Saturday Success

No wine last night – yay me!

One day at a time right!? I am going to celebrate every small success on my journey, (not with wine obviously*) this particular success is being celebrated with no hangover this morning!

Saturday is a toughie for me because there is all afternoon and evening to spend resisting the urge. A typical Saturday might be spent sleeping off a hangover, tidying up the house, spending time in the garden if it is fine, and about 3pm starting to think about a glass of wine. “it is such a lovely sunny day, let’s have a glass of wine outside in the garden…” That insidious voice again.

Yesterday I spent most of my time reading sober blogs, sober books, and writing a blog post. Yes I was totally immersed in my own sober revolution! Although my goal is to quit drinking on July 1st, I find that the more sober literature I read, the less I feel like drinking.

I did think about going to the bottle store at one stage, but I have plans to get outdoors in the morning, so knowing it would be agony with a hangover, I managed to sideline that idea.

I went to bed at 7pm with the cat, a hot chocolate and a sober book instead. It is quite helpful that it is winter here, and retiring early is an option.

Some takeaways from yesterday:

For our whole lifetime alcohol has been marketed to our subconcious minds. The implied benefits are all false. The side effects are undisclosed because they are all bad. We know what they all are – cancer, heart attack, stroke and more. Alcohol would not be legalised if it was invented today.

Wine marketing to women is prevalent. Wine o’clock! Mummy’s little helper! It’s quite sad really as years ago women did not drink as much as men, and now they do. And women themselves are embracing and promoting this culture, rather like Lenin’s useful idiots.

About wine marketing in particular, I used to be sucked into the whole wine tasting thing years ago. We’d go to wine festivals, read wine reviews, try new vintages. We’d sniff, swirl and taste as if we were some kind of wine elite. I even had a treasured credit card sized fold out pocket guide to all the wine characteristics – tobacco, oak, melon, cut grass, wet wool! I’d try to identify the aromas in the description, with varying success. I may have become a wine bore for a while! Eventually I realised it was all just a marketing ploy to sell you an expensive bottle that didn’t taste much better, so I went back to something I could afford…to drink in the quantities I needed.

So yeah, there is a lot of effort going into selling us this flavoured poison that deadens our senses. It is important to be aware of that.

xx E

*the truth is that we don’t need wine to celebrate, we’ve just been taught that we do.