![]() ![]() ![]() Mr Ruari Fairbairns, founder of One Year No Beer (a challenge I haven’t signed up to, but to which more than 80,000 others have), sees how entrenched drinking is in our culture, despite changing behaviours. Not drinking is usually something you do to get through a thing, isn’t it? A necessary stop gap, so the obligation – maybe a course of medication or a marathon – can pass and you can get back on it, get back to normal and start waking up feeling like you’ve been in a mild road traffic accident again. People in the UK drink to get drunk more than anywhere else in the world, according to a survey published in The Lancet in 2019. ![]() About 20 per cent of the UK population don’t drink at all and the no/low-alcohol market is set to grow 34 per cent by 2024, but British culture still compels us to drink. I know these questions well because I used to ask them. “Are you OK?” this person might also say. Well, since you ask, the essential circuitry in my brain that compelled me to drink was dislodged and I am now fundamentally redundant. Then there is the person who says something like, “Good for you! I wish I could do that.” (They do not wish they could do that, but it is what they think they should say.) And there is the person who says, “What happened?” ![]() In my experience, if you embark on an extended fast from booze, there are three types of people you are faced with. In September, at the age of 33, I passed a year of not drinking and, in the month that has been marketed to us as Stoptober, perhaps you are considering something similar. Even if it means losing all your friends, only to be found in the small hours contentedly watching snooker and drinking cans in peaceful silence in a Hackney council block with a gentleman of the road, his friend and her boxer dog. An enthusiastic drinker in their twenties has an uncanny knack for finding people with whom to continue a night out. Sometimes I’d be home before last orders, on other occasions, nearer to sunrise. I did my drinking out, in restaurants, pubs, bars and clubs. I later realised I was to some extent using it to manage unresolved trauma and my mental health. Alcohol had the capacity to make me do things outside my moral compass, the hangovers were getting longer and it had negatively impacted some of my relationships (including the one with myself). What’s too much? Well, the bad outcomes competed with the good ones. I didn’t drink every day – on average about two or three times a week – but I objectively drank too much. If there was a future where I couldn’t go to the pub and drink with my friends, what was that future and how did I fit into it? This was fun and what was life without fun? What unit could my joy be measured in if not pints? It was compounded by me contemplating the removal of something relatively fundamental to my life. An unprecedented amount of solitary confinement and the threat of virus-induced respiratory problems and death will inspire an existential crisis in the best of us. Whichever, I realised that alcohol had no role to play in whatever I had to do.Ībout two months into this alien pursuit, I found myself pacing around my flat wondering who I, and what my purpose in life, was. Some might call it self-reflection, personal growth or self-work. I don’t have children and I won’t bake, so all that was left for me to do with the yawning chasm of lockdown quasi-time was casually ask some earth-shattering questions of myself. ![]()
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