When I was in college, the pubs still closed on Good Friday. Rather than seeing this for what it was – an unpleasant reminder of how much power the Church continued to have in Ireland, how intertwined state and church remained – I found it amusing, a cute relic of times gone by. We were children of the Celtic Tiger; we didn’t abstain from anything on a religious holiday, not meat, not sugar, and certainly not alcohol. After all, some of the best parties of the year were thrown on Good Friday. Slabs of beer stacked in the corner of a grotty student house, standing by a blazing bonfire on the beach, the air heavy with weed and smoke, tents pitched in a desolate field, gazing at the night’s sky and telling stories weaved out of the stars.
The prohibition on the sale of alcohol on Good Friday was lifted in 2018, and at that point, I had been almost twelve months sober. My days of raves were long gone. And yet every year, I think of those parties and there would be some… regret, perhaps, or melancholy. A wish unfulfilled. It’s not that I want to be 21 again, you couldn’t pay me to return to that young woman, so adept at keeping her secrets. Maybe it’s the freedom I miss. The sense that I was playing at real life, and there would be no real consequences for any mistakes I made. Money was there to be spent, nights were there to be razed to the ground, waiting for the sun to rise again. Our bodies were made to dance and sweat and fuck and dance and dance again. Isn’t that glorious, in its own way?
Do you want to know how I spent my Good Friday in 2024? I went to a two-hour ecstatic dance session. If you don’t know what that is, let me try and explain it to you. Picture a small room, pitch black, a DJ in the corner with his decks. Maybe 30-40 people, men and women, all barefoot. All sober too, that’s a requirement; it’s a drug and alcohol free-zone. The music starts slowly, builds to a crescendo, then descends again, and you move your body with it. You let go of self-consciousness, of embarrassment. You try not to worry about what you look like or what other people are thinking of you. It’s just you and your body in the darkness. Nothing else.
I’m often asked if I miss drinking and my answer is sometimes but not really. If I’m being honest, I miss taking