Don't let alcohol become your crutch

Another landmark approaches on Thursday 19th December 2019 - it will be three years since I had a drink.

Alcohol that is, not 3 years since liquid.

It's been a very good period in my personal and professional life too these 1095 days, if we're counting, and I'm 99.9% certain I won't drink again.

I'd been a regular consumer of booze since 1979 - when I was 14 - the year Thatcher got in and I was so politically traumatised that I started drinking and, to be honest, didn't stop til I was 51. That's 37 years of alcohol coursing through my veins, weekly, if not daily.

In 2012, though, I took drinking to Olympic levels, when suffering from anxiety, stress, depression and trauma, I drank heavily, without any breaks from 5pm daily til I staggered into bed, pissed up.

I had counselling and medical help to get me through these long dark months but the medication I was taking was totally negated by cider, sherry, rum, gin and wine that I used to wash down sleeping tablets, betablockers and Prozac daily.

Idiotic I know now, but I was reacting to a set of circumstances in a tragically toxic workplace that nearly killed me.

The key for me though was that my wife, who I've known for 31 years, drove me to the doctors where she cried and I looked on gormlessly whilst the female doctor listened to the effects on her and then told me I was a disgrace.

Cruel love indeed.

I didn't drink that night, went to a support group for alcoholics the next day and on the day after with complete withdrawal from it via cold turkey, a letter arrived through the door vindicating me and saying that the accusations brought against me were, in Paul Calf lingo, a "bag of shite." It had only taken three years of me getting pissed daily and raging against the system that had made me ill and barred me from teaching, to provide salvation.

I've not touched a drop since.

Looking back, I think that you are one of two people with alcohol: the ones like my wife and many friends who can have a bottle of lager, a glass of wine, a gin and tonic and stop.

Or the second type like me who once the taste of alcohol is met, goes on and on for more and more.

Now, I didn't get up and pour Pernod on my muesli; I didn't piss and shit the bed; I didn't steal to feed the addiction but my drinking was out of control. It was controlling me daily and I seemed too weak to stop it.

The story after sobriety is well-documented.

I gave up teaching, retiring effectively at 49 as I was blacklisted for boat-rocking, realised the classroom door was barred forever - even after written exoneration - and opened another door: freelance.

What an opening it's been too: vast satisfaction, no bellend bosses, no politics, no bullying - just the satisfaction of working hard at making my one man band company Get Pro Copy Ltd grow.

I read the other day an article about Frank Skinner, the comedian. He got in a mess with alcohol and packed in drinking at 29 years of age, I think. Now 62, he has not drunk since, yet misses the effects of alcohol daily.

I feel like that too.

What I would say though is just as those cumulative pernicious workplace factors led to heavy drinking (alcoholism if being honest), the cumulative positive factors of being self employed as a writer, web designer, social media person have made alcohol unnecessary. It's a massive footnote in my history - but I now look forward to 2020 and this business growing further, and try not to look back through beer goggles at events from 2013 to 2016.

Those three years were painful, but the other 51 years of my life have been pretty good, especially the last three years, and that's worth staying permanently teetotal for.

With a Brigette or Oleg flourish at the end: agree?