New Year's Eve

It does seem deeply unfair for newly sober people that, just a handful of days after the major challenge of Christmas, they are faced with the biggest party evening of the year: New Year's Eve.

(If you are worried about this evening then this post might help: SoberMummy's Party Survival Guide)

I have a complicated history with New Year's Eve.

I've had some wonderful, unforgettable times with incredible friends in beautiful places. But I have also had many years that have bowed, then broken, under the pressure of expectation. Years when I attacked the booze so enthusiastically, and so early, that well before midnight I'd be sleepy, grumpy and able only to slump in an armchair, telling circular, rambling stories to anyone drunk enough to listen.

And the worst thing about New Year was waking up on January 1st with a raging thirst, pounding head and a mounting sense of despair. How, I would ask, can I find the strength to start all over again?

One thing that is worth remembering if things get tough tonight is that - like many things post booze - everything turns upside down and it becomes all about the morning, not the night-time.

Last New Year (my first sober) I had a relatively quiet evening. It was lovely, but not hugely memorable. But the next morning, as we were in the Swiss Alps, I took the whole family SM up the mountain relatively early. We stood on the deserted peak, literally on top of the world, looking at the most beautiful, shiny New Year's Day and everything and anything seemed possible.

This year I'm being more ambitious.

It strikes me that we tend to blame ourselves for not enjoying parties as much when we get sober, whereas actually it's the fault of the parties.

We expect people to have a wild time at an event which consists solely of a bunch of people - many of them strangers to each other - standing in a room for several hours just talking and drinking. When did that start to happen?

Can you imagine a children's party where forty kids were expected to just talk for five hours? No way! We have pass the parcel, pin the tail on the donkey and pinatas. Then, after just two hours, we give everyone a large slice of cake and a party bag and pack them off home.

There are fewer party games at teenage parties, but the gap is filled by lots of dancing, raging hormones, flirting and experimental snogging.

Even into my twenties I remember wonderful celebrations involving hugely competitive games of charades, sardines, squeak piggy squeak, karaoke, dressing up and Scottish dancing.

Then, gradually, all the party games and events (what my Scottish in-laws would call 'happenings') petered out, and we were left with the standard format of fifty people in a room, constantly drinking, wheeling out tired anecdotes and chasing tired canapés.

This suited me, actually, as all I really wanted to do by this stage was drink. And if I was hosting, the idea of organising anything more challenging than a bottle opener, once I'd had a few glasses myself, was anathema.

But now I'm on a mission to revive the great party happenings of the past.

Tonight we are celebrating Hogmanay in Scotland - five adults and six children with ages ranging from eight to eighty.

Rather than trying to hustle the children into bed early so that we can all get drunk, I'm letting them stay up to see midnight in. It's not as if there's school in the morning (thank God).

We're going to have a huge dinner together, then we'll play charades, guess who? and other party games and teach everyone how to dance an eightsome reel. Then at midnight we'll sing Auld Lang Syne and let off some celebratory fireworks.

Actually, I'm feeling a little exhausted just thinking about it, but I'll make it through on a wave of adrenaline and caffeine.

Hurrah!

Happy New Year to all you wonderful people! See you in 2017.

Love SM x

George Michael

If you've just made it through your first sober Christmas, then CONGRATULATIONS! I'm sure it wasn't easy, but I'm prepared to bet that it was also awesome.

Maybe you overdid it on Christmas Day and have decided that this is your Day One, or perhaps you're gearing up to quitting in the New Year?

I think we're all looking forward to a new, bright and shiny 2017. After all, 2016 has been a really hard one, starting with the death of David Bowie, then Prince, Leonard Cohen and now George Michael. Some of the greatest songwriters and poets of my youth all.... gone.

I loved George Michael in all his incarnations - except his final one, as a bloated, depressed recluse, addicted to alcohol, marijuana and - allegedly - crack cocaine and heroin.

I was at a traditional girl's boarding school, perched on a windy cliff overlooking a grey sea, when George burst onto the scene in Wham!

There was very little to do at weekends when we were fifteen. We weren't yet trusted to go into Brighton unaccompanied, so we were left, rattling around the decaying old buildings and vast bleak grounds, to make our own entertainment.

This involved activities like trying to get high on Tippex thinner, seeing if we could make our own tobacco from baked banana skins or competitive cockroach catching. I was the House champion at catching cockroaches - the only school sport at which I excelled.

Anyhow, one memorable weekend we spent hours perfecting a dance routine to Wham!'s newly released single Bad Boys.

I still have the lyrics seared into my memory:

When you tried to tell me what to do,
I just shut my mouth and smiled at you,
One thing that I know for sure

Bad boys
Stick together, never sad boys
Good guys
They made rules for fools, so get wise

I remember thinking how those words could have been written for us - the cool rebels who loved ignoring all the rules.

But the truth is that breaking the rules catches up with you eventually, and it's wise to fall into line before it's too late.

So, if you spent this Christmas drinking way more than you know you should have done, then why not make it your Last Christmas boozing, in honour of gorgeous, wonderful and talented George?

Love SM x

Stephen King on Booze

We are in Scotland for the festive period, hunkered down around blazing fires, keeping out storm Brenda who is raging outside.

(Don't you just love the names they pick for storms? Brenda sounds like she'd be more at home in the Bingo Hall or with a knitting circle rather than flooding roads and knocking down power lines).

Whenever I get to take a break from the frenetic Christmas supermarket shopping and last minute present buying and wrapping, I've been reading Stephen King's book: On Writing.

I bought this book because it was about writing. Little did I know, it also covers King's alcoholism, about which he writes brilliantly.

King says that when he first realised that he was an alcoholic his immediate reaction was to be incredibly careful not to let anyone know, otherwise someone would tell him to get control of his drinking.

Telling an alcoholic to control his drinking, he writes, is like telling a guy suffering the world's most cataclysmic case of diarrhoea to control his shitting.

Eew, but we know what he means, don't we?

King says it's been almost twelve years since I took a drink, and I'm still struck by disbelief when I see someone with a half-finished glass of wine near at hand. I want to get up, go over, and yell 'Finish that! Why don't you finish that?' into his or her face. I found the idea of social drinking ludicrous - if you didn't want to get drunk, why not have a Coke?

Well, quite.

But the really fascinating thing about King's story is how his subconscious was crying for help through his writing.

It was, apparently, many years before King realised that the alcoholic writer and ex-schoolteacher who starred in The Shining was actually himself. He had been up to his neck in denial, but somewhere, deep inside his brain, in the part that writes the stories, he knew.

Ten years later, in 1986, he wrote Misery, a title, he says, which accurately described his state of mind. The hero - a writer again - is tortured by a psychotic nurse. The nurse, Annie Wilkes, he says (with the benefit of hindsight) was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided that I was tired of being Annie's pet writer.

The book which followed Misery was Tommyknockers, which King says he wrote with cotton swabs stuck up his nose to stop blood from his cocaine ravaged nostrils dripping all over his typewriter keys.

In this novel, alien creatures get inside your head and start messing about in there. The upside to this alien activity for the host is boundless energy and a superficial intelligence, but in exchange they give their soul. King writes it was the best metaphor for drugs and alcohol my tired, overstressed mind could come up with.

So, if you're tempted tomorrow to have just the one glass of wine with your Christmas lunch, then remember that alcohol is not your best friend, your greatest fan; she is a crazy obsessive with a penchant for amputation (or 'hobbling' in the film version). She will get inside your head and she will steal your soul.

Get the hell out of there before it's too late.

(If you need more motivation, then read this one: Relapse Stories)

Love to you all, and have a very, very merry (but sober) Christmas! It'll be awesome! See you on the other side....

SM x

P.S. I've just been told that the storm is actually Barbara, not Brenda. Still more redolent of home knitted jumpers and self sufficiency than 100mph winds....