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The restaurant cleaner got the fright of his life when he found me under the table. I had been eating there earlier that night, but had drunk so much that I had passed out – something my friends found hilarious. They put a tablecloth over me and left me there for the staff to find some hours later.
Despite spending decades drinking to the point of passing out, I never believed I was an alcoholic. Those were people who sat on park benches with a bottle of White Lightning and put vodka on their cornflakes, not professionals who drank £30 bottles of wine. That’s why I can understand Andrew Lloyd Webber feeling the same way: “When you’re a wine drinker, you don’t think of yourself as… well, alcoholics drink spirits.” It is only recently, he has said, that he has admitted he is an alcoholic, and has auctioned off his expensive wine collection to finally get away from his addiction.
I never needed an excuse to drink: wine was always there, and socially, there never seemed to be a limit. I worked in sales and marketing for a number of global businesses, and whether it was client meetings or nights out with friends, opening and finishing a bottle – and then starting another – was just accepted. I was a switch, not a dial. Once one bottle ended, another would be ordered. Work events made it easy to drink to excess, too; bottles kept coming, and nobody paid attention to how many you might have gone through. It was a vicious cycle.
Though I never thought I had a problem, in each of my three marriages, my drinking always came up. I always insisted that I was fine, that they all drank too, and that I was just enjoying myself in the same way as everyone else. Ever since my late teens, between my hockey mates, partners and work, I had constant validation: everyone seemed to have a glass in their hand. Every supermarket sells six bottles of wine at 25 per cent off, which I took as confirmation that it was OK to buy a case at a time – even if I was getting through the whole thing in two days.
Things hit their worst in lockdown, when I was 57. I was by then working for my third wife’s business and the weather was nice, so drinking a bottle of rosé at two o’clock in the afternoon on the patio became my norm. Once the top of a bottle had come off, that was it. I was drinking three bottles of wine three or four days a week, often after my wife had gone to bed, hiding the empties in the spare-wheel compartment in the boot of the car. I would often tilt bottles forward on our wine rack so they looked like they were still full, despite the fact I had demolished them. I’m sure she knew what I was doing, no matter how well I thought I was hiding things.
The more I drank, the more alcohol was constantly on my mind. Where was my next fix going to come from? Once Covid restrictions loosened, how could I next engineer a dinner party or having my in-laws over, so I could spend the rest of the day and night drinking?
There are so many things I did during that time that I’m still devastated by. On one occasion, I drove home from a restaurant with my two children, then aged 10 and 12, in the car, despite my wife and I having had nearly three bottles of wine between us. She had asked me not to drive and said we should get a cab back, but I brushed it off. When we got home she rightly laid into me, saying that I had the most precious things in the car – our children – so how could I have got behind the wheel? That should have been enough of a wake-up call. But when you’re in the grip of alcohol addiction, it just keeps taking over.
That incident led to my wife issuing an ultimatum for me to sort my life out. I took it as seriously as I could, and agreed to do Dry January in 2021. But your mind is always on where the next drink’s going to come from. During that abstinence period, all I could think was: how can I cheat?
I got through the month, but as soon as February began, a friend who was running a wine-import business wanted to do an online wine tasting. He sent everybody servings of loads of different wines, and we all gave our feedback over Zoom – and that was it. Across the course of the next month, I drank around 10 bottles (sometimes more) a week, until my wife told me that she was taking the kids to her mother’s house.
I can still picture myself pouring half a bottle of red wine down the sink and going, “You’ve really got to take this seriously now.” I went for a walk at midnight, finally acknowledging the fact I had a problem. She then came back the next day without the kids and told me that I had to leave.
That gave me my “why”: I had to get clean, for the sake of my family. Moving out made me hit what I call my “T-junction moment”. I rented a flat, and sat there with my possessions of one chair and a television. I realised that everybody expected me to go and buy some more wine, and start drinking again.
But the other direction was to try to use what had happened to me as a positive, and that’s what I did. I started the Alcohol Free Drinks Company, a 0-per-cent-proof firm, to give people more of a choice in social environments where they might otherwise be pressured into drinking.
I haven’t touched a drop for five years, and have used support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous (like Lloyd-Webber), Forward Leeds (an alcohol charity near me) and Andy’s Man Club (a male peer-support organisation) to stay away from alcohol.
I know I’ll never drink again. I don’t need to. Still, I look back on that time with so much sadness and regret. I fixed things too late to save my family. I just think: “You idiot. You had everything that you wanted in life and you threw it away.”
All I can do is try to be a better version of myself today than I was yesterday, and continue to be honest about what I’ve been through. Until you’ve talked about your problems openly, you’re unlikely to find your “why”. But once you have, life becomes so much better.
As told to Charlotte Lytton
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