"The best nights had drink in them"

Ask people for the best nights of their lives and you get a list like this one. The wedding where everybody danced until the lights came up. The evening the exams finished. A bar on holiday, somewhere nobody can now find on a map. Drink runs through all of them, so drink looks like what made them.

The first thing to say is a point of logic, and it's mine, not a research finding. You've had perhaps a thousand evenings with a drink in them. Five or ten were wonderful. The alcohol was much the same on all thousand. What differed on the wonderful ones was the people, the occasion, the music, being somewhere new, and nobody having to get up in the morning. Something that was present every time can't be what made a few of them special.

Drink does add one thing to nights like that, and I want to be exact about what. Steele and Josephs, the researchers from chapter 3, argued that alcohol makes social behaviour more extreme by blocking what they called response conflict. That's the tug between an impulse and the reasons against it. At the edge of a dance floor, the impulse is to dance and the reason against is the fear of looking daft. Alcohol quietens the second voice.

So some of the permission is pharmacological. I think a larger part is an agreement. Everyone in the room accepts "we'd had a few" as cover for singing, dancing and telling a friend you love them. The placebo experiments in chapter 4 suggest that belief carries a good deal of this. The room also contains evidence. At midnight the driver and the pregnant bridesmaid are on the dance floor with everyone else, using the same licence without the drink. Children at the same wedding have been running in circles since four.

You may feel certain you wouldn't dance without a drink. At eight o'clock, in a bright room, to a song you don't like, you probably wouldn't, and nor would most of the drinkers. At eleven the floor is full, the lights are low and your song comes on. The bar to joining in has dropped for everyone by then, because everyone else is already doing it. The first time is the hardest one. There may also be things you've only ever done drunk that you'd choose not to do, and finding that out is useful too.

There's a cost to the best nights that seldom gets counted. The NHS notes that memory loss can be a problem while drinking. Think about how you remember those nights. The first half is sharp, the speeches and the first dance and the moment your friend arrived. The last two hours are a smear of repeated conversations and a taxi. The nights you value most are the ones you're keeping least of.

The list of best nights also has a companion list that nobody recites. It includes the row in the street, the thing you said to your brother-in-law, and the text you sent. Drink was on those nights too, and did more of the work there than it did at the wedding.

If you try a big night without drinking, you'll notice something drinkers can't. There's a point, often around the time the stories start repeating, when the night stops being fun for anybody and carries on out of momentum. You can stay for the dancing and leave at that point, and you'll have had the best of it.