I gave up alcohol – and I'm glad I did

Before that, even, it was the impossibly adult bottle of Snowball or Babycham I was allowed each Christmas as a kid. It was probably, even before I could swallow a mush of bananas, the ‘tot of whisky’ on my dummy to help me sleep.

You see, we go back, me and alcohol.

Except me and alcohol have fallen out. The love story is over. Because, as the saying goes, ‘there are three of us in this relationship’. The third wheel is my weekly dose of methotrexate, a low dose chemotherapy medication I inject every weekend to keep in check my rampaging, overactive immune system. This medication is particularly hard on the liver, so much so that you have regular blood tests to check the auld fella is holding up OK, and so booze is off limits.

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Well, not off limits exactly. Members of an online support group vary on what you can and should drink. Some still have six beers a night, some are teetotal. My rheumatology doctor suggested I stay within medical guidelines of 14 units, the equivalent of a bottle and half of wine a week. I have tried having a few drinks but even a single bottle of IPA, moderately sipped over an evening like a skint student, makes me feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss my bad ex-boyfriend, booze. I grew up in a family where the drinking culture was as essential and automatic as breathing. My family was full of drinking stories – each competing to be wilder. And, as I wrote in the addiction anthology, A Wild and Precious Life edited by Lily Dunn, "Too-drunk didn’t exist in my world. Drinking meant drunk, drunk meant mortal, blacking out was hilarious. What a laugh."

In my teens, I started to understand that booze was consuming a lot of my relatives rather than my relatives consuming it. Not least my father, an alcoholic, who hopped on and off the wagon more times than I could count and claimed AA was both the only way to get clean or ‘a cult’ – depending on how badly he wanted a drink that week.

And still I drank. I drank because of an undoubted genetic predisposition to alcoholism, because in 1990s' laddette culture where you were expected to get as trashed as the boys and still look hot in a naval-skimming, too-tight indie band T-shirt, because I was young and there was always another club night, a party, a rave in a field somewhere and I wanted to experience everything.

This can be an alcohol-soaked time of year (Image: free)

I also drank because I was cripplingly shy and somehow the right amount of booze, or much more than the right amount, turned me into a wild party girl. If I told anyone who knew me back then, in my teens and twenties, that I had social anxiety they would think it was a punchline. But mostly I was either drunk or so tired and hungover I didn’t have energy to worry what people thought of me. It was highly effective, and deeply self-destructive, as a self-medication.

I did slow down a little in my mid-twenties. I worked charity office jobs in London, I was ambitious, cared about my job and knew I couldn’t function at work hungover.

So, I let loose Friday and Saturday nights giving me Sunday to recover. How much did I let loose? Well, when I was looking up average binge drinking stats for this column, 8 units per day is the average for men, 6 units for women, my first thought was, ‘amateurs’.

When I became a mother, it reduced further. Except, of course, for social occasions, when I used drinking as a social lubricant for my nervous, shy-self. Now, as we go into the festival season, I’ve been wondering how I’d do as…well…just me, without the armour of alcohol.

It turns out, OK. Traditionally, the first gathering of the Christmas period kicks off with my best friend’s birthday. So this weekend I sat at a long table awash with wine bottles and nursed a pint of lime and soda wishing for a double vodka in it. But there were unexpected benefits I hadn’t imagined. Because I was sober, I made sure everything went smoothly, ordering taxis, making sure candles were blown out, taking her kids home so she could relax and stay out late.

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More than that, I had genuine and deeper conversations with friends than I’d ever have managed with booze powering me onto the next drink and some ill-advised dancefloor starting on the sticky carpet. And, of course, it was lighter on the wallet than any other night out. I woke up the next day and went for a smug non-hungover pancake breakfast with my family knowing I wasn’t modelling the same toxic culture I grew up with for my toddler. He’s never so much as seen his mum tipsy.

I can’t say I don’t miss booze. I’ll always love it. And while not drinking can feel like a loss, and frankly one to the entertainment of Scotland's public houses too, I’m starting to realise it’s a real gain for me.