Thirteen or so years ago, I stopped drinking. Things had got to a stage where I realised that I was being controlled by an impulsion to drink every evening; I woke up to myself and stopped. What followed were eleven blissful, hangover-free years in which I knew I could rely on myself. When my life fell apart a couple of years ago, I hit the bottle hard and, for a few months, I found myself drinking every day again. It started with having a house full of booze that was left by the one whose actions had caused me to lose myself. There was no way I was giving away £10 bottles of wine, not when I needed the self-indulgence of inebriation to ensure that I was experiencing the absolute worst time of my life.

Once things calmed down, though, I got it back under control and became a proud weekend binge drinker. This was something that I’d never achieved as an adult. The compulsion to drink midweek was gone and I now consider my relationship with booze almost normal. Normal, that is, except for the fact that it makes me so ill. It’s as if alcohol is seeking some sort of vicious revenge for all those years that I forsake it… forsook it… didn’t allow a drop to pass my lips… whatever.

People don’t understand me when I tell them how much I enjoyed abstinence. They give up for a month or so and do nothing but whinge and moan all the time instead of looking for the positives and enjoying the numerous benefits that come from staying sober.

So I’m facing a bit of a dilemma. Do I continue as I am doing and play Russian roulette every weekend, never knowing whether the bottle of wine that I drink on a Friday night will render me utterly useless the following day? Or do I just pack it in all together, knowing that I’ll just feel so much better? Taking the latter option will be so much easier this time round. I’d no longer feel uncomfortable when faced with the questions of those who find it incredulous that somebody doesn’t drink. Instead of having to come up with some cock and bull story, I’d have the confidence to tell them that booze and I just don’t get along.

Late nights and brain toxins
I’ve never experimented with my sleep so I don’t know what my optimum sleepy time really is. All I do know is that I need far more then six hours on a worknight. There was a study published in Science this week, which of course I haven’t read. I think, because I couldn’t actually even be bothered to read the noddy version that was on the BBC news website, that the study showed that sleep gets rid of all the toxic chemicals from your brain that accumulate during the day. Something like that anyway.

Assuming that the more toxic your thoughts during the day, the more toxic the chemicals that need removing from the brain, I’m in deep trouble from the insufficient amount of sleep that I get each night. If I calculate that on an average work day there are about seven hours of me thinking negatively about things and about twenty minutes of positive thoughts, and added to this there are the journeys to and from work during which I want to launch a rocket into the boot of most cars that I’m following, that’s about nine hours of ill-feeling that needs to be excreted from my head. Then there’s walking Rocky on his lead, emptying the dishwasher, despairing at all the fluff in the house and catching the news headlines. Adding it all up, I should really be in bed by 5.30pm and asleep by 6. Getting to sleep at about midnight on a school night means that there are six hours worth of bad thoughts already carried over into the next working day.

I think I need to work this fact into my work e-mail signature. It’s already perfectly evident from the way I answer the phone.