My secret finally finding true love? Giving up booze

Gazing at a woman’s face in extreme close up, i can see her eyes are bloodshot, her lips chapped, her cheeks flushed with rosacea. Her mouth hangs open in animal confusion as she feels the bruises on her shoulders and the seeping wound on her scalp.

i’m watching The girl On The Train — the thriller of the moment — based on the Paula Hawkins novel that has sold millions. i am supposed to be riveted, rapt. all i feel is overwhelmingly sad. Because — at times — that’s been me, that bruised and bloodied creature, forced to play detective about my own body, my own life. Waking and waiting to be told what i have done — managing, not managing, to negotiate the drunken obstacle course i have created; and this not in my teens or 20s, but in so-called ‘responsible’ middle age.

and i am by no means alone. Friends have had similar experiences of drinkinduced memory loss and injury; laughingly dismissing them as ‘brain blanks’, ‘war wounds’, or ‘UDIs’ (casualty speak for ‘unidentified drinking injuries’).

a hard-partying fortysomething refers to them as ‘soiree scars’ and drinkinduced black-outs as ‘social strokes’.

Bravado apart, many will empathise when Rachel — the film’s alcoholic heroine, played by Emily Blunt — is asked why she sought out a therapist, and answers: ‘Because i’m afraid of myself.’

i stopped drinking two years ago, at the age of 43. after 30 years of largely happy — if somewhat hysterical — carousing, i found myself bloated, weary, more miserable than i’d ever been, incapable of being around others without being a bottle down and unable to sleep. ‘afraid of myself’ is about the sum of it.

Rachel’s horror is her terrifying lapses of memory. as she notes in the novel: ‘Blackouts happen, and it isn’t just a matter of being a bit hazy about getting home from the club . . . it’s different. Total black; hours lost, never to be retrieved.’

My own lost time was mostly of the former variety. The ‘i know i got a cab, but remember no details’ thing.

and, yet, at times, i too had missing moments. How many? i guess i may not be the best judge. Friends would tell me about swaggering antics, being kissed by people i didn’t want to kiss.

i should immediately make clear that my drinking was never anywhere near as bad as Rachel’s. i had good friends, a great job, and — i am reliably informed — was known for being good fun rather than a total nightmare.

My boozing was enthusiastic, but never an obvious problem. i didn’t drink every night, rarely appeared drunk and never allowed alcohol to affect my work.

That said, i always drank faster and more fervently than anyone else, which meant more anxiously. (Would there be enough? Why were the glasses so small? Should we order another round?) and i never wanted a glass, two glasses — half a bottle, even. i wanted the whole damn lot. More given the opportunity.

DRINKING

was my hobby, my most committed relationship, my joy. i relished the nihilism with which it knocked the world off its axis so that only the next glass mattered; the way it suppressed emotion; the heady oblivion it brought.

i drank to escape stress, boredom, and — ultimately — myself.

and, yet, one of the reasons people have found my renunciation so difficult is that i drank no more than anyone else in our alcohol-obsessed society.

‘You weren’t an alcoholic,’ others tell me. ‘That’s just normal.’ and it is.

Sure, in the month before i gave up, i’d gone up to a bottle of red a night when on holiday or out on the tiles.

However, in the run up to that last month of bingeing i’d knock back what friends and colleagues refer to as ‘the usual’: half a bottle of wine an evening whether on my own or with others, with the odd night off in between.

given that there are ten units per bottle, this new normal added up to around 25 units a week.

in July 2014, a study published in the British Medical Journal argued that 12 units a week — less than a pint or large glass of vino a day, and two fewer units than the government’s recommended limit — can have an adverse effect on health. Personally, i have never met anyone who drinks that little.

Middle-aged women such as myself have been at the forefront of this transition into kamikaze carousing: a shift from an occasional, festive glass on high days and holidays to Mumsnet’s ‘wine o’clock’. Time was when fat was a feminist issue. Today it’s booze.

We drink with a recklessness that suggests mother’s ruin has been transformed into mother’s little helper.

Middle-aged mothers whose children have left home are the fastest growing group of hazardous drinkers according to a Yougov survey, while people with degrees are almost twice as likely to drink every day and admit to a problem; a correlation stronger in women.

and, put bluntly, our addiction is killing us. The number of professional women of every age dying from alcoholrelated conditions is up by a quarter since the Eighties.

all of which means a good many female viewers are going to watch Emily Blunt’s performance and shudder. There is much that we will recognise. The pitying looks from strangers, drunk texting, the hangovers that leech from 24-hour to rolling. and, of course, her blackouts.

Readers will recall Rachel’s horror when she lurches into consciousness the morning after the night before.

‘i wait for the memory to come. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it’s there in front of my eyes in seconds. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all. Something happened, something bad.’

My memory losses were more: ‘Was i an idiot for those last couple of hours?’ with me guilt-texting friends and lovers to apologise without knowing what i was apologising for.

Such lapses happened a little more towards the end of my drinking. at a friend’s wedding, a married man kissed me in full view of his wife. i remembered that i had fought him off. i hadn’t.

The next day was torture. as Rachel laments: ‘i’m going to feel terrible all day . That twist in the pit of my stomach. and i’ll be telling myself, it’s not the worst thing i’ve ever done.’

Humiliating as i found this episode, it is small fry compared with my friends’ sad and shocking encounters, which include: ‘intercourse with a stranger a week before getting married’, and ‘never remembering anything about sex before the age of 40.’

One 50-year-old designer who wished to remain anonymous confides: ‘Blackouts were the norm. The last thing i’d remember would be falling into bed with someone, removing clothing, then — nothing. This is how sex happened.

‘But, then,’ she adds, ‘my flatmate had terrible blackouts and used to wake up worried she’d killed me. and my daughter recently added tracking software to