11 Oct 2024
Non-drinker Laura Bill asks whether the right messages are behind the Sober October initiative…
This will be my ninth sober October and my 104th month of living alcohol-free and I have to be honest, I find Sober October an odd phenomenon.
In one way, I guess it’s a good thing because it gives people the idea to cut back or give up booze but what I always hear from folk doing it is the white-knuckle ride up to the Big Drink and that’s the bit that worries me slightly.
I went veggie in January. Because being nicotine-free and drink-free wasn’t boring enough and I can’t imagine looking at photos of dead pigs and cows all month only to slaughter one at the end and tell everybody about it, maybe even posting a picture on my social media.
You see, I could have chosen to use the analogy of a crispy BLT at the end of Veganuary but I didn’t. Because the juxtaposition doesn’t feel like that. It feels more brutal.
Sober October seems like it might be a week or so of okay, a week or so of distraction and two weeks of counting down to the end or wondering if you can cheat a little on the weekend nights. I’m not really bothered about the ‘what’ it looks like, more about the ‘why’.
I am willing to bet that if you are giving up alcohol for a month there is a reason; you might have been feeling like you have been drinking too much for a while, you might be trying to prove something to somebody or yourself or you might be thinking it will be great for your health.
When I stopped drinking it was because wine had become my best friend – or I thought it was. During my teacher training in my thirties it was extremely full-on. Writing long academic Masters-level essays alongside trying to learn how to teach teenagers where ten years prior I couldn’t have even stood up in a room to introduce myself.
Being at the bottom of the school hierarchy yet desperately having to find inner authority was challenging in itself. That was when I wasn’t writing full-blown lesson plans, wrapping up Coca-Cola smelling pens for my whizzbang pass-the-parcel plenaries or driving from Lincoln to Essex after a day at school for an interview the following morning.
And there was no shaking in the morning. I was never ever drunk or even hungover at school and never have been since.
I have never driven drunk. I haven’t been arrested. I have never hit anyone on a night out, drunk vodka from a paper bag or wet myself. I have never stolen alcohol. I have never raided a friend or family member’s drinks cabinet and then filled the bottles back up with water so they wouldn’t notice.
It was just the feeling of “aaaaaaah” as I rushed back to my fridge earlier and earlier after the school day. The relief of opening the fridge one day and realising it was only half four.
If you have crips and hummous with it, it makes it instantly middle-class acceptable, I remember thinking.
But I’d gone from being thrown out of my school by the caretaker locking up, to trying not to run the kids over on the way out, needing that “aaaaaah” earlier and earlier.
I’d been qualified a few years by this point and was easily having a bottle an evening. Everywhere we look, it’s encouraged. Everytime I ever spoke to anybody from the receptionist at the hairdresser to the deputy head or a person at the end of a call centre they’d finish the call with something like: “Have a nice evening. Go and pour yourself a big glass of wine.” And they still do say that, almost nine years into my sobriety.
It’s a funny thing being sober. Sometimes I love it. I love the freedom it brings. God forbid, something awful happens and I need to get in the car and drive somewhere in the middle of the night, I can totally do that. I can be present all the time, if need be. I can remember stuff that happened the night before very clearly and if I send a text or an email, it’s because I mean what I say not because I got in the ring with somebody when I was drunk.
Sometimes I don’t love it so much. I’m not really a massive believer of extremism in any form so complete abstinence kind of goes against my personality. I’m much more open-minded about most things and quite a free-thinker and I haven’t necessarily got the perfect answer to “Why can’t you just have one?” but I think it’s this…
Maybe I could. But some folk can’t. Lots of people very close to me have died of addiction or almost have done.
I think I sit in the camp of abstinence because what’s the point of just having one? And if there is no point in having one then why do I have it? Where does it stop? And when the “aaaaaah” doesn’t come any more after a sip, a glass, a bottle…what do I do then? Do I go and buy another bottle? Do I move onto spirits? Or do I just have a look at myself and think what am I trying to get “aaaaaah” from? How can I get the “aaaaaaah” without a substance?
And I know it sounds a bit nun-like and super boring. And don’t get me wrong, the twinkly Champagne glasses on the Iceland advert at Christmas get me every time I see those lust-worthy frozen prawn pastry vol-au-vents and the smiles around the tree. A social media post showing somebody’s tipple of the evening by the fire or something that signifies their “aaaaaah” and I might feel resentful or envious.
Britain has a weird attitude towards drink. I noticed this when I gave it up. Festivals, weddings, funerals, book clubs, shopping events, popping round to the neighbours at Christmas, anything fun at work – I went from teaching to journalism and that is one of the biggest drinking professions – all involve alcohol as the main event.
Remove the alcohol from those things and now imagine them. Do you still want to go? Is a festival just an excuse to get really drunk? I see whole cohorts of kids now getting into £9,000-worth of debt each year so they can have a social life. I wish somebody would tell them that they can get drunk for a tenner in their bedroom and save themselves about £30K.
See why I left teaching? No academic advocate here.
What am I trying to say? If alcohol is such a thing that you can’t imagine life without it, what is it really that you need to have a look at? I think that is a really fascinating question for us to ask ourselves. How else can I get my “aaaaaah”?
Am I still fun at parties? I’ll find out next month at my friend Jo’s 50th…
Find out more about Sober October at https://www.gosober.org.uk/
