Morning team! Today - to give you fair warning, in case you’re nursing a Saturday night hangover, I’m talking about booze. Alcohol. Grog. Mother’s ruin (although I think that’s specific to gin?). But I promise to do so kindly, and quietly, with no sudden bright lights, smugness or virtue-signalling. So fret not if you’re reading this over a bacon sandwich - or, indeed, a Bloody Mary.
A few weeks ago I started a new job. Before joining, I’d had coffees and lunches with a number of people I’d be working with - I think to ensure we could work together without killing one another. After one meeting I received a follow-up text from a new workmate. “Important question!” it read “red or white wine?”.
“Haha” I replied “I’m more of a gin girl!”. I said this sound cool and winning - but in reality I was faking it.
Since starting the new role in earnest, the wine chat has only increased. After stressful days, people will appear looking harassed, sighing “I’m definitely having a glass of wine tonight”. When confessing moment of frustration to new colleagues “have you tried wine?” is a standard response, with a knowing wink. I’m able to gauge when a new work friendship might be emerging by the suggestion that “we drink wine together soon” - a much bigger deal than “let’s have a coffee”. It’s not about alcohol - it’s a promise of shared confidences, tips and work gossip that you simply won’t get over a flat white from Pret.
None of this is because I have joined a peculiar company staffed entirely by alcoholics - for I have not. In fact, I’ve joined a company that goes out of its way to create sober-friendly social events. Rather this is evidence of the deep rooted wiring of our pro-booze culture.
While the job is new, the wine language is not. It’s a form of communication and connection that’s existed for my whole career. It’s not remarkable - it’s normal. But, having stepped away from this world for a while, I’m struck by how firmly entrenched it still is. Despite the sober-curious movement, nothing has infiltrated my generation of hardened drinkers. “There’s always wine” slips out without even thinking - it’s as mindlessly normal as asking someone about their weekend on a Monday morning.
Much has been made in recent years of “mummy wine” culture - the cutsey normalisation of alcohol as an essential crutch for motherhood. But it doesn’t stop there. In the corporate world the standard stress response has long been - and continues to be - the “wine whine”, a hasty retreat to the local wine bar post work to decompress and discuss the day’s ridiculousness. It’s a bonding ritual - an “us against them” eye-rolling moment of rebellion. A communal swig in the trenches from a hip flask.
But what’s really made me notice this culture is my dark and dirty secret; I’m not very good at drinking. And I find it complicated to explain this against the backdrop of the mutual wine appreciation. So instead I fake it. I strap on a smile and regularly deliver a faux enthusiasm for booze - an absurd thing for a grown woman to admit.
When I say I’m not good at drinking - I mean that literally. I don’t have addiction issues - it just often (but not always) makes me ill. I’m not fully sure why - I strongly suspect I’m one of the people who doesn’t have the enzymes to break it down properly. But oh boy that has not stopped me trying! At university I would routinely spend the day following a night out lying on the bathroom floor, vomiting every 15 minutes for about 12 hours from 5am. This I now recognise was likely alcohol poisoning. At the time I thought it was my body’s weakness - and punished it by… continuing to drink.
By my mid-20s my sensitivity became so severe that I would be sick after just one drink… unless I had a lot of food with it. Colleagues would often mock me as I sat in the office with my ‘pre-drinking sandwich’ preparing to meet friends for drinks after work. What they saw as a needless affectation was simply my desire to join in, no matter what the cost. Sometimes it worked - sometimes it didn’t.
Yet still I persevered. Friends would look concerned - not because my body was very clearly not great with booze - but because they were so horrified by the prospect that I was not able to drink heavily. Which - in the UK - is considered a basic human right. I should get an allergy test. I should work out exactly what elements of booze I’m allergic to so I can drink other things. Had I tried charcoal tablets? (I had - they made me throw up charcoal) Buoyed with their concern I consulted by GP - who gently suggested I should not drink. I rolled my eyes. This was not the solution.
As the years have gone on, booze and I have had a toxic off-again, on-again relationship. If we were people, my friends would tell me to block booze immediately from my phone and write her off as a narcissist.
I’ve had periods where I’ve given up drinking completely - and periods when I’ve drunk regularly and generated more of a tolerance. But this tolerance is not reliable. And this is the real kicker - I just never know how alcohol is going to kick my ass. By the time I know, it’s too late. It’s an unappealing game of vomit Russian roulette that no sane person would want to partake of. Sometimes I’ll be fine for a while - but booze is always ready to smack me down when I least expect it; leaving me caressing the lavatory at 4am after 2 glasses at someone’s leaving party. Drinking is always stressful - because I never quite know what the fallout will be.
If I was an alcoholic everyone would suggest I gave up booze. Because I’m not, I’m encouraged to find ways of drinking. If you can drink - the logic goes - then you should. In a way that nobody would suggest if I discovered I was intolerant to, say, dairy or gluten.
Starting a new job and wanting to fit in I find myself in a situation desperately trying to navigate how to booze effectively, rather than just saying no. I appreciate this makes me sound insane. I am a grown woman and can make my own choices - I quite clearly have some kind of personal medical issue and I should just step away. But my point is there is something so deeply entrenched in the world of work drinking (whine wine) that I still don’t want to miss out on it.
Like Rachel Green in Friends desperately learning to smoke so as not to miss gossip sessions with her boss, there is something alluring about being in the “fuck it, let’s go to the pub” crowd that loses its edge immediately if you order a sparkling water.
But - let’s be honest - this is all totally and utterly fucked up. We wilfully gloss over the fact we are talking about a drug. A poisonous drug that does nothing but harm to our bodies. And my body chooses to make this clear to me every time I suckle the nectar.
If we replaced drinking with - let’s say - free-diving the conversation would look very different.
“Fucking hell, this place is chaos - my to-do list is officially impossible”
“Yeah I know that feeling. Fuck it - shall get out now and do a spot of free-diving?”
“Ahh, I’d love to - but I’m actually asthmatic and have a fear of deep water”
“Fair enough, I guess free-diving isn’t for everyone. Cup of tea?”
Then everyone would move on with their lives. It’s unlikely your colleague would encourage you to seek a cure for your asthma purely so you could enjoy the thrill of free-diving. But not with booze. We idolise her. We want a relationship with her. Alcohol sensitivity is not a phrase one hears in a world where one can’t eat out without being grilled about allergies.
Yet - deeply embarrassing as it is to admit - I still want in on the action. Like a spurned lover I just so desperately want it to work between us. And if it doesn’t, I want there to be really good reason. A dramatic reason. A checking into AA reason - something that nobody can quibble with. Something that gives me a stance. A sense of drinking identity. A label. Something to work with. Something more definitive than “sometimes I don’t drink much as it can make me feel ill but sometimes it’s ok and sometimes it’s worth it”.
And that’s fucked up too. I worry I must be weird, strange and deluded - I have never heard anyone else ever admit to this. I’ve never met anyone that doesn’t love drinking - even if they chose not to.
It all comes back to what the brilliant writer
refers to much more succinctly as our “alcophiliac society”. This week her very important piece that originated right here on the mighty ‘stack appeared in The Times - and reduced me to tears. In it she explains a point that’s long bothered me - that booze is marketed as the ultimate solution for everything.“We celebrate with a drink and we commiserate with a drink. We drink because we’re excited, we drink because we’re bored, we drink to buoy ourselves up and we drink to uncoil. We drink to sleep and to shag, to feel and not to feel. We drink because it’s been a long day, a long week, a tough year, and we drink, in the end, because drinking is what we do.”
I call the piece important because it’s the first time I’ve read something non-judgemental that genuinely explores the complexity of why we want to drink (because it can be really really fun) with the reality of what it does to us. The searing description of her father’s death from alcohol abuse is not an image that will leave me anytime soon - and she uses it to decisively lance the flippant notion of a “short life and a merry one”.
Betts speak of missing her former self - and maybe that’s why I can’t fully let go. Maybe despite the crippling hangovers, mountains of vomit and wasted days, I miss the version of myself that was willing to put up with that. The me that danced on tables with strangers, seduced anyone I fancied and ended up on wild drunken adventures across London and Ibiza.
Sober Annie doesn’t do that. While life is much better without the vomiting and anxiety, adventures are not the same when you remove a mind-altering poison from the equation. And maybe it’s that - not peer pressure - that stops me fully letting go.
As regular readers will know, I’m a big advocate of figuring out what works for you in life and doing it as much as you possibly can - while always heeding the mantra of Don’t Be A Dick.
But somehow booze is the ultimate frontier I find it hard to rebel against. Of course, there will be people reading this who have quietly decided to not drink and are quite happy with that - I salute you and ask you not to judge me. At the end of the day I’m just a 43 year old go, standing in front of a massive societal norm, asking it to love her.
Ahhh so this was a tough one to write - purely because I’m so embarrassed. Why can’t one be content not being part of the booze crowd? Keen to hear anyone’s view and experiences… or just thoughts. Kudos to anyone who has managed this one without giving a toss. But please be gentle with me - I’m going through a booze break-up you know….
At first I thought, oh no another “sober October” finger wagging. This was so far from that. Feel and appreciate it deeply. Winery visits, wine tastings, wine with friends, etc. is a big and enjoyable part of retirement for my wife and me. But, whenever I encounter someone who doesn’t drink I tell them that’s probably a good choice. Most of the time I have to add the old Monte Python, “More for me then!”
I sometimes fantasize about alcohol becoming magically unavailable so no one can drink it and we all just get on with life without it!