I’ve finally got a friend I can rely on: a bottle of wine a day

THERE was a piece in the newspapers the other week moaning that women are always asked to write about their personal lives. The author couldn’t ignore the fact that esteemed writers such as Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion and Nora Ephron have done it, but excused them because ‘with their rigorous self control they are a long way from the hysterical narcissism we have now’.

But here’s the problem: you can’t half write about an important personal issue, be it insanity, bereavement or infidelity, because what’s the point, other than swelling your coffers?

If you only half write, you become part of the conspiracy that tells women they are alone, weak, stupid. I’d love it if the world didn’t know I have whiskers, grey roots, cellulite, collapsed buttocks, breast reduction scars and debts. But that’s not the business I’m in.

Writers are supposed to feel impossibly naked (no, I won’t do naked, given the aforementioned flaws – let’s change that to uncomfortable) when we publish something.

I pray for a power cut, or martial law, when one of my pieces is published. I would certainly never flag it up on Twitter.

So, trying to keep the narcissistic hysteria and Casting Creme Gloss in Dark Chocolate hair dye (I can no longer afford a salon) from dripping all over my keyboard, here goes.

Last week, a new report warned that alcohol is a direct cause of seven types of cancer.

These scientists never leave their comfy labs often enough to realise that heavy drinkers can’t be scared by things like that.

As someone who now drinks a bottle of wine a day, I would absolutely love a disease to finish me off, and soon.

I’m not writing about ‘wine o’clock’ and one too many glasses of a really nice Chablis to wind down. I drink to escape my life, not toast it. I don’t want to get tiddly – I want to be comatose, to escape the awful pressing problems of today. I don’t care two hoots about tomorrow. I had my first drink on Millennium Eve, thinking it might cure my crippling shyness, help me get a date. That was Trigger Number One – loneliness, insecurity.

A glass of wine didn’t cure my diffidence, not really, but it gave me something to do in the evening, something to hold.

It helped me cope with my job as a magazine editor that meant I was always standing around in difficult shoes, talking to people I didn’t know (mainly Italian fashionistas, which didn’t help) about stuff I didn’t believe in.

It helped me get out there (I was drunk when I said my marriage vows – that and the fact I couldn’t hear the registrar when he said ‘Do you take…’ made my future claim for an annulment viable), which is very different to what happened when Trigger Number Two came along – fear.

LAST year, faced with financial ruin, I drank half a bottle in one go. That was a first. I felt better – ooh, another first. This is nice. Wow. I can sleep. Yay. Who cares that I have no money? I can keep warm by burning all the brown envelopes. Of course, I woke up, depressed, at 3am, my body craving more booze. A cycle had been set in motion.

This sort of drinking isn’t a recreational choice: 40 per cent is caused by genetic disposition (my sister died of an alcohol- related disease; I was barred from her funeral for writing that sentence). I imagine the other 60 per cent is caused by people going through what I have – grief (for my old, comfy life, siblings, parents, pets), failure, having nowhere to turn.

Drinking as much as I do is a slow suicide, so no amount of telling us it’s going to make us ill, no number of adverts showing little red tumours fizzing at the bottom of a glass, will have any effect.

A report last week also found that people drink more when they are in relationships.

Rubbish. I drink less when my boyfriend is around. I couldn’t possibly have a glass of wine before 6pm if he’s here, or drink a whole bottle. I’d be ashamed, much in the same way I only put out half my bottles for the recycling man. The rest I take straight to the dump.

I was always the last person anyone thought this would happen to. As well as being teetotal for my first 40-odd years, I even took my own decaff whenever I was invited out for dinner! I was pure as the driven snow (I never took drugs, either).

Now? The bottle is my only friend. It’s so festive with its bubbles, so merry. The pop makes you feel you’re at a party of one. It’s not that without it, life just doesn’t seem worth living. Without it, life is impossible. So, bottoms up. Or maybe not, given the state of mine.