Ok, here goes. After many years of thinking about it - and a few, desperate half-arsed attempts - I've given up the sauce. It's early days - three days, 11 hours, 19 minutes and 13 seconds in to be precise - but according to my Sober Time app I've already saved £19.10.
My tipple of choice was wine. Not necessarily the most expensive stuff, but not the cheapest rot gut either. I'm talking the semi-decent supermarket claret or Malbec that I, and millions of middle-aged middle class women like, me buy most days as part of our grocery shopping. Nor would I necessarily drink the entire bottle. Between Sunday and Wednesday I'd typically have "just" a couple of glasses ie half a bottle - shared with my husband. Thursdays, we'd frequently imbibe a couple of bottles (more if it was book club, of course) and Friday and Saturday, we'd invariably binge - and who knows how much I'd knock back. Occasionally I'd drink so much that I wouldn't remember the end of the evening and, even at the advanced age of 53, I'd sometimes wake up fully clothed. Oh yes, and we'd always share at least one bottle with our Sunday dinner.
So what's changed, you might ask, what's brought on this latest attempt to cut out the booze? Well, several things actually. Firstly, I'm sick to death of hangovers, not to mention the feelings of shame and self-loathing that invariable accompany them. And then there's the expense: I'm shocked and appalled at how much money I must have spent on alcohol, money I could ill afford. In fact, I'm not yet ready to face the implications of this, but do intend to address it in a later post.
I've also just read Catherine Gray's inspirational book The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober and I'm two-thirds of the way through Clare Pooley's The Sober Dairies. I also watched Clare's excellent TED X talk, which really hit home, given that we had remarkably similar "drinking histories".
No comments:
Post a Comment