WE’VE ALL BEEN SHAMED BY MODERN MOTHER’S RUIN
Behind the boom of trendy gins — many aimed at women — there’s a dark side: victims who don’t realise its strength can face VERY embarrassing consequences...
WHENEVER Lucy Griffiths thinks about gin, her cheeks redden and her toes curl with embarrassment as she recalls one office Christmas party she would far rather forget.
It ended with her slumped on a ballroom chair beside the dancefloor in such a deep, drunken stupor that mischievous colleagues were able to put a long, knotted red wig on her head, smear lipstick around her mouth and surround her with huge pot plants, so that when she eventually woke she actually thought she was alone in a jungle.
Too inebriated to make sense of what was happening on the night — and, luckily for her, accompanied home by a flatmate — it was the following morning, when her boss sent a photograph to Lucy’s phone, capturing the scene, before she realised she had been the drunken butt of her colleagues’ japes.
‘Thankfully, my boss was amused rather than angry, but I was utterly mortified that I’d made such a complete show of myself — and he felt bad enough for me that he deleted it,’ says Lucy, 42, a media trainer.
‘I blame it on the gin. I drank heaven knows how many on a near empty stomach. There was no proper food, only nibbles.
‘As I discovered to my cost, while one G&T may be fine as an aperitif, it is an incredibly potent drink which goes down way too easily, because it tastes so refreshing.
‘I was so horrifically hungover the following day that I had to cancel a visit to see friends in Nottingham because I just couldn’t face the journey.
‘I never touch gin now. The mere mention of it makes me shudder with embarrassment.’
Lucy, who lives in North London with husband Tim, 49, a banker, is far from the only woman falling prey to the potency of gin, not least because it is being pushed specifically at women in multiple sophisticated marketing campaigns.
There are pink gins, gin in beautiful artisan bottles and those flavoured with honey, rhubarb, mangoes and strawberries. When mixed into a cocktail with tonic water or lemonade, some hardly taste alcoholic at all, making their hidden strength lethal.
This week, it was revealed that UK gin sales have soared by an astonishing 254 per cent over the past decade. The spirit was officially named Britain’s favourite last year when a record 47 million bottles were sold, an increase of seven million on 2016.
Sales rocketed in value from £630million in 2011 to £1.2billion last year, according to the Wine and Spirit Trade Association.
To KEEp up with demand, the number of UK gin distilleries has more than doubled, from 152 in 2013 to 315 today. And, it seems, even when we’re not drinking the stuff we’re thinking about it, with a surge in gin-related products ranging from candles, lip balm, fudge, T-shirts, exfoliating scrubs and bath oils.
And there is no end of Christmas-related gin gifts on sale this year. From gin and tonic stockings to advent calendars and even cards where traditional festive slogans are given a twist, such as ‘Gin-gle bells’, ‘Merry Gin-mas!’ and ‘oh, Come let us adore Gin.’
The drink with a base of juniper berries has come a very long way since the 1700s when it was considered the bane of society and given the damning soubriquet ‘Mother’s Ruin’, due to its popularity with impoverished women desperate to escape the harsh reality of their lives.
But as manufacturers go all out to appeal to the female market, alcohol awareness campaigners warn that there is one crucial difference between wine and the juniper berry. While fizzy wine typically contains around 11per cent alcohol, gin is a far more potent 40 per cent-plus.
This is particularly worrying given that two-thirds of the alcohol consumed in Britain is now drunk at home where there are no optics or pub measures to limit intake.
‘A unit of spirits is 25ml and even a single pub measure tends to be 35ml, the equivalent of 1.4 units,’ says Katherine Brown, chief executive of the Institute of Alcohol Studies. ‘However, when people are free pouring at home they are unlikely to stick to measurements and can therefore easily exceed the recommended intake without realising.
‘Few understand the link between alcohol and cancer, especially breast cancer in women, so we would like to see companies make that association clear on bottles, as they do on cigarette packets.
‘The weekly low-risk drinking guidelines were revised in 2016 and if people want to keep their health risks low, they should try not to regularly drink more than 14 units a week.’
Given that a 750ml bottle of wine contains around ten units while a one litre bottle of gin is made up of 40 units, the risk of overdoing it is undoubtedly greater.
And while Katherine Brown recognises that manufacturers have women firmly in their sights, advertising their colourful, sweet gins in glossy magazines and during ad breaks around ‘femalefriendly programmes’, she warns that this is also the group most at risk.
‘Women can tolerate lower levels of alcohol because we have less water and more fat than men, so it is more highly concentrated in our bloodstreams,’ she says.
‘We also have slightly smaller livers to detoxify the alcohol, so get drunker quicker.’
Lucy Griffiths is all too toe-curlingly aware of this fact, having drastically cut down on her alcohol intake following what she calls her ‘shameful drunkeness’ at that fateful office party seven years ago.
Indeed, since becoming a mum to son Ben three years ago she is almost teetotal.
Laura Downing, 32, is also unlikely to ever forget the night she fell foul of gin’s potency, as she still bears the scars.
Three years ago, she was booked to work as a compere at Bristol Fashion Week and, as she waited to go on stage, a friend suggested she have ‘a little gin and tonic’ to calm her nerves.
The Greenall’s pink grapefruit gin with elderflower tonic went down so easily that she had a couple more during the course of the evening, before later heading off to a nightclub, with some of the models, where she carried on knocking back G&Ts.
‘I usually drink craft ales and lagers but that didn’t seem sophisticated enough for the company I was in,’ says Laura. ‘Gin used to be considered an old ladies’ drink when I was a child but it’s become really trendy.
‘And, thanks to the mixers, it tasted delicious, so I just didn’t realise how much I was drinking.’
HER partner, Sam, 39, an artist, concerned about the state she was in when she called him, came to meet her and on the way home they picked up a takeaway pizza, which she decided to eat in bed.
Laura also took up a jar of mayonnaise, which she put on the floor beside her bed, with the intention of dipping pizza in it.
‘I lost my balance as I leant over to pick up the mayo and landed on the jar which broke into pieces, some of which pierced the skin on my back and bottom,’ recalls Laura, blushing at the memory.
‘There was a lot of blood, which pooled on the mattress, and although I insisted I didn’t want to go to A&E Sam dialled 111 and they told him to take me straight to hospital.’ Doctors at South
Mead Hospital near their home in Bristol cleaned up the wounds, one of which was the size of a £2 coin, but she needed a week off work and was unable to lie on her back until her wounds healed.
‘I’d just been made a team leader at the centre for adults with learning difficulties where I worked, and felt so embarrassed in front of my staff when I returned,’ says Laura, who is now a full-time mum to LillyMay, one.
‘And my poor mother was so upset when she saw the scars, which I’ll probably have for life. She said, “I can’t believe you’ve done this to yourself, I thought I told you to drink responsibly?”
‘It has made me much more conscious
about how much, and what, I drink and I’ve not been drunk since. I went to a regatta recently and they were serving fancy gin and prosecco cocktails, with a raspberry on top, to which I said an emphatic “No thanks!” I can see why gin became known as “Mother’s ruin” — it’s absolutely lethal.’
Nutritional therapist Dr Elisabeth Philipps finds this gin craze among women more concerning than last year’s passion for prosecco. ‘It’s harder for the liver to break down spirits than wine or beer because the ethanol content is higher,’ she warns.
Sarah Turner, a cognitive behavioural therapist, who runs the Harrogate Sanctuary, an online support group where she helps, mostly, middle-aged, middle-class mothers overcome drink problems, is concerned by what she sees as a normalising of spirit consumption. ‘Women used to say, “I never touch spirits, only wine”, and that was a way of curbing their alcohol intake,’ says Sarah. ‘But gin is now hugely popular. ‘Wine can be acidic and cause bloating but gin is clear and clean so you don’t usually get the same magnitude of hangovers, which makes it even more dangerous because feeling ill afterwards can be a deterrent from drinking. ‘People who move onto spirits from wine will start out thinking I’ll only have a couple because it’s much stronger, but alcohol is a very powerful drug and the more you have the more the body craves.’
MOTHER-ofthree Emma Starrs thinks drinking gin is incompatible with childcare, which is why she took the opportunity to over-indulge a little when her youngsters were spending the weekend with their father, from whom she is divorced, back in May. However, four months later, she still crosses the street in the market town in Greater Manchester where she lives, to avoid anyone who witnessed her uncharacteristic behaviour that night. She had only nipped out to walk her dog, when she was drawn into a pet-friendly local pub by rousing live music and a sing-a-long at a Forties night. It was a warm evening and Emma, who runs a PR firm, ordered a double gin and tonic and before long was joining in with old favourites like Show Me The Way To Go Home and It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. ‘It was all very patriotic,’ recalls Emma. ‘The gin quickly went to my head because I’d not yet eaten dinner, but that didn’t stop me accepting when someone offered to buy me a second. ‘There was a lady, a professional singer, in wartime dress, on stage with a band and we were all joining in and banging on the table. Then one of the old boys I was with got up on stage and sang a song. When he’d finished I thought, “I can’t let the side down” so I took the microphone and belted out Rose Garden, the Seventies song by Lynn Anderson. ‘I can hold a tune but I’m not a great singer and would never normally do something like that — it makes me cringe from head to toe just thinking about it. I’m not a big boozer. I completely blame the gin, which I only ordered because I think of it as a cooling summer drink. ‘If I’d been with a friend, I’m sure they’d have said: “You’re a mum of three and a professional woman, what are you doing?” and I’d never have got on that stage.’ When the musicians took a break, luckily she came to her senses and staggered off home. ‘I haven’t set foot in the pub since. I’ve avoided speaking to anyone who was there that night,’ she says. ‘It all feels a bit surreal and the people who know me to be quite demure probably now think that, underneath, I’m a frustrated cabaret singer.’ Emma’s gin-fuelled night seems all the more surprising as she is usually so healthconscious, exercising regularly and eating a high protein, low carbohydrate diet. However, she, like growing numbers of women, favours gin over wine because it is a ‘clean spirit’, which means it doesn’t contain yeast or chemicals found in some other drinks, and, at around 80 calories a measure, is easier on the waistline. But Dr Philipps cautions against manufacturers of trendy gins taking advantage of the misconception that something fruitflavoured may have health benefits. ‘These drinks contain no vitamins, just fruit sugar to make it taste nice and added colour — and certainly couldn’t be classed as one of your five a day.’