Focus: How to stop the spread of coronavirus. Video / AP / Mark Mitchell
COMMENT:
While everyone else was running in circles, stockpiling loo roll and flapping about pasta, I put my hands on my hips, in a "when the going gets tough" type way. "Right," I said, "We're going to need decent wine. I'll sort the vino, you get the crisps."
Our government deemed off-licenses essential businesses earlier this week, and they can stay open with the pharmacies and the supermarkets. In South Africa, which admittedly has a terrible domestic violence problem, all alcohol sales have been banned for the duration of their lockdown. Now's not the time to wean the Brits off booze, is it.
When all this descended I'd proudly been on a healthy hiatus from drinking, I'd been drinking modestly like a government mandated normal person. That all changed.
My Covid 19 drinking habits mutate at an alarming rate. Gone is the polite middle class sun over the yard arm trigger. Daily, I turn to drink for different reasons. First came those initial corona-Christmassy feelings. Do you remember that time about three weeks ago, when everyone started working from home and feeling a little demob happy. This was the period, two weeks ago, before people we knew started getting sick or dying.
At this early stage our cupboards were groaning with food we'd never eat and a small libation at lunch time to toast the festive vibes seemed only polite. One weekday afternoon we watched a couple of movies we'd always wanted to and put away the best part of a litre.
This couldn't go on. The wine reflex in me is so strong that I'd ordered 15 litres of the stuff in a box with a tap. We could not run out. I did the maths, and worst comes to worst and the wine dries up, those 15 litres should do us for a couple of months, I said.
Then my partner went away to his mother's, so I'm locked down alone, with the dog and a lot of wine. I don't generally drink alone - its a line I try not to cross. Well, I've crossed that line daily for the last week. Now, drinking alone is my foreseeable future - I won't pretend it doesn't slightly worry me.
NeedToKnow3
Every day I try not to drink in an attempt to have at least three booze-free days in the week. And I do well, I promise that come lunchtime I don't glance at the wine box by the larder thinking to myself how a small glass would go so nicely with a plate of cheese and biscuits - and take the edge off the mild but very present loneliness and all-pervasive virus-induced anxiety.
It's later in the day the triggers come. Sitting at my desk watching the daily press conferences at five, the weight of what's happening overwhelms me and I say out loud to the dog. "I need a drink".
The new cocktail hour became sitting in front of iPlayer listening to Rishi or Boris or Chris Whitty. This is a pattern, I thought, of drinking to sedate your fears. So the other day I pushed through, I didn't drink, it looked like a booze free day, and then the clapping for caseworkers reduced me to tears, and I had to have a drink.
I've been using a tiny wine glass, using all the tricks to keep the quantity low and the cognisance of how much I'm putting away high. I know we never actually need a drink, we want one. And I want some relief from the edginess and boredom.
If I don't have a drink when I'm talking to my Mum in the evening I merely cudgel her with that day's obsessively harvested Coronavirus data. Poor woman. So I drink up to make myself tolerably fun on FaceTime, more for other people than myself.
We are going to need the odd drink to get through this. Now isn't the time to give up. Sorry to any temperance advocates out there. I've put in place some tactics. I've bought myself good quality wine, fresh in style, quite brisk and tannic, not too gluggable - "easy drinking". I drink from tiny glasses so I notice if I am getting up too often to refill my glass. And I am trying to have three days off a week. Perhaps today will be the day? Then again, perhaps not.
Pepys followed 1665's Great Plague in London with a mixture of fear and obsessive fascination that I now fully understand. Yet, after a year in which a quarter of Londoners died, he writes in his diary, " I have never lived so merrily...as I have done this plague-time". We might as well do the same. I look at those NHS workers and knackered ministers and hope that they are blessed not with dried pasta or bog roll at home, but with a stiff drink.
