Just have one drink

Like many working-class children born in the 80s, I grew up attending the social club at weekends, dragged along by my parents.

Inside the blanket of smoke was suffocating, and your best Adidas jumper would stink of B & H gold for days after spending just an hour or two inside the lacquered wooden confines of the club.

It was here that the sport of drinking was properly observed. Men and women would often recount how many drinks they'd consumed in the previous session.

"Dave had 14 pints last week!"

"I had 6 pints and 5 double vodkas"

Spirits seemed to carry more weight in the alcohol point scoring system.

I took note of all of this as a kid, and at no point did anyone ever say:

"I enjoyed 1 drink last week".

Numbers Game

Drinking alcohol was a numbers game. It seemed like an easy way to gain acknowledgement from family and friends alike.

Sure, some would recoil at the notion of (me) drinking so much, but even that was a reaction which was perhaps better than not getting noticed in my mind at that time of life (teens and twenties).

Of course this behaviour became a habit, and the competitive drinking mainained strongly through my twenties.

Why I Can't Have One Drink

I firmly believe this learned competitive behaviour just formed a habit and idea in me that I couldn't shake as I got older.

Drinking to me was about getting drunk.

If I had a quick one after work, I'd have to continue when I got home. So a visit to the off-license would happen and I'd come back with a case of 12 beers and finish them off.

I do envy those who can have one and call it quits, I'm just not one of those people.

My Realisation

When I realised I wanted to cut back on my alcohol consumption, it became apparent quite quickly that it had to be all or nothing.

Just because of that binging compulsion I would have when I had one drink, it wasn't going to work any other way. Elimination rather than reducton has worked well for me, I have not for one moment missed the feeling of drinking alcohol, I think they call it being drunk from memory.