As someone who used to have a substantial drinking problem, I’ve been pretty torn about certain topics in the news lately.
Last week, Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary, for example, called for airports to ban serving alcohol before early-morning flights. What a killjoy!
Until fairly recently, I had never, ever boarded a plane sober. I found alcohol drastically reduced the discomfort of the flight – and I didn’t once misbehave.
New MP Hannah Spencer (Green Party), meanwhile, has had a proper whinge about other MPs being too boozy. ‘You can smell the alcohol when people are in between votes,’ she said. She’s not wrong: I’ve been at the bar in the House of Commons and mingled in those circles. It was riotously good fun.
I do think we can all agree that politicians shouldn’t be hammered when voting on the future of our nation, but I’ve been drunk plenty of times on the clock, especially in my early 20s when I was working in the advertising industry. With my bosses, I should add.
There’s no doubt about it: Britain has a bold, long-standing, far-reaching drinking culture. It’s almost a badge of honour that we can drink practically any other nation under the table. I recall being horrified the first time I had a big family meal with my husband’s German relatives and there was not a drop of alcohol on offer. It was dinner! On a Saturday!
At 39, I’m a millennial, and we started getting wasted in our early teens on lurid-coloured alcopops in local parks. There wasn’t a single non-drinker among us. Ditto at university, where there were either students who could or couldn’t hold their alcohol. No one refused altogether – even if it did make them sick most nights.
‘Just this past month, when my husband (pictured with Annabel) was away for work, I noticed myself lurch back into having one glass of wine in the evening to soothe my fried nerves,’ writes Annabel Fenwick Elliott
Booze wasn’t just rife in educational settings. My mother’s family is Irish and they all drink like sailors. My English father, and his father, and so on, have always enjoyed a whiskey at noon on the dot, generous portions of wine with dinner and a sherry nightcap.
Before it started to ruin my life slightly, I was smug about what a ‘good’ drinker I was. I am deeply ashamed to admit that, at university, I was known as the ‘designated drunk driver’ among friends – the best by far at navigating a car with precision even when tipsy.
My tolerance crept ever higher as the years went on; no matter how plastered I was, I didn’t slur my words, didn’t wobble and never threw up. So I got away with it for a long time, easily sinking a bottle of wine a night after work throughout my late 20s and mid-30s.
During the Covid pandemic, when I was living alone in the countryside and working from home with only my dog by my side, I was drinking more than ever, and starting earlier and earlier in the day. I have ADHD and autism, so my mind is a circus. Alcohol was, and still is, the fastest remedy I’ve found to calm down what Buddhists call the ‘monkey mind’ and make the show tolerable.
But it also made me look puffy, get combative when challenged and feel wretched the next morning.
I only accepted that I may have to abandon my beloved tonic when I got pregnant with my son, nearly four years ago. Even after he was born and I started drinking again, it didn’t sit right with me.
It was one thing pickling my liver when I was single and gloriously selfish, but I wanted to be a good mother. And a good mother does not knock back a bottle of wine every night to stupefy her rampant mind.
Around then, I came across a medicine that cured my lifelong drinking problem very quickly. Often touted as the ‘Ozempic for alcoholics’, naltrexone is a drug that kills your desire to drink.
When taken according to the Sinclair Method – developed in the 1980s by Dr John David Sinclair, an addiction specialist at the Finnish Foundation for Alcohol Studies – an hour before drinking, the pill, a dopamine inhibitor, kills off the reward loop for the next eight to 12 hours until it wears off.
In the simplest terms, it switches off the part of your brain that usually reacts to alcohol with that warm euphoria which keeps you coming back for more.
If you continue taking it every time you drink, your mind quickly learns to stop expecting the hit, and wine has the same allure as apple juice.
I hardly drank at all for years after using the method, but I have slipped back into bad habits a few times since. Because of the naltrexone, I pretty much have to force alcohol down like medicine, but there are still situations in which I refuse to be sober, so don’t take the pill.
Long-haul flying, for example. And parties. Travelling for work, on the rare occasion I don’t have my children with me. Christmas. Birthdays.
Certain people trigger the urge to drink, too – like my father. Drinking good wine and whiskey with him on holiday long into the night has always been one of my favourite ways to spend time. It simply wouldn’t be the same if we were teetotal.
Just this past month, when my husband was away for work, I noticed myself lurch back into having one glass of wine in the evening to soothe my fried nerves after long days spent wrangling my three-year-old son and three-month-old daughter. One glass quickly became two. I wasn’t taking naltrexone, and I could see old patterns returning, so I knocked it on the head and stopped buying more wine.
Truthfully, I imagine I’ll do this dance for the rest of my life. At least I know I’ll always have a drug that really works to get me back on track, and for now my children keep me in a responsible headspace. But when they’ve left home, and I’m retired? Terminally ill? I’d quite like to take my last breath with a soothing tipple running through my veins.
‘My tolerance crept ever higher as the years went on; no matter how plastered I was, I didn’t slur my words, didn’t wobble and never threw up. So I got away with it for a long time,’ writes Annabel, seen at the pub when she was younger
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Graham Norton, who has been candid about his own back-and-forth with booze, wrote in his memoir about briefly attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings, and stated: ‘The big question is: do I have a problem? On one level, I obviously do because I drink far too much.’ He later concludes simply: ‘I prefer my life with booze in it.’
I look at younger generations, who pride themselves on their restraint with – or all-out rejection of – alcohol. My own half-siblings, who are Gen-Zers, never found it ‘cool’ to get blotto at school and university. ‘Sober raves’ are apparently a thing these days, despite sounding thoroughly ghastly to me. Part of me thinks: ‘Good for them and good for their health’. The other part rolls my eyes and feels they are missing out. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
Alcohol is, in many ways, a fantastic elixir, an effective social lubricant for the shy, and a time-honoured tradition that has got Britons through miserable times for centuries.
As long as it doesn’t turn you into a rude, angry moron, and provided your liver can take it, perhaps it’s OK for some of us to fall on and off the wagon, swinging between dry spells, moderation and excess until we shuffle off this mortal coil.
