It has just gone seven in the morning, and the air hostess on my flight wants to know if I would like a drink.
‘A gin and tonic, a vodka, a nice glass of white wine to get your trip started, perhaps?’
I politely decline her offer, and ask instead for a bottle of water.
‘Are you sure?’ she prods, looking at me as if I have taken leave of my senses.
‘I’m sure,’ I nod. ‘Just a water, thank you.’
‘I can’t tempt you with a glass of Prosecco?’ she persists, waving a miniature bottle in my face.
I realise she is one of those people – the type who are incapable of imagining a world that doesn’t revolve around alcohol. I have some sympathy; I used to be like this too.
‘Not even one,’ I reply, a rictus grin on my face. ‘I’m an alcoholic.’
I have a version of this conversation at least four or five times a week: at restaurants, at parties, at almost any social occasion outside my house in fact.
‘But surely you can have a glass of something after so long not drinking?’ asked an acquaintance a few weeks ago. ‘Haven’t you proved you don’t have a problem with alcohol if you can give it up for ages?’
In a few days, it will be exactly eight years since I last had a drink. Eight years since I came home from a cocaine and booze bender at 10am, having gone AWOL on my husband and four-year-old daughter, for the umpteenth time that month.
Eight years since I sat on the edge of my bed and knew with absolute certainty that I was going to die if I continued to drink (while also suspecting that there would be no way I could survive if I had to give it up).
Eight years of wondering when people will stop waving tiny bottles of Prosecco in my face, even after I’ve asked them not to. People often say addiction is an illness of denial, the only condition that tells you that you don’t actually have it. In my experience, it’s also the only illness other people feel qualified to tell you that you don’t have – something that happens all the time when I explain why I don’t drink.
‘You don’t look like an alcoholic,’ is just one of the lines I’ve heard as I’ve attempted to bat away booze.
Here’s the thing I wish people knew about recovery: sobriety does not diminish addiction, it just gives you a better chance of keeping it at bay. I may not have accepted the offer of a drink on the plane, but my brain still has a nasty habit of telling me how nice it would be, despite all evidence to the contrary (black outs, crack dens, rehab etc).
As the late Matthew Perry told American broadcaster Diane Sawyer a year before his death from ketamine: ‘Your disease [alcoholism] is outside doing one-armed push-ups just waiting for you, waiting to get you alone, because alone, you lose to the disease.’
It was while watching Matthew Perry: A Hollywood Tragedy – the ITV documentary released this week – that I realised just how often addicts are expected to explain their illness to people, in a way that people with other chronic conditions simply aren’t.
The film told us little we didn’t already know about the actor’s tragic death in 2023, but it did show how wilfully ignorant some people are about addiction, with commentator after commentator expressing ‘shock’ at his passing, especially given he was ‘doing so well’, even writing a bestselling memoir about his illness (a memoir that began with the line: ‘Hi, my name is Matthew… and I should be dead.’)
Perry had been telling people he had a killer disease for years and years. He was one of the few vocal celebrities articulating the reality of addiction in all its horror, even discussing the condition on BBC’s Newsnight in 2013.
Did anyone other than his fellow alcoholics and addicts even attempt to listen to him?
Then again, perhaps they were the only people Perry felt he needed to reach – he is known for having helped countless people get into recovery. But all of us who reach the sunny uplands of sobriety know it is not a given we will stay there. We are all of us only ever ‘just one’ drink or drug from disaster.
Indeed, it’s astonishing Perry survived for so long in an industry filled with predators and creeps – from the doctors who referred to him as a ‘moron’ even as they lined their pockets selling him their grotesquely over-priced drugs, to ‘Ketamine Queen’ Jasveen Sangha, the dealer who this week made clear she will plead guilty to supplying the actor with the ketamine that killed him.
Why is it that addiction is so often seen as a moral failing, instead of the disease it clearly is? Why are so many non-addicts incapable of understanding that they’re not superior to us, just bloody lucky?
‘Tragically, Mr Perry fell back into addiction issues,’ says one of the police officers who investigated his death, at one point in the ITV documentary.
But we never move on from our addiction issues – we just get better at understanding them. If only everyone else did, too, it might make recovery that tiny bit easier.
Dua Lipa’s book club is surprisingly high brow
Oh Dua Lipa, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. It’s not the pop star’s music that has me smitten, it’s her book club. Each month, Dua (looking amazing on the October cover of Harper’s Bazaar) surprises with her picks, interviewing Pulitzer winners and Booker nominees on her podcast. This month it’s This House of Grief, a true-crime masterpiece by Helen Garner, which I gobbled in a day. When fewer people than ever are reading, it’s a relief literature has such a strong advocate.
Noel praising Liam is unnerving
I should be pleased the Gallagher brothers have made up. Noel said this week: ‘He’s been amazing… it’s great being back in the band with Liam’. So why do I find it so unnerving? Like plagues of locusts or ravens leaving the Tower of London, I’m not sure Noel and Liam getting on is a portent of anything good.
Wonderful to hear the teen word ‘skibidi’ has found its way into the Cambridge Dictionary – although, intriguingly, not even the dictionary’s publishers seem able to define it. (Apparently it can mean anything from good to bad to cool to weird.) I’m convinced it’s a code that our kids have come up with, to stump us when we go to snoop on their WhatsApp messages. If anyone manages to work out what it means, do let me know.
My husband’s idea of romance!
My husband announced he’d found a new series for ‘the two of us’ to watch – Alien: Earth, the spin-off from the movie franchise where creatures with acid for blood rampage around goring people. Given I watch most of it cowering behind Harry, I guess you could say it’s brought us closer as a couple.
Sale trick that’s made Labubus a hit
If you have children, then the chances are you’ll have heard about Labubus – peculiar creatures that look like demonic Teletubbies. They are so popular that their maker, Pop Mart, has seen profits soar by almost 400 per cent in just six months, in part due to canny sales techniques that include creating waiting lists and only selling ‘blind boxes’ (you don’t know which Labubu you’re going to get until you’ve purchased it). It’s basically gambling, but with toys. You have been warned!
