Sobember

Day 7 of Sober in November. Do you bugger "feel better", "sleep better", "feel more refreshed" etc. You eat like a horse and develop weird food tastes, like those of a pregnant woman. The one advantage is that you do save money--except if you try to rejoin normal society, as I discovered last night. In The B---, two Ginger Beers (250ml each) came to £5.40. In another pub, soda water was £1.00.

Sod this for a game of marbles. Next time I fancy going out I'm going to drop six quid down the grid and go back in. It's quicker, you don't get cold walking, and it produces the same results.

I made up a fire in the front room and sat down with the computer. I became alert as I heard the stairs. The Moldovans made a bold entrance. Ionache was brandishing a bottle of vodka; both were dressed strangely, half zip-up outdoor nylon coats and long but flimsy shorts attracting too much attention to the regions of overlooking. Andrei apologised for interrupting me.

"Would you like to have a glass of fifty-one year-old vodka?" I heard him say, but it turned out he was saying that he wanted us all to have some vodka because it was Ionache's thirty-first birthday.

I explained that at any other time I'd love to, but I'm going sober for November.

It was a great evening, the best of ice-breakers. Ioanache went to the kitchen to find some shot glasses; I haven't got any, never needing them, so came back with an eggcup. We got through most of a bottle of vodka and some tins of Fosters. They taught me the Romanian for "cheers", and we passed the eggcup round repeatedly, the coarse but socially important throat-scrape of neat vodka, accompanied by some herring, feta and cucumber.

"You are a good man," said Andrei, repeatedly, in the friendly pan-Continental locution. "We will meet again--we will take you out. My bill, we pay everything. But you show us the best pubs. Maybe there is football? Next time, we pay everything. This is inside, next time, out."

"I don't know how is in your house, but this is your house, and we must respect. And in the house before, every week, we all go together to clean. All of us, we do everything. I show respect to you. It is your house. We keep our room clean and we all clean." It's alright mate, we're not that rigid about it.

They unwrap a huge supermarket pizza, and lay an entire packet of sliced chorizo over it. "Now is a true pizza." I offer baking trays but they say the cardboard base will be good enough.

"How much you think a week in Moldova, how much you think?" I prevaricate, trying to think of a figure which doesn't sound imperialistic. "I'm not... I don't know, I've never been." "Do not go to Chișinău without asking us first. One hundred pounds, one week--beer, wine, everything. That is all, and we show you Moldovan wine. Moldovan wine..." and he shakes his head, transported, wishing he had a bottle to prove his point.

Next morning, I discover the pizza has leaked everywhere and baked to black onto the most inaccessible rear parts of the oven, and it takes me forty minutes to clean it, using wire wool and anti-greasing agents strong enough to kill small birds.