‘Yes, I’m stress-drinking, but this isn’t the time to give up’
Has the coronavirus crisis seen your drinking habits mutate at an alarming rate? Mine too, says Kate Spicer
While everyone else was running in circles, stockpiling loo roll and flapping about pasta, I put my hands on my hips, in a “When the going gets tough” type of way. “Right,” I said, “we’re going to need decent wine. I’ll sort the vino, you get the crisps.”
This was before the government deemed off- licences ‘essential’ last week, so they can stay open with the pharmacies and the supermarkets.
When all this descended I’d proudly been on a healthy hiatus – drinking modestly like a government-mandated normal person. That all changed.
My Covid-19 drinking habits have mutated at an alarming rate. Gone is the polite, middle-class, sun-over-the-yardarm trigger. Daily, I turn to drink for different reasons. First came those initial corona-christmassy feelings. Do you remember that time about three weeks ago, when everyone started working from home, and feeling a little demob happy? This was the period before people we knew started getting sick or dying.
At this early stage our cupboards were groaning with food we’d never eat and a small libation at lunch time to toast the festive vibes seemed only polite. One weekday afternoon we watched a couple of movies we’d always wanted to and put away the best part of a litre.
This couldn’t go on. The wine reflex in me is so strong that I’d ordered 15 litres of the stuff in a box with a tap. We could not run out. I did the maths, and if worst comes to worst and the wine dries up, those 15 litres should do us for a couple of months, I said.
Then my partner went away to his mother’s, so I’m locked down alone, with the dog and a lot of wine. I don’t generally drink alone – it’s a line I try not to cross. Well, I’ve crossed that line daily for the last week. Now, drinking alone is my foreseeable future – I won’t pretend it doesn’t slightly worry me.
Every day I try not to drink in an attempt to have at least three boozefree days in the week. I promise that come lunchtime I don’t glance at the wine box by the larder, thinking to myself how a small glass would go so nicely with a plate of cheese and biscuits – and take the edge off the mild but very present loneliness and all-pervasive virus-induced anxiety.
It’s later in the day my triggers come. Sitting at my desk watching the daily press conferences at five, the weight of what’s happening overwhelms me and I say out loud to the dog. “I need a drink.”
The new cocktail hour became sitting in front of iplayer listening to Rishi or Boris or Chris Whitty. This is a pattern, I thought, of drinking to sedate your fears. So the other day I pushed through, I didn’t drink. It looked like a booze-free day, and
We’re going to need the odd drink to get through this – sorry, temperance advocates
then the clapping for caseworkers reduced me to tears, and I had to have a drink.
I’ve been using a tiny wine glass, using all the tricks to keep the quantity low and the cognisance of how much I’m putting away high.
Still, we are going to need the odd drink to get through this. Now isn’t the time to give up. Sorry to any temperance advocates out there.
Pepys followed 1665’s Great Plague in London with a mixture of fear and obsessive fascination that I now fully understand. Yet, after a year in which a quarter of Londoners died, he writes in his diary, “I have never lived so merrily... as I have done this plaguetime”.
We might as well do the same.
I look at those NHS workers and knackered ministers and hope that they are blessed not with dried pasta at home, but with a stiff drink.