My story is far from extraordinary.
Alcohol hasn’t taken me to rock bottom or destroyed my life. I thought I generally functioned well with my ‘friend’ but more recently that wasn’t the case. My beloved Peroni and red wine were sapping my energy, making me extremely anxious and wrecking my sleep. Plus, my eyes and skin looked dreadful.
One of my earliest memories of alcohol was coming home from my swimming club on a Friday night aged 8 or 9 and sharing a can of lager with my Mum. I used to smile cheekily at Mum and say ‘I could murder a lager and lime’.
Yep – I started quite young!
I can remember knocking back a whole bottle of Baileys one night when was revising for my A levels….wow how sickly was that.
By the time I went to University, I was merrily drinking 4-5 pints of lager in the Uni bar or at the Poly bop most nights. Ah, the delights of student life in England – cheap pints followed by take-away pizza. Not great for the figure as you can well imagine! I can also remember buying cheap bottles of Cinzano (who remembers that!) from Morrisons and drinking the whole bottle with lemonade mixer before even going out some nights.
I studied French and Spanish which meant I spent a year in France in 1992. So I lived in Agen (near Bordeaux) and expanded my drinking repertoire to red wine and super strong, black coffee. Neither of which I’d drunk before.
So there is was, tastes firmly acquired for my two favourite alcoholic drinks: lager and red wine with a strong black coffee chaser the morning after.
In the early days, I used to water my lager down with lime and generally picked a ‘cooking lager’ but as with all things alcohol, I built up a tolerance and soon my lager of choice was Stella – affectionately known as ‘wife-beater’.
An evening work-out at the gym was routinely followed by a trip to the off licence where I’d grab a few bottles of Stella to down as soon as I got home. My reward for working out; yes that’s what it was.
I bought my first house and it was during this period of living on my own that I developed my love affair of cosy nights on the sofa knocking back a bottle of red wine. It was easy back then.
Then I met Steve, my now husband, and moved down to live in Surbiton where I spent most Saturday nights at The Works in Kingston drinking bottles of Fosters Ice followed by Jack Daniels and Coke chasers. Ah….those were the days. Steve has a full repertoire of photos of me crashed on the kitchen floor after a heavy night of clubbing. Those photos won’t be making their way to this website! No way Jose.
We moved to Warwick, got married and I soon fell in love with Peroni ( a very close second to Steve for my affections!). For me, a chilled draught pint of Peroni served in a beautifully branded glass was tantamount to pure poetry. To be honest, it still is.
However, William Porter (author of Alcohol Explained) would call this ‘FAB – fading affect bias. Basically I’m in love with the fantasy or ambition that this idea conjures up. I know he’s right but it’s tough all the same. The thought of sitting in a beer garden on a lovely sunny evening, drinking a chilled pint of Peroni is simply idyllic. It’s a really hard vision for me to deal with or to tame.
Trouble is….those two pints of Peroni in the pub were never enough and I always topped it off with a large glass of red wine or two when I got home. If it was a weeknight and we didn’t go to the pub, then I would substitute the Peroni for two cans of San Miguel. It had to be cans as I had realised by now that I didn’t like bottled beers. So my daily diet consisted of cans of lager at home or draught beer in the pub. Either way, it was followed by red wine. Yep that was my routine, my habit, my life.
Alcohol consumption every day.
Time to change!