MY STORY
I have given much thought to the questions: why did I start drinking and why did I continue to drink on a regular daily basis for over 35 years?
I did not consider myself to have a drink problem. Everyone I knew drank. It was the normal thing to do. Friends, work colleagues, relatives, girlfriends, teachers, lecturers, even priests. I could go on.
How much you drink is NOT relevant to anybody else, only you, because it’s all about you.
For example, two glasses a night could be highly dangerous to one person and to another it could just be their starter. Everybody is different.
When I stopped drinking, I noticed that the first thing other drinkers ask (or think) is, ‘Do you have a problem?’ This is only to make them feel better about themselves. They are just trying to gauge themselves against you.
By stopping drinking, you are a shining beacon. You are doing things differently, taking the path less travelled, wanting a better life. You have decided to leave the tribe. This tends to make anyone staying in the tribe feel uncomfortable. They want to believe the only reason you have stopped is because you have a problem or you have found a new religion! Other drinkers need to put you in a box, label you, and then forget about it. They don’t need to ask any more questions. They can go on drinking as normal.
Even with my regular alcohol intake, I ran my own successful marketing agency, have been married for 25 years and have three wonderful, grown-up children. But every day, I was putting this poison inside myself, thinking it was some form of relaxant, stress reliever, anxiety killer.
But I was overweight (well over 17 stone), short of breath, anxious, short-tempered and doing very little exercise. These were all symptoms of too much alcohol consumption and an unhealthy lifestyle.
I did do some exercise but not enough to make an impact on my weight and mental well-being. I went cycling and played golf, always spending time at the 19th hole.
Being in my 50s, my body was not what it used to be. Even two drinks the night before would lead to a hangover. I never really looked at it as a problem until well into my 40s, when my body started to tell me that it just could not cope as it used to with the mental and physical effects.
GROWING UP IN THE 1970s & EARLY 1980s
I don’t think much has changed in 50 years regarding the way alcohol is promoted though media.
Even though the amount of information we receive has massively increased in volume through social media, the internet and smartphones, alcohol is still pretty much positioned the same.
When I was a boy, there were only a handful of TV channels – BBC1, BBC2, ITV and, in the early 80s, along came Channel 4. There were national newspapers and local papers, plus magazines. There was also radio – with only a few stations to choose from, including national BBC stations and local independent radio. To watch a movie, you had to go to the cinema. There was no internet.
The home I grew up in was alcohol-free. My mother and father were not drinkers. There was never alcohol in the home apart from at Christmas time when it would appear for a week or so in the form of cans of beer, a bottle of whisky, maybe Malibu and Baileys or a bottle of Advocaat that would become a Snowball if you added lemonade to it! There was no wine. Wine in the UK in the 70s and 80s mainly consisted of a German sweet white wine called Liebfraumilch.
My parents did not drink during the week. On a Saturday night, when they would go out dancing at a local club, it was only a couple of pints of beer. Other than that, I think my dad would have a couple of pints during the week if he went out to play skittles so, in total, he was drinking maybe four pints of beer a week maximum and my mother much less than that. So, my parental role models drank, but hardly anything at all. My older brother, who was 14 years older than me and lived at home until he was 21, did venture to the pub more often, so this probably had some influence on me as a young boy.
Alcohol was very much associated with successful people. Of course, there were the drunk tramps drinking out of bottles concealed in brown paper bags, but they were classed as alcoholics. The very clear message through TV, cinema and all media was that the more successful, rich and famous you were, the more alcohol you could afford. Success was a bar in your house; success was drinking champagne. In sport, it was James Hunt covered in champagne after winning F1; George Best pouring champagne into a pyramid of glasses. In the movies, it was James Bond drinking his Vodka Martini. On TV, it was Leonard Rossiter enjoying a Cinzano Bianco with Joan Collins. Anyone who was successful usually had a drink in their hand.
The TV adverts were creative and appealed to younger people with their catchy slogans, staying sharp to the bottom of the glass, probably the best lager in the world, refreshing the parts other beers cannot reach, follow the bear and reassuringly expensive.
This definitely had an effect on my subconscious mind. I was being groomed. Every media channel was telling me alcohol was good for me. Successful people consumed it. Adults consumed it. It was fun. It made you sociable. You became a fun person if you drank it!
My recollection is that I never thought of drinking alcohol until I was probably around 14 years old.
Outside school, social life consisted of a weekly youth club and the odd disco in a village hall. There weren’t many of these, probably four or five a year.
There was definitely pressure among my friends to drink a couple of cans of beer or cider before going to these village hall discos. It was good to have an older and/or taller friend who could get served in an off-licence. We all knew the three or four shops that would sell us cigarettes and beer.
Once the cans of beer were acquired from the shop, they were normally consumed in secret, in a park, somewhere where no one could see. This drinking gave me a slight ‘high’ and normally ended in me being sick. Nothing like it was portrayed on TV!
In the summer evenings, my parents would take my younger sister and me, not that often but maybe two or three times each year, to pubs with an area for children to play. My father would probably have a couple of drinks, my mother too. My sister and I would play on the swings and slides and have crisps and soft drinks. So, I began to associate pubs with having fun.
On the flip side, I had aunties and uncles who drank a lot. It was not talked about much in the family but word slipped down the grapevine to me that several had ‘issues’. My father’s older brother was one of these. He still lived with his mother and father well into his 50s. He was a big man, with a full, red face, who was always down the pub. One of my mother’s sisters drank a lot of wine. She lived alone and my mother would take me along to visit her on the occasional Saturday morning. Her house was full of empty wine bottles. So I saw first-hand the destruction alcohol causes.
By my teenage years, I was starting to build a belief that alcohol was cool, that drinking it was a normal thing to do. Everybody did it. It was a rite of passage. Grown-ups drank. Everyone else drank, well, most people. It was everywhere. It was hard to avoid. If you did not drink it would be unusual. Suspect. Wrong.
MY FIRST DRINK
The effects were like nothing I’d ever known before. I felt absolutely terrible. The headache was excruciating but it was the start of a long-term relationship that lasted almost 40 years – what a first date!
I was 14 and with my friend, who would’ve been 16 at the time and lived just around the corner. He had acquired some home-made scrumpy and his parents were out. He invited me round and I drank about two or three pints of the stuff, which was poured out of a plastic carton that looked like a petrol bottle, which is ironic as alcohol is pretty similar to fuel.
I remember the room spinning and me saying that I had to leave. I really thought I was going to die. I staggered home and I think I tried to creep into the house, because I was in such a bad way, but ended up throwing up all over the upstairs hallway. The next day, I had a very bad headache, like nothing I’d ever had before. This was my first hangover. I would go on to have thousands of these over the following years.
This first drink experience was an end in itself. The only reason we were drinking was to get drunk but I had no idea I was going to get drunk. It was only my older friend who knew what was going to happen. He’d probably been through something similar a few years earlier. It was my right of passage – I had to do it. Everybody did it.
My second date with alcohol was linked to a village disco. I was still aged only 14. I remember buying four cans of beer and then going to the park to drink them with other friends going to the disco. We knew the places that would sell alcohol to 14-year-olds. I went into the shop, very nervously, with our money and bought the cans of beer. We sat behind some bushes, out of sight so no one could see us drinking. Again, the whole objective was to get drunk and feel high.
Drinking the first few times was, for me, just beer. My first experience with spirits was at a friend’s house party. I remember drinking whisky, which tasted disgusting. The hangover was so bad. Throughout the rest of my teens and 20s, I could not drink whisky again as the mere smell of it took me back to that party as a 14-year-old.
Looking back on this, I really should have realised then that it was not the whisky that tasted disgusting – it was the alcohol, the same chemical, or active ingredient, in beer that I had decided I liked.
The only other spirits I drank as a teenager were mixed with a sweet drink like Coca-Cola and the only objective of drinking spirits was to get drunk quicker. But the drink of choice as a teenager became beer.
By 16, drinking was something we always did if we went to a party. I remember being at a holiday camp in Somerset and buying scrumpy from a garage and ending up behind a hedge completely drunk and sick again. Why the hell did I do this? It was just crazy. In fact, most drinking experiences as a teenager ended up with me back in bed by myself with the room spinning around!
By the time I was in the sixth form, there were at least two 18th birthday parties each month at night clubs in the town centre. There were always tickets available, so even if you did not know the person, you would go along to the party where alcohol was readily available and being sold knowingly to 16 and 17-year-olds.
With alcohol all around me, it started to become a regular thing for me when I was about 17. Not that I was drinking it daily but if there was a party, I would almost certainly have a drink. The first thing I did after finishing my A-level exams was to go to the pub to celebrate with other students.
HAPPY HOURS
The second phase of drinking started for me at the age of 18 and coincided with leaving home and going to university. Drinking became an everyday thing.
I’ve only realised now, while writing this chapter, the power of the Happy Hour slogan. It works on a number of levels. The first level being that you feel happy because drinks are discounted for an hour, so you are saving money and getting more for your hard-earned cash. However, the subliminal message is that alcohol makes you happy. As you will see later in this book, that is a complete load of nonsense.
I went to the London School of Economics and, as with all universities, alcohol was all around me. It was everywhere: Fresher’s Week, Happy Hours, Club Welcome Drinks. Everyday drinking became the norm. Weekends were the worst, staying up into the early hours of Saturday morning, sleeping all day Saturday and doing it again Saturday night. For the first term, roughly ten weeks, I drank almost every day. I was not alone. Most people did.
University was the time of my life when the habit was etched into my brain. The only day I did not drink was Monday, maybe Tuesday, but by Wednesday it was the start of the weekend. It was usually two or three pints of beer during the week and more at the weekend. It was not as if I had the money to do this either. But, somehow, I found a way to fund the drinking, normally through Happy Hours and cheap supermarket wine. I recall a brand called Thunderbird that was 15% ABV. One bottle of this before going out to the student union became the norm.
PROFESSIONAL LIFE
After university, I initially had several short-term jobs before landing what I would call a ‘career path’ position in one of the top accountancy firms. I stayed for just a year as it was just not the right fit for me. I then went into journalism for around 18 months, finally ending up in one of the world’s biggest marketing, advertising and public relations agencies. I stayed in this sector for the next 35 years.
PR had a huge client entertainment side to it. I was effectively being paid to drink with my clients and members of the media.
We worked hard but we also played hard. Client entertainment always involved booze, at long lunches, dinners, parties and meetings. Staying away in hotels meant ending up in the bar until the early hours, and it was all effectively free, that is, I did not pay for it. I even had beer and spirit clients so access to supplies was the norm.
I used to think that it was just the industry I was in that had alcohol playing a central role, but as I listened to others, it became apparent that this legal, addictive drug is a problem in almost all industries. There are the obvious ones like the City, insurance, accountancy, legal and marketing, where client entertaining is paramount, but it has also weaved its way into many business and trade cultures, including the medical profession, teaching, and the police, to name just a few. I am sure that if you look at the industry you work in, alcohol will play a role.
By the time I hit my mid-30s, I had developed a palate for fine wine and was drinking around a bottle of wine a day, maybe one and a half or two a day on weekends. I did not consider myself to have a problem as my colleagues and friends were doing the same.
THE BAR IN THE CELLAR
By my late 30s, I achieved the dream of building a real bar in my own home – in the cellar. It had its own name, a website and a drinks menu. It was like a church of booze, the bar being the altar. It was a statement that I was successful. I’d made it. It was fully stocked with wine, beer and even spirits hanging on the wall behind the bar so you could pour yourself a large one whenever you liked. It was like being in a movie.
The bar was a novelty, a folly. We celebrated my 40th birthday down there. It could hold, at a squeeze, up to 30 people.
I tended to be the barman, pouring everyone’s drinks. I really enjoyed it. It was hard work. Non-stop for five or six hours.
By this time, I was running my own company based in an annexe of our main house and the bar was somewhere I could take clients after a meeting for a glass of something. This was to me, at the time, a dream come true. Who was I kidding?
To stock the bar, it cost well over £500 and, at Christmas, maybe even £1,000. I had two of every spirit just in case I ran out and I needed to be able to make any cocktail I was asked for by my guests. There was a house white and red, normally a Chablis and a Cabernet Sauvignon plus a selection of other wines. Stock was always around a minimum of 30 bottles. On top of this, there was a wide selection of beers and soft drinks.
Our three children loved it as they had a lot of their birthday parties there. The bar was given a soft drink overhaul for around three hours and then the adults were invited to pop in for a drink when they picked their children up.
The novelty wore off after a year or so and the bar was only used for Easter, Christmas and the occasional birthday.
The village had one pub so my drinking was pretty much wine at home and two pints down at the local. I probably went to the pub two or three times a week by myself but would meet locals there at the bar.
So, all in all, I was not drinking a massive amount but looking back on it now, it was still a lot.
ABSTINENCE
In the 36 years that I drank alcohol, the longest I went without drinking was six days. I think I did five days three times and a handful of three days. On top of this, there were around 10 alcohol-free days a year. This adds up to around 360 days of non-drinking during my drinking years.
So, in 13,000 days, I didn’t drink for 360 days. Of the 360 days I didn’t drink, these were probably because I was hungover from the day before when I had drunk twice as much as I should have. Over the 36 years, I drank about 1,000 litres of neat alcohol. Really, I should be dead. In a way, I was dead.
THE LAST DAYS BEFORE THE LAST DAY ONE
By the age of 54, I knew this really had to stop. I knew that what I was doing was crazy. I wanted to stop. I had wanted to stop for about ten years. But now I really wanted to stop. My body was getting older and it just could not take the side effects of alcohol.
Towards the end of my drinking days, I was drinking roughly a half bottle of spirits, seven bottles of wine and six pints of beer each week. My neat alcohol intake per week was 140ml from spirits, 656ml from wine and 199ml from beer. Total 995ml. That’s 52 litres a year. I had to stop.
This cycle of behaviour was starting to wear me down. I knew I had to do something but I really did not know how to break free. Something had to change and it did.
WHAT I LEARNT
Putting pen to paper and writing my alcohol life story was an enlightening experience. This story of my relationship with alcohol revealed three main things:
The difficulty of getting hooked. You really have to work hard at it. I remember others saying to me at the start of my drinking career, ‘You should try Guinness, it’s an acquired taste. You won’t like it initially but it will grow on you.’ What a load of codswallop.
Are there any other things in my life that I have taken up for over 35 years that initially tasted disgusting and made me sick? The only one I can think of is alcohol.
What seems to be going on here is some form of gigantic conspiracy. Alcohol has weaved its way into almost every aspect of our lives, from celebrating births and marriages, to raising a glass to the lives of those we have lost. If we’re happy, we’ll drink to celebrate. If we’re sad, we’ll drink to commiserate. If we’re angry, we’ll drink to calm down. If we’re calm, we’ll drink to get calmer. If we’re depressed, we’ll drink to anaesthetise.
I am lucky. I also discovered that I am one of the lucky ones. I am still breathing. I am here now. I have one life and I am going to make the most of what is left of it, whether it’s one day or 40 years. I’m going to do it right now.
I can change my beliefs. One of the most important, if not THE most important thing anyone who drinks could learn is this: believing you can never stop drinking is just a belief. That’s all it is. A false and limiting belief. And like all beliefs, they can be learned and unlearned. That’s what I did. I changed my belief about alcohol. This book will show you how I did it.
MY STRUGGLE… I was a 50-something-year-old, who had been locked into the habit of drinking for over 35 years. Every day, I was putting this poison inside myself, thinking it was some form of relaxant, stress reliever, anxiety killer. I was overweight (well over 17 stone), short of breath, anxious, short-tempered and doing very little exercise, all symptoms of too much alcohol consumption and an unhealthy lifestyle. Most nights I would lay awake at night believing I am an addict and could never stop. But I did and that person has gone forever. In the 36 years that I drank alcohol I had 1,000s of day ones – days in which I planned to stop drinking but never did. At the end I was drinking around a bottle of wine a night and more on the weekends.
MY SOLUTION… I finally woke up and said, “I want a different life”. I spent the first year finding my purpose and in doing so I started to transform my mind and my body. I discovered the secret to alcohol-free living through looking at my values and beliefs and many limiting beliefs. I calmed my mind through meditation and mindfulness practice. I changed my story and that changed my life.
MY SUCCESS… There are so many changes for the good that stand out, but a few of them are: being anxiety free; sleeping 7 hours every night; losing over 4 stone in weight; better relationships; and being much much more present. Mark Twain said, the two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you found out why. I found out why when i stopped drinking. The central part of my purpose is now to give back. At my core, I believe I have a duty to pass on the secret to alcohol-free living information as I have tried my best to do in the pages of this book.
