The description didn’t say very much other than that the event was to be held in a pub that sold good tea and coffee, and there was going to be some ‘exciting news’. I clicked on the ‘join and RSVP’ button but before the registration was confirmed I was confronted with a bunch of questions, and one of them was, ‘what is your favourite soft drink?’
The Roebuck is tucked away in a side street in Oval, which is just south of Kennington and Vauxhall. Oval is, of course, famous for being the home of the Surrey County Cricket Club. Despite being thoroughly English, cricket is a sport that I find utterly confusing. I once went to a match where Sussex was playing Yorkshire. I had to ask the friend who invited me who was winning (I was allegedly ‘supporting’ Sussex), and he replied: ‘I have no idea…’ To some, a visit to the hallowed ground of Oval might have inspired high levels of emotion and brought a lump to one’s throat, but to me, it was just another unexplored part of the city.
I took off my baseball cap and unzipped my raincoat, and very quickly found the group: seven people were sitting at a long a table at the end of the pub. There was a perspex sign that clearly indicated I was in the right place. The group’s founder, Laura, gave me a very warm welcome.
‘Why don’t you get a drink, and then we’ll go through the introductions properly’.
‘Okay, I’ll just go and get a pint of my usual’, I replied.
‘And what is a ‘pint of your usual’?’ Laura challenged, her voice taking on a deeper more ominous tone.
‘Lime and soda’.
Moments after joining the invisible queue at the bar, Laura had caught up with me and asked me how much I knew about Club Soda. I replied that all I knew was that it was about not drinking.
‘The concept of Club Soda is very different from, say, the twelve step programme in alcoholics anonymous, where you go to meetings in draughty church halls’ Laura explained; I wondered what I was getting myself into. ‘The idea is that it's like a friendly social club; a place where you can meet people who are trying to do something similar. So, do you have any drinking goals that you would like to work on? Would you like to stop drinking, drink less, or just maintain a level of current drinking?’
‘I would like to maintain my current level of drinking.’
It was at that point I decided to come clean: I told Laura about my quest and what I was doing. After a moment of bafflement, she seemed to accept my explanation with a smile. When I returned to the group with my lime and soda, Laura formally introduced me as someone who was ‘going to different Meetups’.
‘I once did a sponsored swim where I went to every single local authority swimming pool in the London area’. Everyone turned to Laura. ‘I went to a total of one hundred and six swimming pools’.
‘What? One hundred and six swimming pools? How long did that take?’ I exclaimed.
‘Six weeks’ replied Laura. It was my turn to be confused. ‘For some of the pools, I just swam from one end of the pool to another. I did ten in a day once’.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
‘I wore my swimming costume under my normal clothes. I would drive to a pool, get out of the car, go do a swim, get in the car and then drive to another pool. There was this one time when the pool was closed for a class for a school, but I persuaded them to let me just do a length.’
Even though Laura’s swimming quest sounded entirely crazy, I could see why it would be something she would do. Laura had worked in local government for over a decade, gained an MBE for her services to the community, and had worked as a full time politician for a couple of years. She might describe herself as a campaigner and an activist.
Club Soda could be described as a social enterprise. One of the objectives of the Meetup was to show other members how the prototype website was coming along: it was a social enterprise enabled by technology.
Laura opened her MacBook and talked us through what she had been working on. Users could set drinking goals, use different on-line discussion forums, talk about objectives and learn about non-drinking social events. Through Club Soda, members can gain access to services, such as professional advisors who may be able to offer help and support. There was talk about nutritionists, doctors, and life coaches. It was a space to share experiences, stories and tips, to help people to move towards a non-drinking world. It had big ambitions: although it was just a website, and the website was a way to access different services; the idea was to create a movement.
‘We’ve worked with University College London on parts of the design of the system. Here’s a questionnaire that we’ve developed that assesses your drinking habits’.
‘Can I have a go?’
Laura gave me her laptop. There were three or four pages of questions about how much I drink, whether people had expressed concerns about my drinking, and whether I forgot where I was after drinking too much. I answered all the questions as honestly as I could but I found myself wanting to click a button that said, ‘yes, this has happened but quite some time ago; I’m a lot more sensible these days, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t going to happen again’.
I gained a good score from the questionnaire: it appeared I was a relatively sensible drinker.
‘Have you thought of how you might use apps?’ I asked.
‘That’s the first thing that people think about when it comes to tech, and there are loads of apps out there about drinking. What we might do is recommend some apps for users, and in the future we might create our own app that could then feed into the site’.
I pictured a tool where users could share drinking status updates, but then dismissed the idea as a non-starter: I suddenly imagined loads of people posting selfie pictures, smiling stupidly, whilst holding glasses of orange juice, with a tag line: ‘having a great time!’
Laura mentioned an Australian initiative called ‘Hello Sunday Morning’ that had the subheading of, ‘changing your relationship with alcohol: one Sunday at a time’, which was, in some sense, an antipodean competitor to Club Soda. HSM, as it is known, is also a website, but one that is packed with positive images of people doing amazing things and making the best of their lives. It’s a powerfully simple argument: hangovers hurt, you lose days, you feel guilty, and you lose money and gain weight. If you don’t drink, you don’t have to endure these traumas.
There was one question that I really needed to ask, which was: how will it be sustainable? Or, put another way, how would it be funded? The answer was simple: it would work on a subscription basis; the members of the community would pay every month.
After the demo had finished and Laura told everyone about her plans. We chatted about how the culture of drinking had changed over the last twenty years and the challenge of going to nightclubs and boozy dinner parties if you’re sober. The tenor of the discussions had changed: we were in a group of non-drinkers talking about the times that they used to drink: ‘If it was ten o’clock in the morning and my in-laws were coming round, I would think: it’s margarita time’, ‘I would have one glass of wine and feel a bit down the next day, so I would have another glass of wine the next day, and that would make me feel slightly worse, and so it would continue…’ The group talked about genetics, family history and how easy it was to get hold of booze.
Everyone continued to chat until around ten o’clock. I said goodbye to everyone and thanked Laura for letting me come along. I wished her well with her project. If anyone could make it work, I felt that she could. She had a fiery sense of determination, loads of energy and was powerfully articulate. I hope it worked out. It was a great thing to be doing.
It was raining when I left. For the first time in the year I sensed the musty smell of damp leaves. As I walked towards Oval tube station, I passed a pretty Victorian terrace with immaculately kept front gardens. On my right, there was a housing estate that was probably built in the seventies. A large residential tower block of around fourteen stories punctuated the local area. In the distance, towards Vauxhall Bridge, I could see a glass and steel skyscraper that was illuminated by bright lights: I was surrounded by different ages of London.
I decided against the tube to London Bridge and opted for a bus route that I had never taken before. When the bus arrived, it was three quarters full. I found a seat on the top deck and settled down to enjoy the ride. I knew where we were for the first fifteen minutes of the journey: the bus went past the Maudsley Hospital before making its way to Denmark Hill and onto East Dulwich, another part of the city that I had never been to. My eyes were glued to the window as the bus rolled through, taking in new sights, and catching glimpses of new streets.
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