Alcohol and Driving

So, the mayor of London has put Uber on the naughty step. 

I imagine that they will stay there for a couple of months, thinking about what they've done, then they'll proffer an apology and promise to start treating their drivers properly, report serious incidents in their cabs to the police and, you never know, maybe even pay some tax.

Then they'll be given their license back (thereby saving the jobs of 40,000 drivers - hurrah!) and told that they'd better keep getting smiley faces on the reward chart, or else.

A while back, the thought of living in the capital with no Uber would have been rather terrifying, but not now, because I am my own mini-cab!

One of the very best things about giving up booze, (along with the fact that, having lost the muffin top, I can now see my feet! And I can afford to buy great shoes to put on them!) is being able to drive ALL THE TIME.

If Mr SM and I have a 'date night' in a fancy West End restaurant, I don't need to book an expensive taxi to get us there and back. Oh no. I just drive and park right outside. Because nobody drives into central London at night time, so you can park anywhere. For free.

If I go to a party, when I decide it's time to go (usually in the middle of someone telling me a 'hilarious' story for the third time), I don't have to find the host to ask for the number for a cab firm, then try to sound sober while I book the cab, then try to look sober when I climb into it.

Oh no, I just leave surreptitiously, find my car (which is usually right outside) and drive home.

I even offer lifts around to all my drunk friends. It's a great way to stock up some brownie points, (or maybe make up for past misdemeanours). It's amazing how popular being a 'designated driver' can make you.

And one of the real joys is being able to sail past police cars confidently, knowing that there is absolutely no way that you are over the limit. 

In fact, I have been known to deliberately drive 'erratically' around police cars in the hope that they will breathalyse me, so I can watch with huge smugness while the light remains stubbornly on GREEN.

Even if you are incredibly responsible about drinking and driving, and always take a taxi or public transport home, there's always the niggling fear that you might just still be over the limit in the morning. On the school run. Or driving into work. 

Give up drinking, and that's totally impossible.

So, yet another fine reason to quit the booze.

In other news this week, the makers of Jaffa Cakes, in their wisdom, have decided to cut the number of biscuits (cakes?) in a pack from twelve to ten. It's a disaster.

During my early days of not drinking I mainlined Jaffa Cakes. Ten would not have been enough, would barely have touched the sides.

New this week on the SoberMummy Facebook page: some fabulous women talking to the BBC about giving up booze, the stories (and before and after pictures!) of fifteen celebs who have gone sober, including Angelina, Adele, Samuel L. Jackson and Drew Barrymore, and the funniest video I've seen in ages.

For inspiration, information and a few good laughs every weekday at wine o'clock, join the SoberMummy Facebook page. CLICK HERE, and 'like' to stay updated.

Love to you all, 

SM x

Getting Through Wine O'Clock

The most difficult thing about giving up the drink is getting through the witching hour.

For me, it was longer than an hour - it stretched from around 5pm until about 8pm.

The clock seemed to move agonisingly slowly, and the wine witch would be jumping up and down inside my head yelling at me to stop being such a kill joy and just open a bottle of wine! (You don't need to drink the whole thing...)

I found that distraction really helped. Finding something interesting to read, or something funny to watch, or connecting with other people in the same boat.

Which is why I've created the SOBERMUMMY FACEBOOK PAGE! It's aimed at anyone who wants to quit or cut down on booze, or just drink more 'mindfully'.

I'm going to post something every weekday at wine o'clock UK time (I'm afraid that'll make it lunch time, or thereabouts in the USA) to inspire, inform or just entertain you.

There'll be newspaper articles, book reviews, mocktail recipes, TED talks, celebrity drinking stories (I know it's puerile, but I do love them. It makes me feel a little more glamorous) and much more. All upbeat and light-hearted - things you'll, hopefully, be happy to share.

If you check out my page now you'll find a the most widely shared TED talk on addiction, a newspaper article about Carol McGiffin drinking two bottles of wine a day, a wonderful video about parenting which I swear will make you cry (in a good way) as well as my favourite Absolutely Fabulous clip (because I blame Patsy and Edina for the pickle I found myself in!).

I'm on a mission to provide an antidote to all those drinking memes that crop up on your Facebook timeline!

All you need to do is to click the link here, or type SoberMummy into your Facebook search bar. Once you find my page, if you 'like' it Facebook will keep you updated with new stuff as I post it.

I'd love to make it all a proper community, so please do share, comment and message me via the page with any suggestions of content you'd like to see up there. You can also e-mail me on sobermummy@gmail.com.

Once we've got enough people on board I can set up some community areas like a 'Dry January' group or a '100 day challenge' group, so you can chat privately to people with the same goals as you and egg each other along.

So please, please drop in and 'like' my page (I'm aware I'm sounding needy!) I'd LOVE to see you there. And please leave any ideas, suggestions, issues in the comments below.

Love SM x

CLICK HERE TO GO TO SOBERMUMMY'S FACEBOOK PAGE

P.S. After two and a half years of blogging, I have finally managed to work out how to post images as well as words! That's my kitchen clock at the top of this post.

Pills

A few days ago I was having tea with a girlfriend who has just returned to London after 3 years of working in Manhattan and living in New Jersey.

I told her that, since she'd been out of town, I'd quit drinking, started a blog and was now in the process of (hopefully) selling a book.

"Do the New Jersey housewives drink the same way the London ones do?" I asked.

"Oh no," she replied, "they're generally far too worried about smelling of booze. They take pills."

"What pills?"

"Usually a whole cocktail of prescription meds. The doctors dole them out like Smarties. Prescription painkillers, sleeping pills, anti-anxiety meds, anti-depression meds. They're obsessed with perfection - always at the gym, dressed in Lululemon, driving the latest Range Rover, but I swear, they're like zombies."

I confess, I was a little sceptical. I thought she was maybe exaggerating to make me feel better about my own little addiction issue. But then she told me this story:

"When we were selling our house the real estate agents said 'remember to empty your bathroom cabinet.' I asked why, and they were amazed that I wasn't already aware that if you leave your medications in the bathroom people steal them during viewings!"

So, different continent, same problems, same 'solutions'.

We are all so stressed out by trying to keep up with the faked perfection of other people's lives, of Facebook and Instagram, that we look for something to blur the edges, and pills do the job as effectively as booze.

I have to confess, just a tiny bit of me was desperate at this point to make an appointment with the GP. But then I remembered reading about a sign that David Hockney has hanging in his studio in Los Angeles. It reads:

All visitors, please please.
No photography and video.
Look with both eyes.

We spend too much time looking at life through a lens of one sort or another - blurring the focus and changing the reality.

It's time to look with both eyes.

Love SM x

There is a Crack in Everything

What a week. America elects Trump and Leonard Cohen dies.

Do you think those two events are related? Did Cohen see the news and lose all desire to ever sing again?

Cohen was, first and foremost, a poet. He said that he only took to song writing because he couldn't make enough money from poetry.

The lines of poetry, from his song 'Anthem', that have been haunting me this week are these:

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in.

We are obsessed with papering over our cracks.

We are constantly bombarded with Facebook and Instagram posts of people's perfect offerings. Perfect faces, bodies, children, houses. We never get to see the hidden wrinkles, cellulite, behavioural issues and damp.

It's so easy to believe in all of it, particularly if you're an adolescent, programmed to hate your own flaws and disregard anyone else's.

One thing the last year and half has taught me is that there really is a crack in everything. Everyone has their hidden struggles - their addictions, their fears, their challenges, because that's how life is.

I've also learned that, once you find out how to deal with those cracks, how to fill them up properly, rather than just pour booze into them, you'll be stronger and more fearless than ever before.

Now, when I meet someone new, I look past the perfect face they show the world and try to see the cracks. Because it's the cracks that make us unique, that make us interesting. Without them it's all a bit bland, a bit meh.

It's the cracks that let the light in.

Thank you, Leonard Cohen, for leaving us your words, and happy Sunday to you all,

SM x

P.S. Please check out lovely reader Neinwine's new blog at www.anintoxicatingaffair.blogspot.co.uk

Kristi Coulter

We're used to all those funny memes about drinking going viral on Facebook - little jokes about wine o'clock and MummyJuice.

Lord, give me coffee to change the things I can....and wine to accept the things I cannot.

Etcetera, ad infinitum.

But this summer an article went viral about not drinking. Halleluiah! Perhaps the tide is turning.

You may have seen it. It cropped up on my Facebook newsfeed and was sent to me by a couple of lovely readers who'd also spotted it. It's by Kristi Coulter and has the (not so pithy) title: Giving up alcohol opened my eyes to the infuriating truth about why women drink.

Click here to read it. It's very funny and very true.

Kristi's article also reminded me of a truth about quitting booze: like bereavement you go through several stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance. When Kristi wrote her piece she was definitely at the angry stage.

She's angry about being surrounded by booze, and mentions of booze, all the time. She's angry with all the demands we women place on ourselves, the compromises we're forced to accept and the fact that - as a result - we end up self medicating with alcohol.

Kristi asks:

Is it really that hard, being a First World woman? Is it really so tough to have the career and the spouse and the pets and the herb garden and the core strengthening and the oh-I-just-woke-up-like-this makeup and the face injections and the Uber driver who might possibly be a rapist?

Is it so hard to work ten hours for your rightful 77% of a salary, walk home past a drunk who invites you to suck his cock, and turn on the TV to hear the men who run this country talk about protecting you from abortion regret by forcing you to grow children inside your body?

I mean, what’s the big deal? Why would anyone want to soften the edges of this glorious reality?...

.....Is there nothing so inherently absorbing or high-stakes or pleasurable that we won’t try to alter our natural response to it?

Maybe women are so busy faking it — to be more like a man at work, more like a porn star in bed, more like 30 at 50 — that we don’t trust our natural responses anymore.

Maybe all that wine is an Instagram filter for our own lives, so we don’t see how sallow and cracked they’ve become.

She has a point. Several points, actually. All a bit shouty, but very pertinent.

Kristi's theory - that we drink to take the edges off the lives we have made far too hard for ourselves - has implications for when we quit.

Firstly, at least in the early days, you have to give yourself a break. The definition of madness is trying to do everything the same and expecting a different result.

Take all those chores, tasks, situations and people that make you want to reach for the bottle and just....cross them off the list for a while. No-one's going to die (unless you're an ambulance driver).

Have early nights or, if you can, afternoon naps. Let the diet and the gym go to hell (unless you find them helpful). Buy yourself presents.

And, secondly, if you no longer have booze as the quick, easy, catch-all relaxant, you need to find something to replace it.

We all find our thing. It might be mindfulness, meditation, yoga, running, colouring, knitting, gardening or writing. Or something else. Anything else.

Gradually, you'll find ways of adding that Instagram filter to your life which are life enhancing, not soul destroying.

And then, like Kristi, you'll find that you've made it to the other side. Here's how she describes a recent outing with her friend Mindy, also in recovery:

On Sunday morning we’re reading by the deep end of the hotel pool when the shallow end starts to fill with women, a bridal party to judge by what we overhear.

And we overhear a lot, because they arrive already tipsy and the pomegranate mimosas — pomegranate is a superfood! one woman keeps telling the others — just keep coming until that side of the pool seems like a Greek chorus of women who have major grievances with their bodies, faces, children, homes, jobs, and husbands but aren’t going to do anything about any of it but get loaded and sunburned in the desert heat.

I give Mindy the look that women use to say do you believe this shit? with only a slight tightening of the eyeballs.

The woman on the other side of her catches the look and gives it back to me over her laptop, and then woman next to her joins in too. We engage in a silent four-way exchange of dismay, irritation, and bitchiness, and it is wonderful.

Then Mindy slides her Tom Ford sunglasses back over her eyes and says, “All I can say is it’s really nice on this side of the pool.”

I laugh and my heart swells against my swimsuit and I pull my shades down too, to keep my suddenly watery eyes to myself.

Because it is. It is so nice on this side of the pool, where the book I’m reading is a letdown and my legs look too white and the ice has long since melted in my glass and work is hard and there’s still no good way to be a girl and I don’t know what to do with my life and I have to actually deal with all of that.

I never expected to make it to this side of the pool. I can’t believe I get to be here.

I can't believe I get to be here either.

Thank you, Kristi,

Love SM x

Friendship (again)

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

C.S. Lewis

Thank you, again, for your wonderful messages of support following the death of my friend, Q. It is really appreciated, and the thought of all of you, out there somewhere, makes things easier.

I have written a few posts on friendship over the last year or so (click here for one on how booze affects our friendships), but the last few days have made me think about it in a different way.

As news of Q's death has spread there has been an outpouring of grief on Facebook. A remembrance page has been set up for friends and family to post pictures and memories.

(I was searching for another word for death, but I hate them all. 'Passing' is okay if you're talking about wind, but not a human being. 'Loss' makes it sound as if they've been mislaid on a station platform).

Mr SM has been asked to deliver the eulogy at Q's funeral. He is terrified. He was awake most of last night trying to work out how to get the tone just right, and worrying about breaking down in front of hundreds of people.

Trying to describe (in just a few minutes) a man and his life, and a little of what he meant to all those who are mourning him, is a horribly hard task.

It's made me think how sad it is that it takes a death to make us realise how wonderful our friends are, about how they've enriched our lives and what makes them unique.

It's all too easy to focus on negatives, on silly day to day irritations (a joke misfired, a thank you not delivered, an invitation turned down) and to forget the big picture.

So I've made a pact with myself. I will make the time to imagine a Facebook remembrance page for each of my close friends - the photos, the memories, the lists of all their awesome qualities, and I'm going to feel grateful for them now. While they are still here. And I'm going to take the time to tell them so.

As for the booze, I don't miss it at all.

My friend S told me that when her father died, she and her siblings flew from various parts of the world to be with her mother (a recovering alcoholic). Their greatest fear was that, after two years sober, their mother would be drinking again.

As they gathered together, the first thing S's Mum said to them was "I know what you're all thinking, and it's okay. I'm not going to drink." S had never been more proud of her mother, nor loved her more.

It's at times like this that you need to be a rock, to protect your family and hold them close. Without the drink I feel strong.

(See my post: When Life Throws You Lemons).

Thank you again,

SM x