Bryony Gordon: ‘I’m an alcoholic in recovery and I’ve realised booze isn’t the problem – it’s me’

There is something priggish and puritanical about decrying all use of alcohol, writes Bryony Gordon. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION

I’ve always liked to imagine Telegraph readers taking in the paper’s content over a pot of tea and some toast in the morning. Maybe I’m weird (I’m definitely weird), but it makes me feel closer to you. But in the digital age, one cannot presume that the news is only consumed over breakfast, and so sometimes I imagine that you are reading this on your phone or the iPad while enjoying a G&T in the garden or a pint at the pub. Does that happen to be you? Then I am afraid I have (yet more) bad alcohol-related news to deliver.

According to researchers at the University of Oxford, alcohol is not just responsible for cirrhosis of the liver and various cancers; even small amounts, they have found, can raise the risk of 60 other conditions that were previously not thought to be affected by booze. The conditions include gout, cataracts, fractures, lung cancer and circulatory diseases. It comes just months after the World Health Organisation announced there is no safe level of alcohol intake.

As an alcoholic in recovery (have I mentioned I’m sober?), you may imagine that I welcome any news that rains on a boozer’s parade. But I don’t. I think there is something priggish and puritanical about decrying all use of alcohol. Just because there are people like me who can’t drink safely, it doesn’t mean that everyone should have their treats taken away from them.

'Booze is only a substance that helps people to relax,' writes Bryony Gordon.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for alerting people to the dangers of alcohol and encouraging the joys of sobriety. But booze is only a substance that helps people to relax and if humans hadn’t invented it, we would have invented something else just as mind-numbing.

Yet, there is a certain type of reformed drinker who blames all their problems on the grog, refusing to take any responsibility whatsoever for their ailments. Their belief is: ‘if I didn’t live in a society soaked in rum, I’d never have had any issues!’ But in the last couple of years I have come to realise that my alcohol consumption was only a symptom of something much deeper. It wasn’t the booze that was the problem – it was me. If I hadn’t become addicted to beer, you can bet your bottom dollar I would have become addicted to something else to numb the chatter in my head. It is why I’m so grateful for 12-Step programmes. They give me a much healthier way of getting out of my own head.

Whenever I go out for dinner, people inevitably ask if I mind them having a glass of wine, as if I might burst into flames at the sight of some Chablis. But I love people drinking normally around me. It is such a joy, and so, so helpful, because it reminds me of exactly why I can’t drink.

A glass of wine with dinner? As an alcoholic, the thought truly appals me. I’d much rather have none than one – as the saying goes in sobriety “one is too many; a thousand is never enough”. So here’s my message to happy, healthy, occasional drinkers, reading this over their evening aperitif: carry on enjoying your life, and let these scientists shove their surveys where the sun doesn’t shine.

Where to get help:

Alcohol and Drug Helpline NZ.