What I’ve learnt from a year without booze

The Very British Problems author almost died due to alcohol abuse. Now he shares the unexpected perks of sober life

‘Here, write your email address on this.” Just over a year ago, from a bed on the liver ward (“usual bed, sir?”) I shakily thrust a napkin and pen at Rob, a substance misuse specialist. I remember this clearly, despite at the time being full of chlordiazepoxide – librium, to its friends – and unable to tell him who the current prime minister was. He jotted down his details. I’d contact him in a year, I said, to announce I’d reached 365 days sober. He’d no doubt heard it all before – quite a few times from me.
We’d met many times over the months. I’d been in and out with various alcohol-related ailments – withdrawals, a fall down the stairs, hepatitis, pancreatitis, double aspirational pneumonia. A lifetime of heavy drinking had in recent years become a more serious problem, one with much more immediate possibilities of death.
The other day I dug the napkin out of my wallet, unfolded it and sent Rob a note of thanks, to mark a whole year without a drop.
If you’d said to me over the past two decades that I could go a year without alcohol, I’d have spat out my pint. But now that I have, I can’t imagine ever putting booze to my lips again. That’s not to say it started off easy.
Firstly, there were the sweets. Oh, my goodness, the sweets. Mountains upon mountains of gums. Buckets of Maoam. After I’d got back from Addenbrooke’s Hospital and poured all the hidden bottles and cans down the sink, I stocked up on wine gums, Haribo, strawberry laces… I couldn’t get enough sugar. 
A toddler would have given a concerned side-on glance at my shopping basket and said: “Steady on, pal.” There’s so much sugar in alcohol that my body expected it. The sweets stopped me feeling shaky, but I’d need more and more. Also there’s a feeling of, “Well, if I’m not drinking, I can get away with it.” Nope: I got fat.
There’s also the sleep. Those first few months, I was having three days awake for every day asleep. And each sleep would bring nightmares. I’d wake up with a phantom hangover for months.
And the sweat! I couldn’t lift my hand to scratch my head without ending up soaked. It turns out regularly filling yourself with poison sends all sorts of bodily systems out of whack. It took almost the full year for my body and brain to adjust back to that of a properly functioning person. Today I leave the sweets on the shelf and sleep normally. And I’m not constantly damp.
My wife, Sumin, and I went on honeymoon a few months into sobriety. We asked the resort to please empty our minibar. One day we came back from the beach to find it full of beer. Another time I asked for a non-alcoholic cocktail at the hotel restaurant. Sumin, who also doesn’t drink because she’s just not keen, acted as taster and found it full of gin. It felt unfair, like I was being taunted.
I felt paranoid, tempted and surrounded. It was perhaps unwise of us to go to an all-inclusive resort, designed for people to be lashed 24/7. We should have booked a cave somewhere or locked ourselves in an empty caravan. It was a holiday of attrition. I listened to a lot of sobriety podcasts and tried my best not to bang on too much about drinking to Sumin.
Actually, I WhatsApped my sponsor, Sean, a lot. As massively supportive and patient as Sumin is, it’s not her job to fix me. I met Sean at a free alcohol support group in my area. Current research suggests the vast majority of people who manage to stop misusing a substance do so because they’ve simply had enough of it. They just can’t do it anymore. If you reach this point before you die, then support as you move forward with change is so valuable.
A few days into sobriety, I turned up to a meeting in a church hall, “shaking like a s—-ing dog”, according to Sean, sat in a plastic chair and actually listened to what people had to say. I didn’t come away with a belief that some divine entity had an interest in whether I had a cocktail or not; what I did grab on to was the understanding that I can’t just have just one drink.
Sean offered to be my sponsor – that is, someone who’d been there and bought the T-shirt with alcohol abuse, and who could give me advice on how to get through life without a drink. I started visiting him once a week in his barge, just to chat about life and how to live it. He helped me immensely, though he always insisted I was the one helping him.
For the first year, I counted days and I complained about it to Sean. “All this counting, seems like it’s just another way of obsessing about alcohol to me,” I’d say, eager to just move on with my life. He advised me that I could do what I liked, it’s my life after all, but that, if I wanted his advice, counting days for the first year might be helpful, then after that to count months, then one day I could just count the years, like he did. He was 16 years sober and had his sobriety date tattooed on his arm. “I can’t drink again,” he’d joke, waving his tattoo around, “because then I’d have to get this bloody thing removed.”
I avoided most social gatherings for that first year. Sumin and I like to keep to ourselves anyway and I’m past the endless weddings of my early 30s. I drank as a teenager because I was shy, so booze became an anxiety cure for the next 20 years. Now, at 38 and a year sober, I find my anxiety has pretty much gone away. It seems the drink was curing and causing it at the same time. And because I’m a bit older now, I care a lot less about what strangers think of me: I’m much more comfortable in my own skin. 
That comes from what Sean taught me too, that I’m not the star of the show and nobody is overly focused on what I’m up to, they’re just trying to get through the day. He urged me to expect nothing and accept everything and to take life a day at a time. He taught me the importance of gratitude – I have a lot to be thankful for when I stop and think about it: loving family, I’m still alive, full head of hair. He told me not to catastrophise everything: that’s a work in progress – I still get very panicked if I think I’m going to miss bin day.
Going to the doctor is actually enjoyable these days. I sit to get my blood test results, and instead of looking at me like she’s about to tell me she’s just run over my cat, the doctor says my results are fine. Then I look surprised and she says: “Yes, take the poison away and everything fixes itself, funny that!” I drive away thinking how lucky I am that I didn’t do too much permanent damage.
Ah yes, driving. It’s nice to drive, all the time. No need for my own breathalyser any more. I drive back from restaurants late at night, where the bill doesn’t have £50 of wine on it. My sobriety app tells me I’ve saved £7,000, just on boozing at home, in the past year.
When I go to restaurants, I notice just how much the drinking culture has changed. I’m lucky to be sober in a time when getting p—– just isn’t cool any more, and all the non-alcoholic beers taste of beer instead of rusty water. The non-alcoholic spirits are a bit too composty and petrolly for me, though, like actual spirits. Now I go into pubs and I don’t really think about alcohol. I could go back to the all-inclusive holiday resort and booze wouldn’t really cross my mind. The obsession has gone.
The best thing about not drinking is, without doubt, the fact that I don’t worry the people I love. I’m reliable and useful, I turn up where and when I say I’m going to turn up, I’m not a no-show at a family birthday party due to another mysterious stomach bug.
This first year has been a time of wobbly orientation, of wearing in my sober shoes so they don’t pinch. A training year. Now I feel that life without alcohol is optimistic, it has possibilities. Only now is my brain starting to believe each day will be fine and that we won’t be falling in a hedge again any time soon.
I still fancy a drink every now and then. I don’t think that will ever go away. But now I know how to ignore it. Well, not just ignore it, but why it’s a completely foolish and dangerous idea for me to think I can moderate. Some can, I can’t. I’ve tested it enough now.
“Your head wants you dead,” is something I remember from the support groups. When I fancy a “boozy” drink, I go for a Guinness 0.0. As Sean would say to me, “I often fancy one, too, but we simply can’t have just one, can we? We know what happens. So there you go, it is what it is, and that’s all there is to it.”
One of the last things Sean said to me, before he died of cancer at the end of last year, was: “Acceptance is a beautiful thing, Rob, it really is.” So today I’ll remember to accept that I can’t have a drink, then tomorrow I’ll wake up and be sure to remember it again. I’ll remember it for Sean, who died sober; for my wife and family; and for me. Cheers.
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This article was originally published in August 2022