The Good Drinker: How I Learned to Love Drinking Less

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Books telling us to give up drinking are 10 a penny, but how about something for those of us who like a social drink but are occasionally worried that two turn into four rather too easily? That’s where Adrian Chiles’s likable and highly readable memoir of his relationship with booze comes in. He writes that “the vast majority of drinkers like me believe they are not problem drinkers”. He details his experiences in cutting down, to comic and insightful effect, and skilfully but never preachingly, offers suggestions for others, too. The Little Blue Flames JR: Well it does exist dear, you’re sat across from one, but I guess you’re saying the fact that you could say to yourself that you weren’t an alcoholic gave you permission to continue drinking to that level? I've occasionally been asked why it is that I need to go for a drink before watching the Albion play. I've always answered with something lame, along the lines of, "You wanna try watching us sober" ... where does this urge come from? I've raced off to games hours early to give me a chance to drink a lot of beer in a relatively short time ... the craic is good, usually. Sometimes it isn't, Occasionally it's all rather boring. But I always make the effort. Why? Well..' It felt so good. At that moment, the last few days we had left on the exchange went from feeling like an eternity to something wispy and insignificant and even possibly enjoyable. I laughed and joked with my friends and even fancied I spotted a girl called Claudia looking at me. And I became overwhelmed with sorrow for poor Siegfried, who couldn’t face more than a mouthful of beer but, with unbearable sweetness, was plainly delighted to see me smiling.

AC: Sometimes I do still feel as though it’s more than just a handrail; maybe a handrail and half the stairs. JR: I just want to be very clear: I’m not anti-moderation. I’m just saying that for an alcoholic, it might make things mentally worse for them and for those around them. The analogy I’d use is a 40-a-day smoker. Give them two cigarettes a day, they will be much worse company. If I was stranded on a desert island and there was one can of Guinness on there, it would still be there the day I was rescued. Because the idea of drinking one can would be horrible, I would be in such a state. Have to say, this was a really well written and easy to follow read on Chiles' life with alcohol and how he kept it in his life without losing the ability to have it altogether. AC: And now you must talk, to some extent, about sobriety – presumably there’s not a lot of comedy in lecturing people. So how do you deal with that?AC: Even if you take it that alcoholism exists, and there is such a thing as an alcoholic – and clinically, my understanding is that it doesn’t really exist, but I’ve stopped arguing against it – my issue has always been that if you can stop, then you drink with impunity. That was very damaging to me, because it meant that I could go on drinking 100 units a week, thinking that was fine. Forty years later, having put petrol-tanker quantities of alcohol through my system, I see the significance of that first drink. And, more importantly, the significance of the first drink on any given occasion. The first one is the only one that matters; it’s the only one that brings about a wondrous change in your emotional state. All subsequent drinks are increasingly fruitless attempts to recreate that initial feeling. Grasping this truth is the surest route to drinking less. Relish the first drink, and perhaps a second if you must, but don’t bother with the rest. AC: I think people are led to believe that moderation isn’t possible: that if you successfully moderate, it’s because you didn’t have much of a problem in the first place. Otherwise, the ideas are very binary. People will stop you in the street and say: “I hear you’re on the wagon,” or: “Are you a friend of Bill’s?” or: “Are you still off the booze?” It doesn’t even occur to people that there could be a middle ground, either you’re completely befuddled and drunk the whole time, or you’re completely sober. First book of the year as I wasn't entirely sure where to start but this stood out to me. As someone who enjoyed Chiles' 2018 documentary Dry January after a rather Wet December has been the sort of moderate conversation I've always really wanted to have with someone. AC: Something you said that really resonated with me, and actually made a difference to my moderation, was when you said that when you’re not drinking, you’ve got to make an extra effort with people, to be funny, and charming. I thought drinking was absolutely essential to have a good time. If you’re using that word, “essential”, you’ve got to have a look at your relationship with alcohol. In the past, you could have filled a room with all my favourite people in the world, and if I wasn’t allowed to drink, I wouldn’t really be looking forward to seeing them.

JR: If you go online and ask: “Am I an alcoholic?” you get these long questionnaires: has alcohol ever affected your work life? Have you ever missed work due to alcohol? Has your family ever worried about your drinking? The questions are ridiculous because they are so broad. There’s not anyone who has ever been drunk, who wouldn’t be able to go, “Yeah, I lost a day to a hangover. Yes, it’s affected my mental health.” And, in some ways it doesn’t matter; your liver doesn’t care if you’re an alcoholic or a heavy drinker. But the real difference between us is that if we went to the pub and had two pints and then went home, you would be fine, and I would be in hell. Because I’d turned the machine on, the machine would want me to keep on going. My issue has always been that if you can stop, then you drink with impunity. That was very damaging, because it meant that I could go on drinking 100 units a week, thinking that was fine Adrian Chiles I am completely in the same headspace as in that I enjoy drinking and if I can do it moderately then why give up the habit of a lifetime. Since the new year my drinking diary says I have averaged 15.78 units/week so not quite to the government's safe drinking guide level yet but close. He thanks "the clinicians who’ve given me so much of their time sharing their expertise", but why not put some in the book? He assures us "there are mountains of scientific studies on all this" and he has done "a fair amount of reading and listening on the subject". Drinking 100s of units a week, he says, meant facing "some pretty dire consequences with my innards". Don't buy this book thinking you'll learn anything at all about the effects of alcohol on health. I think he makes a clear case for having a middle ground with drinking rather than abstaining altogether. He also comes at it from a familiar perspective, having had alcohol as a big part of social events and life in general, especially during his twenties/thirties.A meandering love letter from Chiles to his other half - alcohol. Any occasion without it is rubbish, even those with his 500 closest friends and his family. Cirrhosis, fatty liver and being old don't deter Chiles from moaning "I don't know what to do with people who don't drink". He actively avoids making friends with teetotallers and light drinkers, believing that meaningful connections can only be forged with alcohol. But Mum and Dad decided I should go. I fervently wished they hadn’t. I’d never been so miserable in all my life; come to think of it, I’ve not been so miserable since. Never have two weeks passed so slowly for anyone, ever. The school was in a town called Leonberg, near Stuttgart. I got on with Siegfried every bit as badly as I’d feared. I looked longingly at my fellow schoolmates, all having wonderful times with their new friends. The German girls were conspicuously beautiful and plainly uninterested in either me or my fellow spectacle-wearer. We shambled wordlessly home. To his bafflement I refused all his offers of a game of chess. Eventually I relented just to show him how clueless I was, which didn’t take long. No more chess was played. Moderation is complicated. It’s more complicated than stopping in the sense that everyone knows you’ve stopped’ … Adrian Chiles. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian The thought of never drinking alcohol frightens me as there are so many social and cultural influences around us to drink alcohol and similarly to Adrian, the happy times of my life have been about socialising and drinking with friends. It is certainly easier to be at an event where you know no one to have a glass of wine in hand. However, the glass of wine after a hard day at work (oh poor me working in a book shop) I can generally do without, they've become a habit and the "hard day at work" is just an excuse. JR: I don’t think there’s any way, if you’re drinking 100 units a week, you can call that moderate drinking.

JR: I would get to a wedding where they would greet you with a glass of prosecco, and I would immediately be in a bad mood. It’s midday – I don’t want to start with prosecco. Is there a bar? No, not til four. Four hours of prosecco. AC: I just happen to have an off-switch with drinking, in a way that I don’t have with food. Left to my own devices, I can eat myself to an absolute standstill. But I wouldn’t give myself that get-out, because I’ve got, probably, a less good on-switch than you. Anything can get me to start drinking. If you’ve got an easily triggered on-switch, and no off-switch, then you really have got a problem. Whilst I'm sure for a lot of people abstinence is the only way, cutting down and being more thoughtful about my drinking of wine works for me. JR: At the heart of this is one of the useful definitions of an alcoholic as opposed to a heavy drinker. When you take the first drink, are you able to limit your drinking from that point onwards? You talk about drinking two pints of Stella mixed with spring water as part of your moderation. That would be absolutely impossible for me to do, because once I have one drink, I then drink to exactly the same point every time.Having had Allan Carr's The Easy Way to Control Alcohol for a few years and never had the inclination to get round to reading it, I thought I would give this a go as it seemed a bit more likely and a bit more achievable for me.