What Did I Do Last Night?

When Tom Sykes, journalist and author of What Did I Do Last Night? A Drunkard’s Tale, landed his dream job as the New York Post’s bar columnist and nightlife reporter, he successfully turned his long-standing drinking problem into a vocation. As Sykes launched into a dizzying whirl of glamorous parties in fashionable nightspots, sumptuous dinners in New York’s best restaurants and never-ending free drinks at celebrity-packed events all over town, it seemed Manhattan was his martini. Ultimately, however, the New York party scene that Sykes documented threatened to become his downfall, as the cycle of heavy drinking and casual drug use gave way to the onset of full-blown alcoholism and addiction.

In the What Did I Do Last Night? lecture program, Tom frankly shares with his audiences the dangerous comedy of a life lived with the bottle ever in hand, gives a candid account of withdrawing from alcohol during his first ninety days of sobriety, and talks about the challenges and the reality of living long term without drink or drugs.

With charm and self-deprecating humor, Sykes traces his fondness for the bottle back to his privileged British boyhood at Eton College (from which he was expelled — for drinking) and describes his own alcoholic apprenticeship on London’s famously drink-sodden newspapers. Sykes recounts how, after years of self-abuse and denial, he finally admitted, at age 30, that he was caught in a downward spiral, and resolved to get clean and save his own life.  He inspires audiences both to fully appreciate the powerful attraction of alcohol, and to honestly appraise their own relationship with it as well as with other substances.

With binge drinking rampant in youth culture, Sykes’s message could not be more relevant. With his easy-going personality and sharp wit, Sykes manages to bring a fresh and funny voice to the drug and alcohol debate, but also leaves his audience with a very real sense of great danger barely escaped.

In his time at the New York Post, Sykes devised, wrote and edited the paper’s bar column, “Block Party”, and its dating column, “Meet Market”.  He also worked as a writer and reporter on the paper’s infamous gossip column, “Page Six”. Sykes’ work continues to appear in a wide variety of publications including Men’s Vogue, British GQ and Men’s Health.