The signs you’re an ‘alcochondriac’
Drinking habits
We’re all obsessed with ways of cutting back on booze … without giving it up, obviously
Drink. It’s all we talk about. For a minute there, we thought diet had taken over from drink as the number one topic of conversation. Who were we kidding? Drink is still way out in front. It’s all over the news every day: how drunk was the woman who fell off the ship? How much had Danny Cipriani had? What about Ben Stokes? How is Dec doing off the drink?
Next week, Adrian Chiles presents a TV programme on drinking and how much of it he has done over the years, with no detriment to his job, but plenty to his liver.
In interviews ahead of transmission, he’s spoken about his plan for cutting back, including three days off every week. It’s hardly groundbreaking stuff, and yet we’re agog. Man who drinks too much and decides to do something about it is an intro to our favourite subject: our own normal – but excessive by government recommended standards – drinking. Facing up to our dependency on alcohol used to be the hot topic in January, and in the lead-up to Lent, but now it’s rolling news. It’s really all we’re interested in.
In years to come, people will marvel at this period in our history when people like us – who hoot with laughter at the sissy snowflakes in their boozefree halls of residence – have become shameless alcochondriacs. We’re not about to give up drink but we’re endlessly interested in how much is too much, and how we might limit our intake with minimum discomfort.
Middle-class, middleranking drinkers (bingeing at the weekend, getting a bit carried away on a Wednesday, having a few dry days, but quite often cancelling one of those) have become peculiar about alcohol. Here are some of the ways you can tell you have become an alcochondriac, 2018 style.
You buy Belvoir cordials, in the hope that you can wean yourself on to them, once rosé season is officially past. Also Kombucha, which does deflect the urge for an alcoholic drink, a bit.
Asking for a G&T and then saying “but just a small one, not too much; is that all gin or mainly ice? On second thoughts, I wonder if I should have a spritzer.”
You consult the barman as if he were a doctor, as in “which is less hangovery: the chardonnay or the sauvignon … or would I be better off, do you think, with a beer?”
Buying really small wine glasses, to slow you down, then moving on to bigger, quality glasses, on the principle that you should be savouring every drink as if it were your first or last (quoting Chiles here) not treating it like either poison or Fanta.
You start buying more expensive wine and talking about it, in a bid to get the savouring thing going. You are aiming to drink like a French sophisticate, rather than worrying your girlfriend is ripping through it, and filling your glass to the brim in case it runs out.
You seek out 12 per cent proof wines. (Note: recently, you’ve given that up, having realised your subconscious considers 12 per cent to be not really alcohol, so you end up drinking twice as much.) You start drinking later. You drink outside and leave the bottle inside.
You drink champagne, on the basis that you really do have to savour that, and the bubbles definitely slow you down, and isn’t it better for you? (Note: of all the strategies this may be the most effective, albeit ruinously expensive, though who knows? In the long term it could actually save you money.)
And, obviously, being an alcochondriac means having at least one conversation a week about what you could do differently – apart from not drink.