I was a middle class ‘almost alcoholic’

Tuesday, May 19th, 2015

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What does an alcoholic look like? For years I wouldn’t have said that label had anything to do with me.

I am a professional mother of two who grew up associating alcohol with fun. In my early twenties, it’s what marked me out as the archetypal party girl, in my early professional life big nights out were par for the course.

After the birth of my first child, wine lifted me from the humdrum and provided a reliable link to the old me, the one unfettered by responsibility. With a drink inside me, I felt flirtatious, free, glamorous and eternally young.

I never drank during the day – I was holding down a full time job – but I now know that I was definitely displaying alcohol-dependent characteristics. Which is why it came to me as no surprise to me to discover this week that educated British women now head a global league table for alcohol abuse.

For anyone with a preconceived notion that the problem lies with the raucous ‘girls’ night out’ brigade, the ones with a taste for alcopops and vodka shots, think again.

• Numbers of young women dying due to alcohol increasing

As the study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development suggests it’s professional women – lawyers, teachers and those working in the finance sector – who are statistically more prone to consuming hazardous amounts of alcohol on a regular basis.

Many may begin heavy drinking when they are young, but it is a habit which continues into middle age, with many women downing hazardous quantities of alcohol at home and often alone.

t is something I can relate too and a problem that I only admitted to having when I woke up in A&E under the stark lighting and disapproving glare of the duty nurse.

By then I had been consuming up to two bottles of wine a night and had blacked out during one of my increasingly regular binges. It was April 2011 and I haven’t touched a drop since. Continue reading