Originally Posted by Trollheart

Get some more, cos here's another one.

Okay well if you had actually read what I wrote instead of being so set on mocking me as you always do, you'd have seen that the first few paragraphs had nothing to do with you (sorry but not everything does and I don't respond only to you) but were in fact a reply to Fetcher's comments. The only "manifesto", if you like, was in the last three or four. And anyway, despite what you'd like to think, or how you want to read things into my writing that aren't there, I don't advocate temperance by any means. If people want to drink, fair play to them. If people want to get drunk, their choice. If people want to get drunk and get into fights, up to them. Nothing to do with me, though I still assert the world would generally be a better place if people did not feel the need to drink to excess (important difference there with the last two words).

What I asked for, but realise I will never get, is for people like me, and Rostasi, who don't drink, who have chosen not to drink, to be treated like normal people and not some sort of freaks of society who have to be either a) mocked or b) studied to find out why we don't drink, ie what's wrong with us?

I can't speak for anyone else, but personally, I have no interest in drinking copious amounts of something I don't like the taste of, puking up, staggering home, getting into fights with strangers, waking the next morning with no clear memory of the night before. Doesn't hold any attraction for me. Nor does sitting in a pub all evening when I could be writing more journals to bore you all with, or reading, or hell - here's an idea! Listening to music. There are many better ways to spend one's time, and that's my choice. You want to spend your days/nights (delete as appropriate, or possibly leave both in) in a drunken haze, go right ahead. I won't say anything to you. But if I want to spend my days and nights clear-headed and unaffected by alcohol, that's my choice, should be respected as much as yours and should not have to be explained, excused or justified, just as nobody does, or has the right to, ask you why you feel you need to drink.