“The Best Thing I Ever Did.”

In the annals of my life, it was one of the best things I ever did. And, as time goes by, I am ever more grateful for having achieved it.

The best thing I ever did was to quit drinking alcohol. Maybe the worst thing I ever did – and there would be some competition for that particular award – was to start in the first place but when you are seventeen and you are offered a glass of champagne, why wouldn’t you accept it?

Anyway, I am not a puritan about drink. Alcohol, taken in a normal manner, can add pleasure, conviviality, merriment and joie-de-vivre to life, and I am all in favour of these things.

Nor am I in sympathy with those lists of regret categorised as “things I wish I had known at 20”. The truth about life is that it is an experiment in trial and error. And you only find out your errors by committing them.

With liquor, though, the pity is that in carrying out this experiment you can inflict so much damage on other people. And give such bad example to the young and impressionable. That is the pain of regret that haunts old boozers.

Because, for those with addiction problems, alcohol is lethal. For the alcohol addict, he – or she – might as well be drinking arsenic. Slowly but ineluctably, an alcoholic is destroyed by alcohol: just as the alcoholic slowly but ineluctably destroys all around him.

Many of the campaigns against alcohol focus on the damage that liquor can do – and truthfully so. But seldom is the pleasure of sobriety underlined: the appreciation of life in all its clarity, the delights of memory undisturbed by a haze of drunken forgetfulness, the way in which the whole narrative of existence is infused with enhanced animation. And less clouded by shame: not to speak of throbbing headaches and suicidally-depressing hangovers.

Sobriety is the radiance of life, I would even say. Drunkenness is the avoidance of full experience.

I now see that I drank excessively and problematically for a number of reasons, including fear: underneath a surface of boldness, there was a great deal that I feared, and couldn’t face. As a young reporter, I was terrified half the time, and could only still those fears with large helpings of gin-and-tonic (and easy on the tonic).

“I drank to drown my sorrows, but my sorrows learned to swim.” Corny, but true.

Then, when faced with the suggestion that I should stop drinking I was catatonic with melancholy at the thought of quitting. Without a drink, I’d be so lonely! I’d have no friends! Nothing to comfort me! Nothing to help celebrate! Never again a jolly lunch with those reckless words, which Kingsley Amis once said were the most cheering in the English language – “Shall we have the third bottle?”

And I think that is the hardest thing for the drinker to contemplate: renouncing the comfort and conviviality of booze. Not to mention the taste of fine wines and fizzing champagne.

I’d never have been able to get sober without  support, and above all, without this philosophy: a day at a time. You don’t quit drinking forever. You just don’t drink today.

And thus does one today lead to another, and gradually, a new world of savouring life – rather than seeking oblivion from it – reveals itself in all its glorious technicolour. 

It’s difficult to express the raptures of sobriety without sounding like a Salvation Army preacher: yet sobriety’s pleasures aren’t advertised half enough.
   
Quitting alcohol is not a gloomy or a killjoy decision. It is about embracing life to the full and feeling at top pitch the intoxication of heighted awareness. It is the ultimate act of freedom from a chemical which, for perhaps fifteen per cent of the population, is simply lethal.