We’re inducting our children into the cult of booze

In news that will disappoint those who like to regard all society's ills as originating with the disadvantaged, middle-class children have been found to be almost twice as likely as poorer classmates to consume alcohol, according to Britain's National Health Service.

As with the figures for female drinking – particularly rampant among the highly educated, argues the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – it is the privileged who are our most kamikaze booze hounds.

Drink was cool, fun, feminist, a lifeline. Until it wasn’t.

I'll say. As I write, I am shortly to turn five years' sober.

"Didn't that fly by?" you may cry. Actually, no. A year into being on the wagon, I wrote a long account in which I explained that – if my tone sounded uncelebratory – then that was about the sum of it.

Atheist that I am, I was reminded of T. S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi: a "cold coming", hard, thankless, the benefits of which might be grudging, yet vital; a birth that was like a death, and a return to an old life in which "an alien people" clutched at their gods.

Christians may dislike the comparison, but this was a postlapsarian existence, scales fallen, sight restored.

Now sobriety is just real (occasionally dragging, but finally stable) life. Back then I could see it all clearly: the way the mother's ruin had impacted on my work, my relationships, my brain; the way I'd created my very personality around the constant hit of a drink.

I started young. In my drinking days (or rather daze), I took being introduced to wine at the domestic dinner table to be the great liberal ideal. Now I'm not so sure.

In and outside the home, my parents let us teenagers drink in a way that they would never have contemplated allowing us to take drugs or smoke. My father drank with dinner, so was happy for me to drink with friends. I had been an awkward, painfully self-conscious child, but alcohol propelled me from introvert to extrovert, and extrovert is what I intended to remain.

Besides, I was good at drinking, born to it, one might say. One Easter, I joked that I had stigmata on my palms. My doctor father informed me that they were more likely to be liver spots. And how I dined – or rather drank – out on that story. Drinking together was how he and I expressed our love. We were big boozers, big characters, taking on the world several bottles at a time. I loved it. I loved him.

From 13 to 43, drink was what I did: my sole hobby and lone joy. Boozing was how I defined myself. Drink was cool, fun, feminist, a lifeline. Until it wasn't.

My father's declared ambition was to drink himself to death, and he succeeded, three years ago, at the age of 76. Friends still assure me it's "a good way to go". It isn't. It's a lonely and lacerating demise and I would have done anything to spare him. He wanted his body to be left to medical science, but it was too devastated.

Writing this makes me weep. I know I'm violating my father's privacy – his final privacy – and will refrain from going into further detail. However, I am determined to use his example, as I will use my own, if it can be of use to other problem drinkers.

My father was the brightest and most brilliant of men, but he gave up the last years of his life to his addiction.

No longer a child, I'm finally rejecting his dinner-table example.

Telegraph, UK

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