A look at boozy Britain is rather sobering
About two months ago, I decided I was going to try and stop drinking. Without wanting to sound like an American therapist, I felt it was no longer serving me very well. If my drinking were a barmaid, it would be the kind with zero ability to change a barrel or make a drink more complicated than a vodka and orange. It would be the kind of drunken landlord who siphons off two pints for every one sold, having illegal lock-ins until the sun comes up.
In truth, my drinking hasn’t been serving me ever since I started when I was 15. I’ve never been the kind of person who does things moderately. “Why don’t you just have one?” my husband has always asked, smugly sipping a glass of red slowly, making it last an entire evening as if this were a perfectly reasonable, nay, enjoyable, thing to do. The reason I don’t just have one is because I would rather have none. If someone offered me a pill that made me drink moderately, I would refuse to take it, even if I got to wash it down with a shot of tequila. I don’t want a nice buzz or a charming evening eating food paired with wines by a sommelier.
Like Mike Ashley, who this week announced in the high court that “I like to get drunk”, boozing has never been about enjoying the taste of a nice glass of Sancerre on a summer’s evening, or a beer after a long Sunday walk. It is about oblivion. And I can’t say that Mike Ashley is someone I want to compare myself to too often.
With this in mind, I thought it was probably a good idea to knock the drinking on the head – before it got there first, and knocked me out cold. With the exception of a small slip at a wedding (a glass of champagne during the speeches) and a couple of pints on my birthday, neither of which I wanted nor enjoyed, I have managed to stay off the booze. I managed a book festival without picking up a glass, and a week in Spain without falling for the charms of the endless rosé my friends and family quaffed back during the holiday. I can happily – shockingly, even – say that I am, for the time being at least, almost totally teetotal.
It’s funny what happens when you sober up. You realise that almost everybody else is completely sloshed, and that those who aren’t are forced either to pretend that they are – “No, no, this isn’t soda water! It’s a gin and tonic!” – or slink into anonymous rooms off church halls, like members of the masons.
A sober friend admitted to me that he once made up a complicated stomach ailment to stop people asking if he had a “problem” with drinking. To which he could only reply: “Yes, I have a problem with drinking: I really don’t like the way it makes me feel.”
I know I am a proper problem drinker: I like the way it makes me feel a little bit too much. But still, I have realised that, as a country, we probably have a bigger problem with people who choose not to drink, who have the temerity to turn up to a party and ask for a Diet Coke or an elderflower cordial (stock response: “Sorry, haven’t got that, but we do have tap water, if that suits”).
“Are you OK? Should we be congratulating you? Should we be offering you our condolences because you have a terminal illness?” No, I just don’t want to wake up feeling like a small animal has died in my mouth over night, and before you ask, NO, I CAN’T JUST HAVE ONE.
This was the week that queues for the bar at Wimbledon were almost as long as that record-breaking 11-hour match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut back in 2010.
Sales of alcohol in SW19 have apparently been “strong”. If visitors to Centre Court once enjoyed the odd glass of Pimms with a bowl of strawberries and cream, now they are more likely to to be downing champagne straight out of the bottle.
There have been brawls at Royal Ascot. The sun seems to make the nation’s alcohol intake look even more than usually disordered: for the last month, people have been drinking like pirates.
I don’t want to sound pious; I have, after all, barely managed two months of sobriety. Mother Teresa I am not. But I am finding that once the hangover clears, the world looks a bit nicer. It feels a bit more manageable. And the things that once drove you to drink – a screaming baby, a bad experience in the office, any day with a Y in it – become reasons not to. Waking up without a sense of self-loathing or paranoid fear? I’ll raise a glass of fizzy water and crushed lime to that.