High Sobriety Read Online Free PDF Page A

hangovers,’ she still tells us to this day. They’d go out with friends, and Dad would have a couple of pints, perhaps a port nightcap, and he’d wake up with a dull headache and a queasy stomach. Mum could get stuck into a few glasses of wine, follow it up with a couple of single malts and a whisky liqueur, and the next day she’d be singing in the shower at 6.00 a.m. as if her bloodstream was somehow impenetrable to alcohol. It was very annoying.
    I obviously haven’t inherited Mum’s constitution. But after pledging to go alcohol-free, hangovers are, for now, a thing of the past. When you’re used to feeling dreadful a couple of mornings a week every week for as many years as you can remember, it’s a novelty to wake up feeling rested and fresh.
    The first sober weekend is glorious. On Sunday, I can’t help but feel quietly smug as my friends complain about their mornings-after while I’ve already worked out at the gym, been to the supermarket, and done two loads of washing before lunchtime. Sobriety also gives me the time to read more and start writing again, filling pages with creative musings and bashing out the beginnings of short stories on my laptop. The early mornings are surprisingly enjoyable: the deserted streets, the sense of space — and the stillness. It’s purifying. I feel like I’ve been let in on a well-guarded secret.
    A week in, and I’m amazed at how easy this abstinence lark is. I thought I’d have been tempted by now, but the desire for alcohol has all but disappeared. Every day that passes leaves me with a stronger sense that my body and mind are cleaner than they’ve been in years.
    After two weeks without alcohol, I feel great. My skin is brighter; I’m energised, happier, and fully committed to life as a responsible drinker. Mentally, it’s as if a fog has lifted: my mind is clearer; my thoughts are more sharply focused. I’m calm and motivated at work. There are moments when I feel so alert and full of vigour that I fear I may burst into a round of star jumps. It’s weird; I hadn’t expected to take to sobriety so enthusiastically. I don’t miss drinking at all.
    TO UNPACK THE genesis of my booze-free odyssey, let me take you beyond Australian shores to discover how a binge-drinking Scottish hack came to be a binge-drinking health reporter 17,000 kilometres away from the chilly climes of her homeland. It started, as so many of these stories do, with a boy and a few drinks. It was the year 2000 — a date that seemed such a fanciful prospect during my childhood that when it finally arrived I was a bit disappointed not to be whizzing around on a jetpack and having my every whim catered to by a robot butler. In our third year at high school, five friends and I pledged that on the first day of the new millennium, wherever we were in the world and whatever we were doing, we’d return to our Edinburgh high school and have a reunion in the bike sheds, picking up where we left off: smoking fags, drinking cheap cider, and rocking out to Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion II on a beaten-up ghetto blaster.
    I’m pretty sure that nobody turned up. The richly imagined future we saw for ourselves come the age of 23 turned out to be largely the same as our present, at 15. Most of us hadn’t left the area — I was still living with my parents in the house I’d resided in since I was a baby — and our musical tastes hadn’t expanded vastly. My taste in alcohol hadn’t improved, either; I was still a cider girl. This was long before it became a boutique beverage for the inner-city crowd — I was a fan in its paint-stripper days. Diamond White, K cider, and Merrydown: these were drinks that packed a punch.
    But I had expanded my travel horizons. After I graduated with a journalism degree, my friend Sharon and I hightailed it to New Zealand, where we spent a year backpacking and