I am in an ‘exceptionally’ high risk category, apparently.
Having spent much of my life trying to be exceptional, this pleases me. It probably shouldn’t, but it does.
Middle class men like me, in their sixties (just), with flexible working hours, a creative job, and with children who have left home, are in the high-risk category for becoming alcoholics. You can read all about this in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (2015), if you really want to. Like all scientific surveys, it proves whatever you want it to prove on all sides of the argument, until the summary when it gently points the finger, in my imagination, towards a single cottage in the GU29 postcode area.
Simultaneously, another 2015 study from the Department of Epidemiology at UCL makes the irritating point that young people are drinking less and less these days, with as many as 29% not drinking alcohol at all, and 17% having never touched a drop. This is grim news.
Now I know what you’re thinking, which is precisely what I am thinking. You are a highly intelligent and discriminating person, and you are quite able to make your own mind up on a raft of ‘lifestyle choices’, thank you, of which alcohol consumption is just the one. I, for example, have chosen to be in the category of people who have never indulged in ethnic cleansing, martial arts or Class A narcotics, so I am not looking for any lectures in citizenship.
However, I am also reaching the end of a dry month. (For complicated reasons, it is from Jan 6thto Feb 6th). I do this each year, and occasionally twice a year, by way of an apology to my vital organs, two fingers to the Chief Medical Officer and a down-payment for the privilege of drinking when I like in the other 11 months. Very privately, though, what it is also about is to make sure that I still can give it up at will, you know, to say farewell to those cold lagers of a summers’ evening and that exquisite malt during an evening with friends. It took me 19 years to give up smoking from the day I first wanted to, which makes me instinctively suspicious of my dopamine neurotransmitters. I can’t say that I feel better or worse at the end of it, but I do enjoy the smug feeling of listening to the features about problem middle aged drinkers on Radio 4’s You and Yours much more than I do for the rest of the year.
This year is different, for some reason, in that I have realised that I could, for the first time in my adult life, stop for ever, and that I just might. Possibly not right now, but during 2020. The benefits, which I always used to view through the prism of ‘nanny state gone mad’, I now see as being ones that I voluntarily aspire to- sleeping better, weighing less, living longer and even driving a car at any point of any evening I would like to. I have just developed a subliminal feeling that alcohol diminishes me, potentially at least, more than it enhances me, and that’s quite a big change.
It is not so much I need less and less alcohol, as it seems to need less and less of me.
The sacrifices are considerable, especially with the taste of that 1948 Taylor’s port still washing deliciously around my memory but the wheels are clicking away in my brain, and I find myself interested in whether anyone else out there has experienced this diminution of appetite?
With a wife who drinks vanishingly little, anyway, the only people round here who object to this idea are the dogs. When they hear the pleasing pop of the little cork on the bottle of Lagavullin, they know that bed time in the tiny dog-room by the washing machine will be delayed for at least an hour, and they can drowse at their leisure on the warm tiles of the kitchen floor.
Maintaining that tiny kindness may still stop me.
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