At approximately 10.30 on Monday morning, it will be seven years since I last had an alcoholic drink. Seven years since that grotesquely warm beer, drunk out of a can, at the house of a person I barely knew.
Seven years since I came home drunk when I should have been getting ready to drive with my husband and four-year-old daughter to spend a wholesome bank holiday weekend with the in-laws in Wiltshire. Seven years since I sat on the edge of my bed, mascara crusted in my eyes, trying to block out the bright light outside and the dawning realisation that I was blowing up my life with booze. Seven years since I allowed myself to acknowledge an awful truth: that if I didn’t give up alcohol, I was going to die.
I was going to die by choking on my vomit. or I was going to die by choosing to take my own life (at this point, thoughts of suicide were, I am afraid to say, more frequent than thoughts of brushing my teeth). Or worst of all, I was going to die by continuing to live in this Groundhog Day existence, abandoning all of my responsibilities as a mother so I could worship at the altar of alcohol.
That moment in 2017 wasn’t the first time I had decided to give it up. I had been promising to do it since my first drink at 14 – a bottle of vodka drunk with a friend in a park and then vomited up by the temperance fountain, of all places. “I’m never doing that again,” I told myself the next day.
But the following weekend I was back on the grog and so began a pattern that .