We drank too much last lockdown... can we really stop now?
I’m sure she won’t mind me saying this, but it’s been a long time since Susannah Constantine was our guardian angel. That was back in the days of What Not To Wear, when she and Trinny Woodall would strip women to their smalls and attack their awful waterfall cardigans with pinking shears. Imagine that, children!
Brutal honesty was their shtick – this was long before trolling by strangers was invented – and the women of Britain loved them for it. They rescued us, you see, not just from shapeless High Street frumpery and unflattering sackage, but also from ourselves.
And now the Sainted Susannah has re-emerged in our hour of need with a characteristically blunt reminder about the dark side of domestic drinking.
“I’m an alcoholic and I’ve been in recovery for nearly seven years now,” she admitted this week on the comedy shopping podcast My Mate Bought A Toaster. As the 58-year-old novelist and mother-of-three drank, she would lash out at her husband, businessman Sten Bertelsen, attributing all her own faults to him.
“I thought my husband was passive aggressive, but actually I was the one that was passive aggressive, and I’ve realised that over time and in recovery. My poor husband was the one who had to live with it.”
Note: she didn’t lose days, jobs or friends to booze, but she did lose herself. There was no great drama or near-tragedy in her account – which gives it all the more there-but-forthe-grace-of-god resonance. The drinking she describes wasn’t extravagant, public and glamorous. She didn’t overindulge on cocktails or book long-haul airline tickets while smashed.
She behaved horribly, as simple – as toxic – as that. It was low-key, nasty, depressing – and depressingly familiar. To put it another way, let she who hasn’t got lairy with her partner after a bucketful of cheap Pinot Grigio cast the first aspersion.
I’ll start off with a big, fat mea culpa. Not all the time. Not every time. But I’ve just quizzed my husband about my drinking, and he theatrically rolled his eyes. When he has a mug or two of red wine, he gets all mellow and wants to listen intently t to Scandinavian j jazz.
For me, the first h home-poured G&T e equates to rocket f fuel. With t the second, I am h hilarious. No, really. It’s not my fault he has no sense of humour and what in Valhalla’s name is that dreadful music?
He likes to muse, blokishly, over a single malt. I’m an ooh-look-at-me social drinker. Take away the buffers of convivial company (for him) and a rapt audience (for me) and trap us at home together for months during a global pandemic and… let’s just say it’s not the ideal dynamic.
I haven’t got an alcohol problem per se. I don’t drink every day, not necessarily every week. But I go through phases and, while I may not be a big drinker, rest assured, I can drink bigly.
And when I do, I can be (searches in vain for a euphemism) a bit arsey. That’s the only term for it. A bit arsey.
This is not a gender-specific behaviour. If it were, A&E wouldn’t be packed with mostly male pugnacious drunks every weekend.
I’m just focusing less on the spoiling-for-a-fight carnage of a good night out and more on the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? domestic psychodrama.
During the first coronavirus lockdown, women increased their alcohol intake more than men, according to a study by the charity Drinkaware – with around one in seven saying they often found themselves drinking more than the NHS recommended alcohol limit of 14 units per week.
We know we’ve been overdoing it. Every time I murmured “I think I’m drinking too much”, girlfriends would invariably use my opening gambit as a springboard to talk about their own alcohol consumption, which was so boring I needed a drink.
We all drank too much during the first lockdown, just as we ate too much and sat around on our bottoms watching Netflix too much.
Wine o’clock was increasingly less about the wine and more about the symbolism of clocking off. Drinking – like bingeing on carbs and slumping into inertia – is bound up with emotion.
Why else would otherwise sensible grown-up women shriek like giddy schoolgirls at the sound of a supermarket Prosecco cork popping? It’s the powerful connotations of fizz, fun and frivolity that packs such a punch. Not the taste. Definitely not the taste.
Someone wiser than I once pointed out that you should only drink to enhance your mood or enhance your meal. No premier cru, however magnificent the label or vintage, can change either of those things.
You’re on a hiding to nothing to even try. Mostly, in lockdown, we boozed through sheer boredom, and as the nights draw in we need to fight the temptation to get fuzzy round the edges quite so early and quite so often.
Experts say that you should turn the idea of abstinence on its head.
Instead of setting yourself the goal of entirely forgoing alcohol (poor me…), you should visualise how you will feel after your uninterrupted night’s sleep (yay me).
By concentrating on the benefits in the future, not drinking will seem less like a sacrifice, the theory goes, and more of an active choice.
Moreover, if abstaining is a positive move then, by association, so is choosing to drink. Hey, presto – mindfulness. Let’s raise a glass to that. Alcohol optional.
‘Let she who hasn’t got lairy after a bucketful of cheap Pinot cast aspersions’