, I would have laughed at them. How on earth could this “man of the world” who had worked in many far flung danger spots with oil prospectors, and more recently had been managing radio stations and organizing rock concerts in exotic Thailand, ever end up in the English insurance industry?

Although the company I went to work with at that time was also based in East London, it was in fact a major broker in the London Insurance market, and in fact was very active at Lloyds of London.

I have no idea if it is really true, but there is a belief that goes around the London Insurance market that the rich upper classes who have their sons educated at the exclusive “public schools” (private, actually), send their bright sons to work as merchant bankers in the city, and the stupid ones to run Lloyds’ Insurance Brokers. This is on the premise that you have to be reasonably smart to be a banker, but any fool can be an insurance broker.

If the subsequent melt down and major financial collapse of Lloyds was anything to go by, this belief wasn’t too far wrong.

So although I knew nothing about insurance and  had virtually no knowledge of the then current trend towards computerized accounting, I still had my brains, (still only slightly pickled by alcohol at that time), and it wasn’t long before I proved my worth and started to rise above the dross that the company employed.

The first task they assigned to me was to try and sort out their main operating  bank account which was strewn with errors and hadn’t been properly reconciled (agreeing their book records with the bank’s statements) for many months. This was right up my street, and within a few days I had sorted it out and provided a full reconciliation of outstanding items. They all thought I was a genius, as many had tried, including my boss, and all had failed. The ground was all set for a rapid rise.

My boss was half my age, fairly smart, but with no real accountancy experience under his belt, and within a short time I became his trusted right hand man who basically ran the department for him.

I was still employed as a temporary accountant, which meant I still had no proper employment benefits, such as sick pay, holiday pay or company pension, and I could be laid of at a day’s notice at any time. But in spite of my obvious expertise and the fact that the department head relied on me more and more, the company was extremely reluctant to offer me a permanent position. I just didn’t fit. I wasn’t qualified, I came from the “wrong side of the tracks”, and I spoke my mind a bit too often, and I “knew too much”.

But eventually after almost 2 years of this uncertain existence, they finally put me on the payroll, as I was making a lot of noise about quitting if they refused.

I need to make a few comments about my drinking career during this period.

In case you were thinking that I had cleaned up my act – not a bit of it.

When I first came back to England, finances were very low, and we had to be careful what we spent. The very first thing that went was cigarettes. I had been smoking up to 4 packs a day in Thailand, where cigarettes were cheap, and it was a shock to the system when the government announced a tax increase which put them up to the  penal price of one pound per pack. To me that would be four pounds a day that I could ill afford, and as I had wanted to quit for many years, I decided that now was the time to do it.

I won’t claim that it was the easiest thing I have ever given up, because it wasn’t, but I was surprised how quickly the craving disappeared, considering the severity of my addiction – a habit that I had started way back in my early teens. Within a few weeks I completely free of the dreaded weed, although the craving took much longer to completely disappear – especially when I was drinking, and even more especially when I was drinking in pubs or wine bars.

The money I saved on cigarettes was put to good use in the consumption of alcohol. On most days a group of us at the office would go for lunch at a local pub and get a ‘skin full’ of beer. Not everyone would come every day, and most would just join us 2 -3 days a week. But for me it was every day, and I made sure that by the time I returned to the office I had a good buzz going. At that point in my life it never seemed to interfere with my work, and I was just as able to work half pissed, as I could sober.

Then I discovered the wonders of “Home Brew”. I had made my own beer back in my days in Libya, but then we had to be very inventive to produce anything that vaguely resembled something that tasted like beer. In England, there were no such impediments, as the country was full of shops that sold “home Brew” kits and all the ingredients needed to make very tasty, very strong beer.

So during that initial period back in England, I quickly fell into an evening routine of preparing and drinking my “home brew”. It was very strong stuff – I have no ideas how strong, but certainly powerful enough to put me into a state of ‘unconsciousness’ for most nights.

I was still relatively young though, and my powers of recovery were still very good, and I would rise at the crack of dawn, shake off my hangover, and do another day’s hard labour at the office.

In all I was at my first job back in England for almost 3 years. During the last 6 – 9 months I was there I was becoming increasing restless and unhappy. Even though I say it myself, I had done some wonderful work for them. From knowing virtually nothing about computer systems when I first went to work there, I subsequently designed and instituted a fully computerized accounting system; had completely revamped all the financial reports and had generally brought the whole accounts department into a much better state of efficiency. I received regular salary increases in recognition of my good work (at my Boss’s behest as he was always paranoid about me walking out), but no formal recognition was given to my position, and I just remained one of the “erks” even though I was virtually running things.

After all, I had cut my teeth managing offices in the oilfields of the world, and then in the rough and tumble of the cheating, lying and hypocritical world of Bangkok business. A close friend, who also had spent many years in Thailand, was to say to me much later: “Mobi, if you can survive in the business “jungle” of Thailand, you can make it any where. I think that there is much truth in what he said.

The final straw came, when I told my boss that it was time that the company gave me some formal recognition, and in particular I craved a company car, which at that time were given to almost every employee above the position of “clerk” – and even to some of them. My boss considered it a reasonable request, and referred the matter to his boss, the Company secretary.

My request was turned down and soon afterwards I heard through the grapevine, (not from my boss, but he later admitted it was true)), that not only did the bastard refuse my request, but made it clear that I would never, ever get the car that I desired so much. He didn’t approve of “me and my kind”…..

(Some years later I was to get my own back on that jumped up, Eton educated, “Hooray Henry”. I was learning that the London insurance market was a small world and it didn’t do to make enemies, and one day the tables were turned, but that’s another story).

I was incandescent with rage and full of resentment, so I immediately re-contacted all those agencies that had refused or had been unable to help me last time round, to see if I might have better luck this time.

I was back out in the job market with a CV that showed many years of senior appointments overseas followed by 3 years of outstanding work for a major London Insurance broker. Surely this time I would find something away from the boring and, in my view, class ridden insurance industry.

Today I have been sober for 19 days.

Since returning from Chiang Mai I have been attending two AA meetings, more or less every day, and have started to slip into a daily routine, only broken by trips to Bangkok, as you will see below.

My first few days of sobriety were, as usual, a bit painful and I went through the familiar emotional fragilities that accompany early sobriety.

I had only been drinking for a very short while this time, although it hadn’t taken but a couple of days for the drunken blackouts to reoccur. But for whatever the reason, my efforts to wean myself off alcohol and remain sober haven’t caused me too many problems this time round (so far), and I have hung in there, at least up to the time of writing.

Yesterday, I went to Bangkok to visit a friend, Dave, who I mentioned recently in my blog, was in ICU with liver problems.

Dave has been described as a “gentle giant” by people who have come to know him . He is very tall, around 6ft 4inches, and the copious amounts of beer he has been consuming in recent years have caused him to put on a huge amount of weight and these days he must weigh well in excess of 100 kilos.

He is in his mid sixties

Dave is a very easy going person, who never raises his voice, never argues too forcibly, and in the 35 odd years I have known him, I have never known him to get really angry or to lose his temper.

He has been an alcoholic for many years, and it must have been over ten years ago that all his (then) friends rushed to hospital to pay their respects as it was widely believed, based on his  doctor’s prognosis,  that he would not survive his latest collapse with chronic alcoholism and liver damage.

But survive he did, although it was touch and go for a while, and during his recovery period he was as thin as a rake and photographs taken of him at the time are completely unrecognizable as “Dave” when comparing them with the enormous, rotund  Dave of today.

During the past few years, it has been a regular occurrence for Dave to be rushed into ICU, detoxed, tranquilized and sent home with  dire warnings that any more alcohol would be sure to kill him. But as with all alcoholics, Dave was in denial, and he even tried to convince his friends that the doctors had told him it was OK for him to drink a “few” small beers a day.

He has stuck to this fiction ever since, and even though the “few” beers a day became dozens of beers a day (as testified to by his wife), and finally to bottles of gin every day. He was still insisting that he wasn’t overdoing it, and that his alcohol consumption was very low.

As recently as a couple of months ago, I drove to Bangkok to see him on a regular basis, as he was showing signs of being very near the end. He was  consuming a bottle of gin a day, plus beer, and was barely rational and unable to hold an intelligent conversation. I really thought his brain had become permanently pickled and I was preparing myself for the worst.

However,  then, as on so many previous occasions, he managed to pull himself together for a while, and for a week or so, he actually stopped drinking completely. I happened to  visit him at the end of one of these rare “dry” periods, having previously exhorted him to stay sober if he wanted to stay alive. At the time of my visit he promised me that he would.

While I was at his house, he sheepishly went into his bedroom, where he had a fridge, and returned with a small bottle of beer. He explained it away by telling me that he was having a particularly bad day, and he just needed a couple of beers to get through it, and swore blind that it would only be a couple and tomorrow he wouldn’t drink at all.

I told him that I didn’t believe him and that within a month he would be back to his previous alcohol consumption, unless he made the decision there and then to stop completely.

He expressed surprise at my “prophesy”, and insisted that this time he would keep his drinking well under control.

Following that visit, I called him every day, and for most of that time he sounded sober, and assured me that he was back working and taking an interest in life.

But about a couple of weeks ago, I detected increasing signs of “slurring” when he spoke to me, and then, the day before he collapsed, he told me drunkenly on the phone that he was back on the gin. I asked him to promise me that he wouldn’t drink any gin on the following day, and that I would come to Bangkok and visit with him. He gave me the promise.

The next day I couldn’t get hold of  him on the phone, so eventually I went to his house in the late afternoon and found that he had fallen over, passed out and had been rushed into hospital.

I visited him the next day, and he was in a very bad state. He was already suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and the liver had now been cracked by his fall at home and was bleeding profusely. The doctors were getting ready to operate.

I drove back to Pattaya, and in the AA meeting the following morning, I told the group about Dave, and asked them all to remember him in their prayers.

There must be a “higher Power” taking care of Dave, as the next day I learned that the bleeding had more or less stopped and that the doctors had decided not to carry out any surgical procedures after all. He made further progress over the next few days, and finally, on Wednesday last, he was allowed to go home, on the strict understanding that he remained in bed for at least a week, as there was still considerable danger that his liver might start bleeding again if he wasn’t careful.

So yesterday I went to visit with him at home, and although he was still in a lot of pain, he was fully alert and able to talk seriously with me. He started by trying to claim that the only gin he had drunk recently was the one bottle on the day he collapsed. Both I and his wife told him that was complete rubbish, and that he had been on the gin for at least a week. He seemed to accept what we told him but still maintained he had no recent memory of what he had been up to.

The biggest surprise came from his wife. She told us that on the day of the accident he had been so drunk that he threw his mobile phone away, urinated on some books on the floor of his house, and worse of all, had been shouting appalling abuse at the top of his voice at his wife, and saying very horrifying and hurtful things to her. His wife told him that she could not tolerate such behaviour much longer.

So this “gentle giant” who never got angry at anyone, had resorted to vile, damaging temper tantrums when he was in advanced stage of intoxication. The disease had progressed to the point where it had spun completely out of control.

I told him that if he wasn’t careful, his wife would leave, and he would have no one to care for him. He acknowledged that this indeed was the case.

I asked him what he was going to do about his drinking. He informed me that he now realised that he had to stop forever. I assured him it was the only way forward and that if he picked up another drink, he would probably be dead within a few months. He nodded in agreement.

I also told him that if he picked up another drink, he would never see me again, and in all likelihood he would never see his wife again, and he would die a horrible, painful death, all alone.

On the other hand, however, if he really made an effort and was willing to  quit drinking for good, then I would give him all the support I could muster, and would drive to Bangkok 2 to 3 times a week to be with him and encourage him in any way I could to remain sober

The next time I see him, which will be early next week, I plan to  tell him that he must go with me to AA meetings, for there is no way that he will ever succeed in remaining sober without the help and support of the AA “fellowship”.

I truly believe this.

Today I have been sober for 17 days.

Now, the continuation of my “catch-up” that I started yesterday.

So I started attending regular meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in Pattaya from June 25^th, a date that transpired to be the penultimate occasion that I stopped drinking. (As of the time of writing this blog)

For the first few days of my sobriety, I attended the evening meetings, which commenced at either 5 p.m. or 7.30 p.m. After a couple of days, a fellow attendee suggested that I try the morning meetings. I don’t know why he said that, but as time goes on, I find more and more that random events seem to happen, with no apparent reason, which in retrospect, seem to have been nudging me along a particular path.

I was a little unsure of this advice as one of my original AA friends, who had first accompanied me to meetings back in January, had told me at that time that the morning meetings would never suit me. Firstly, he pointed out, I rarely arose before 11 in the morning, and secondly, in his opinion, the AA morning group were not the kind of people I would identify with, or be comfortable with.

But being the perverse alcoholic that I am, when I am told that I can never do something, I go out of my way to prove that person wrong. Anyway, I thought it might be a good idea to switch to the mornings, as it would encourage me to rise at an earlier hour, and also, I reasoned that by changing my meeting schedule, I would suffer the  minimum disruptions to my daily life – whatever that ‘daily life’ happened to be.

After six or so years of rarely getting up before noon, and for most of that time sporting morning hangovers, it was a bit of a shock to the system to wake up before 7.30 a.m., shower and shave and then take the 25 minute drive into Pattaya.

But I stuck at it, and I started to enjoy these “early morning” gatherings – they started at 9.a.m. I did indeed prove my friend wrong as the morning group is a grand bunch of people, mainly Americans, with many years of sobriety between them and also with a liberal sprinkling of other nationalities, principally Irish, British and Australian.

Most of the core members, who consider Pattaya their “home group”, have been in Thailand for many years and far from me not being able to identify with them, the opposite has proved to be the case, as our recent histories have so much in common, and we all can share similar experiences, good and bad, of our lives in Thailand.

During the next few weeks,  I started to chalk up ever more days of sobriety;  sober days that were a volatile and emotional combination of “highs” and ‘lows”.

The meetings, which involved listening to people “sharing” their experiences,  “sharing” myself, and  trying to absorb the wisdom of the members with many years of sobriety under their belts, was helping me a lot. And I was learning more about AA; reading their excellent literature, starting to understand the “twelve Step” programme and how it was essentially based on moral, ethical and selfless principals. Some of the major facets of the AA programme involved trying to remove our character defects, recognising and dealing with our burgeoning egos and  trying to understand and  put into practice genuine  humility in our daily lives.

But clearly I had a very long way to go in the programme. The first thing all new members have to do is to find a “sponsor” – someone with maturity and experience, who would act as an adviser and counselor and guide the new person through the twelve step programme. Well even as of today I have yet to find a sponsor, although I did have one for a few days, which I shall write about more in a few moments.

Meanwhile, back on the home front, my wife was sliding into a familiar pattern of disappearing every weekend to Bangkok, on one pretext or another, usually leaving on Friday morning, and sometimes not returning until Monday or Tuesday of the following week. Most of her drinking was being done away from home, in Bangkok, and on the few occasions that I spoke to her in the afternoon, I could hear very clearly that she was still drunk from the previous night’s excesses. Although on the one hand, I was happy that she was away and not causing me any trouble, but on the other it bothered me that she was continuing to behave like this, as it made the prospects of a viable  future together so uncertain.

I finally resolved that sometime soon,  when I managed to gather up sufficient courage, I would sit down and talk with her about a divorce and how we could divide our assets between us, as there seemed little chance that the marriage could hold together for much longer

The penny had finally dropped that she was a hopeless alcoholic, and the likelihood of her making a recovery were next to none. This was especially so as most Thais have difficulty even in accepting the concept of alcoholism as a disease. Furthermore, she was never going to change her social habits which  revolved around “Bai Tio” (going out and having a good time), which inevitably  meant getting drunk with friends and family, all of whom had  a like mind.

So although the meetings were helping me, I also had some very “dark” and depressive days when the temptation to “pick up” again was very strong; but I managed to resist. I also realised that the AA meetings were the only thing keeping me from the demon booze, and after a week or so of switching to the morning meetings, I  decided to also attend the evening meetings . Two daily meetings took a huge chunk of time out of my “daily life”, probably in the region of  6 hours, including travel time, twice a day, there and back. But it now suited my purpose admirably, because it kept me away from the bars, and used up my spare time during which I might have  given in to temptation.

Towards the end of August, I decided to make a trip to Chiang Mai to visit with two friends who were also members of AA and  attended daily AA meetings there. I thought it would be a good break for me, and would help me get away from my daily routine and mentally prepare myself for the task of confronting my wife with a divorce proposal.

I drove to Bangkok for some business, stayed overnight, and the next day drove on to Chiang Mai.  Unfortunately, going to Chiang Mai wasn’t one of my more successful ventures. I arrived in one piece, and one of my friends met me on the outskirts of the city and led me downtown to my hotel.

Since returning from Chiang Mai, I have been rebuked for publicly relating the incident that occurred at the Chiang Mai AA meeting that eventually caused me to pick up a drink. For AA is what its name implies: anonymous, and everything that transpires in an AA meeting should stay there, and not be broadcast to the outside world.

So by way of explanation of what actually happened, let me start by saying that for most alcoholics, one of the features of their early days of sobriety is the development an increasingly volatile temper. Just the slightest thing will set us off into almost uncontrollable rage. I am told it is because we had previously used alcohol to assuage our anger, bitterness and resentment, and when this “medicine” is voluntarily removed from our reach, our egos take over and our anger becomes ever more difficult to control.

I was certainly no exception, and in the weeks prior to my trip to Chiang Mai I had become all too keenly aware of my anger getting the better of me. I had never lost my temper in a public place prior to this recent period in my life, and it was with alarm that on several occasions I “saw myself” yelling and screaming at some poor victim in a public place, for virtually no reason at all.

So at my very first meeting in Chiang Mai, I had only been there for a few minutes when I suddenly exploded over some inconsequential matter and stormed out. I embarrassed my friend, who was chairing the meeting, and probably burnt my bridges forever as far as the Chiang Mai morning fellowship was concerned. I have since apologized to my friend, but I am sorry to say that he no longer considers me as a friend.

After I returned to my hotel, I continued to fume about what had happened. I knew I was in the wrong, but I was in denial. In Bangkok, a couple of days earlier, I had finally taken on a sponsor – the friend from Bangkok who had met me in Pattaya and persuaded  me to go to regular meetings. In my anger, I sent an email to him, effectively sacking him, then an email to my Chiang Mai friend telling him what I thought of his f’ing meetings, and I even copied the email to a number of my other AA friends for good measure.

Having now “cleared the decks”, as my ex-sponsor was to tell me later, I went out and proceeded to get uproariously drunk.

They say that alcohol is cunning, baffling and powerful. My friends also tell me that I picked up a drink because I wanted to, and everything that preceded that first drink in Chiang Mai was a manipulation of events on my part to create a justification for drinking. I have no doubt that is absolutely correct.

(I have an alcoholic friend in Bangkok, who I will write more about later, who would only drink beer in the mistaken belief that he would never harm himself if he didn’t drink the hard stuff. Then, not long ago, he started drinking gin, and it wasn’t long before he was on a bottle a day. He claimed that the only reason he switched to gin was because he had a ‘bladder problem” and that if he drank beer, he could not go out and do his shopping before needing to go to the toilet, and the shops he patronized had no loo!  In his twisted logic, if he drank gin, there was less liquid in his bladder and he could make it home in time before needing to relieve himself. Today he is in ICU, his liver shot to pieces, fighting for his life, and he still believes that crazy piece of fiction.)

I drank for 3 days, more or less non-stop, in Chiang Mai and then had to make the supreme effort to remain sober long enough to make the journey home.

My wife had called me while I was still drinking in Chiang Mai, and said that she missed me and was waiting for me to come home. This precipitated my departure, and when I was half way home, I called her and was taken aback when she told me that she was no longer at home and had gone to visit her mother!!.  If I had known, I would have stayed in Chiang Mai and continued my drinking spree.

Anyway I returned home and waited for her. The next day she still hadn’t returned, so I sent her message suggesting that she come back so that we could talk about things. I continued drinking for the first two days I was back in Pattaya, and also went to AA meetings, sometimes drunk, but on August 30^th I drank, what is currently, my final drink. I consumed it at around midnight in Pattaya after a night of carousing, following the evening AA meeting.

My wife returned the next day. I was out at the time, and she called me to come home and talk to her. When I arrived, I could see that like me, she was very hung over, and it certainly wasn’t the best moment to discuss divorces.

I declined to talk, but she insisted, so I related my plans to get divorced and what I considered a fair division of assets, which would involve the sale of the house.

At first she seemed to behave in a reasonable manner and asked me a few questions about the details. Then suddenly she erupted, and told me in no uncertain terms that she would never agree to a divorce, would never leave the house, and if I couldn’t stand it any more, then I had better leave. Of course I also became very angry, and once more the shouting, insults and vile accusations started to fly back and forth. Her son fled, the maid fled, and even my 3 dogs cowered in the corner of the garden.

But it was soon over and after a while, when our anger was spent, we sat down and talked almost normally. We agreed that we would stay together, but that in future she would live her life, and I, mine. We agreed that we wouldn’t fight each other, wouldn’t ask each other where were going, or where we had been.

I told her that from now on the first priority in my life was my sobriety, and that came before anything else. She didn’t like this much but I think she took it on board.

For my part, I agreed to this ‘accommodation’ because I had no choice. I needed “piece of mind” and a quiet life if I was to consolidate my sobriety. In AA they tell you that whenever possible, you should not make any major, life changing decisions in your first year of sobriety unless you have absolutely no choice. Well I probably have no choice, but I can wait a while – a month or two – and see how events unfold before I try yet again to part permanently from my wife.

One thing I know – with absolute certainty – is that we will never be happy together, and sooner or later we will have to go our separate ways.

Today I have been sober for 16 days

It is 54 days since I last wrote in this blog.

A few irritating little  “odds and ends”  have occurred in my life, all of  which, one way or another, conspired to keep me away from my Blog.

On the 22^nd July, the last time I blogged, I wrote that I had been sober for 27 days. Well I actually made my first goal of 30 days, and went on to stay sober for 60 days before eventually succumbing and picking up a drink.

In all, I drank again for a period of just 6 days, and stopped once again on 30^th August.

What happened?

Well I have a little time to spare, so I will fill you in on some of the more recent background of alcoholic Mobi, before, opening the doors once again on my past life of drinking.

One of the many crosses that I have had to bear in this life is the fact that for the past six years I have been married to an alcoholic Thai lady – my sixth wife. And as anyone will tell you two alcoholics married to each other can produce a very potent and combustible relationship.

About a year ago, a close friend, who happens to be a qualified therapist, suggested to me that all my marriages seem to have followed a familiar pattern, in as much as I always seemed to be seeking a wife who in essence behaved like my father, in some desperate, subconscious attempt to change them, and thereby correct all the wrongs that my father had committed.

He is probably correct, as all my wives, to varying degrees, have been control freaks with domineering personalities and terrible tempers.

The present one is probably head of the class.

Almost from the first time that I met her, she displayed irrational behaviour, which as time went on, became volatile, and even violent. In the early days of our relationship, (when we lived in Bangkok) she would never return home at the promised time, and would invariably arrive back very late, drunk, and pick a fight with me. After a brief period during which I would patiently wait at home for her, I resumed my own carousing activities, becoming as drunk as she was, and when we finally met up at home, the inevitable storm would erupt.

All this was before we were married, and even on the odd occasions that we both went out together, often with friends, there would reach a point in the evening when the alcohol would suddenly, without warning take control of her and her whole personality would change from a pleasant, fun loving girl friend, to the “girl friend from Hell”, and she would shout and fight with me as though I had just tried to murder her.

I threw her out several times during this period, on one occasion she left for several weeks, but my drinking was also out of control and in my melancholy and lonely states, I would eventually relent and ask her to come back.

We certainly had some terrible fights in those first 3 years, and as time went on, she became more and more violent and used to punch me and hit me with whatever was to hand. In the days following these fights I would often drown my sorrows at one of my locals, sporting a black eye and cuts and bruises all over my face and arms.

To give you an idea of how bad it was, we lived in a large rented apartment off Soi 31, Sukhumvit for the first 2 years of our relationship, but were eventually obliged to move as the owner had had enough of our fights and noise late at night, and after several warnings (including a penal rent increase), he threw us out.

During this period I was slowly becoming aware of the concept of alcoholism as a disease and the need for me  to do something about it, and I even ‘Googled’ the AA website one day, and read some of the information posted there. But that’s as far as it went. Never the less, I guess the seed was sown.

But it was much, much later, in fact only very recently that I finally realised that my wife was also an alcoholic. I was fooled into thinking she was just a heavy social drinker, whose “bad side” came to the fore when she drank, and also because she was a binge drinker. She didn’t drink every day. She would drink sometimes for several days, and then she became so ill that she would stop for several days, or even longer. I thought that if she could stop at will, something I couldn’t do, then she couldn’t be an alcoholic. It wasn’t until I started going to AA meetings and reading their literature, that I realised that binge drinkers are every bit alcoholics, as those who drink every day.

So not only did I continue to hope that things between us would improve, I also became convinced that I was the cause of all the conflict, and that if I cut down on my drinking, everything would be fine. Of course I was deluding myself, aided and abetted by my alcoholic wife, who insisted that she never did anything wrong and it was my drinking and drunken temper that caused all the problems.

So 4 years ago we were legally married, and we had a huge party in her home village, during which she got drunk out of her mind, had a fight with her closest friends who had driven up from Bangkok to attend the ceremony and to this day has not made up with a couple of them.

A year later we moved into a huge house that I had been building near Pattaya, not far from the Mabprachan reservoir.

If it were possible, things became even worse when we moved to Pattaya. My wife was insanely jealous every time I went out somewhere by myself, convinced that I was “short-timing”. (Later I realised that it wasn’t so much jealousy, but all part of her control freak mentality, and also the fear that I might find someone better than her, and kick her out).

She made a few friends in Pattaya, and, more significantly, her friends from Bangkok would make regular trips to Pattaya, whereupon she would drive in to go drinking with them, and often I wouldn’t see her for days. There were many occasions when she would go to Pattaya one afternoon for a shopping trip, and several days later I would find out that she had gone to Bangkok. Even on the occasions when she came home, she would never arrive before 4 or 5 in the morning, often much later,and  she would be completely drunk, invariably sleeping for days on end.

She was also “playing around” I had already caught her on a couple of ocassions before we moved to Pattaya (she left her phone at home one day and a farang sent her an SMS. When I looked her messages I found a great deal of incriminating evidence). Then after we moved, I managed to establish that she was screwing around on a more or less regular basis, both in Pattaya and in Bangkok. I also used to travel to Bangkok with her on numerous occasions as I had hospital appointments, and I can’t think of a single occasion when she didn’t go out, get drunk and not return to the hotel.

On many occasions she caused me to miss my appointments, and I had to drive back to Pattaya and re-schedule the appointments.

Her violence was also on the increase, and she would attack me and she would destroy property in my house, including furniture and even pull plants up by their roots. After one drunken rage, \I took some photos of the destruction she had caused, and it looked like a tornado had passed through my house. My mobile phone and car were also frequent targets of her rage, and I may well qualify as being the most regular purchaser of new telephones in Thailand.

I could go on…and on…. but I think  that the foregoing has given you a “taste” of what I have had to put up with for the past 6 years, and why her behaviour has not been conducive to my own attempts to stop drinking.

Last year I succeeded in stopping drinking for almost nine months, but eventually went back to the bottle as the result of my wife’s outrageous behaviour. I believe then incident that was the final trigger was when I discovered that she had been staying with a farang in Bangkok. I too went to Bangkok and got gloriously drunk and didn’t return home for a couple of weeks.

Then, towards the end of last year I left her again after another incident of a similar nature, but this time I was drinking very heavily, and my state of health and impaired mental state eventually drove me back home.

I should also mention that during last year, I had a horrific accident in my Toyota Fortuner when drunk, and was lucky to escape with minor injuries. The car was a write off. Then I rented a car and had another bad accident in that, and at long last started to realise I was reaching the end of the line with my drinking. I had been a drunk driver for longer than I cared to remember and had never has so much as a scratch; well – maybe one or two scratches – but certainly nothing that was in any way serious. I used to pride myself on it. I was invulnerable – I could be paralytic, almost unable to walk.  But still manage to climb behind a wheel and drive home safely. Well that arrogant, foolish, selfish and evil allusion was finally smashed.

Being the perverse alcoholic that I am, I then went promptly out and ordered a new, shiny black BMW with incredible acceleration and a top speed of 260 kms/hr. Apart from one or two crunches, praise God, it is still in one piece.

Early this year, I left my wife yet again, and I drove to Bangkok and stayed there a couple of nights before flying to Cambodia. On the second night I got very drunk, and woke up the following morning in my hotel to discover that there was nasty crunch on the car’s wing. I thought hard, but e3ventually, all I could remember was standing in the middle of Sukhumvit Road in the early hours and paying some money to a Thai whose car I had hit. I remembered nothing before, and nothing subsequent to that.

I got very drunk during my journey to Phnom Penh and luckily my friend, who is a sober member of AA, met me and took care of me until I sobered up, after another night of hard drinking in the bars of Phnom Penh. The next day we drove to Sihanoukville where my friend lived, and I confessed to him that I had reached the end of the line with my drinking and that if I carried on, I would surely die or kill someone else.

The next day I attended the first and the smallest AA meeting I have ever been to. Just me and him, in his house, and I heard enough at that meeting to convince me that I had indeed better stop if I was to live to old age.

But stopped for one day only, as the next evening I went to the local bar and ordered a Diet Coke, but they gave me a beer, and I said to myself: “What the Heck?”

The next morning I woke up drunk, on the beach, which was several kilometers away from the bar where I started drinking, and had no recollection of how I got there. The blackouts were coming fast and furious.

So once again I decided to stop, and this time I was more successful, and managed to stay sober for quite a while.

I returned to Pattaya, and returned to my home. My friend from Cambodia, plus another friend who I had met over there came to Pattaya soon after, and they both took me to my first AA meeting in Pattaya. This was in January of this year. I went to several meetings with them while they were here, but I didn’t really get too much out of the meetings, and when my friends left Pattaya, I stopped going. I had been sober for several weeks at this point, and felt that I didn’t need AA to remain sober. I thought I had it licked. There was no way in the world I was going to even pick up a drink again.

Things were still bad on the home front. My wife were still fighting, she was still going out and getting drunk on an ever more frequent basis and still disappearing for days at a time.

So I eventually concluded I would never stay sober in this kind of environment and made a decision to leave her for good, and employ a lawyer to negotiate a divorce settlement.

I moved a lot of my personal stuff to a friend’s house (without her knowledge), and one day when she was out on the razzle, I packed up and left for good – or so I thought at the time. I stayed a while in Pattaya and then went to Bangkok, and finally flew back to Phnom Penh, while my lawyer back in Pattaya went to see her and tried to negotiate an amicable settlement.

At first, negotiations seemed to go well, and it appeared that she was going to be reasonable. But nearly three months later, just before she was due to sign the divorce settlement agreement, something happened, and she changed her mind and refused to talk to my lawyer any more. I had returned to Pattaya this point, to finalise matters, and was of course extremely upset at this turn of events.

During my 3 months away from home I had spent time in Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines, and near the end of my time away, when I was in The Philippines, I started drinking again. I am not sure what precipitated it, but it happened and that was that.

I hadn’t spoken to my wife for r the best part of three months, but when the agreement fell through I decided to contact her to see what I could salvage, and as a result of that initial contact, she begged me to come home and promised that she would truly change.

I believed her.

Upon my return we sat down and had a long “clear the air” session, and tried to work out a new basis for a happy relationship. A few weeks later, on my birthday, I stopped drinking again. Soon after this my wife stared to get up to her old tricks: going out, getting drunk and not coming home.

Ground Hog day had truly arrived.

Towards the end of June, a particularly bad incident happened – she had gone out, was getting drunk and was clearly lying to me about where she was and who she was with on the phone, and I fell off the wagon and got very, very drunk. I hadn’t drunk for 3 weeks and my tolerance was low.

I became so drunk that I could hardly walk, and I was walking around my swimming pool near my fish pond in the wee hours of the morning, and lost my balance and fell head first into the fish pond. My head was under the water and I couldn’t move. I was drowning; and would have drowned if two Thai men, who I had been drinking with in my garden annex, hadn’t heard me fall in. When they realised what had happened they rushed over and pulled me out. I got unsteadily to my feet, retraced my steps to the annex, and resumed my drinking. It was only several days later, when I was completely sober and free of alcohol withdrawal, that I realised how near I had come to death.

The next day an AA friend from Bangkok met me in Pattaya, and we had a long talk, the result of which was that I made the decision to stop drinking once again and started to go to AA meetings on a regular basis.

This was on June 25^th 2009.

(I shall try and complete this “catch -up” tomorrow, and then get back to “Mobi’s Story” over the next few days.)