Like increasing numbers of Brits, Robert Crampton had a guilty secret: he was drinking more, the older he got. Way more. In a brutally honest account, he reveals what finally led him to quit.
Last July, six months ago, just shy of my 55th birthday, the penny finally dropped that I needed to stop drinking. Shortly before the penny dropped, so did I, face first, in our back garden, your well-refreshed correspondent having stumbled over his own feet on account of being outrageously drunk. As luck (bad at the time, good in retrospect) would have it, I didn't choose the lawn or the flowerbed to fall flat in; I chose the blinking rockery. And thereby, as the name suggests, when my face arrived at terra firma, it didn't connect with anything soft or yielding or forgiving, it connected smack-bang with a rock.
Ouch.
But never mind ouch. "Ouch" I can deal with. The problem with a rock, as opposed to grass or mud, is a rock leaves a bruise. A big red-purple-brown-yellow bruise across your nose, eyes and forehead. A bruise you cannot easily explain to your family and friends. A bruise that your kids can't help but notice when you make the absolutely schoolboy error of facetiming them for a chat not long after the impact.
Had I, I asked myself, levering myself unsteadily upright out of the rockery, become an alcoholic? Probably, yes. Then again, does the precise definition matter? The fact is, over an extended period – 8 years, 20 per cent of my adult life – I had been drinking way too much. Not drinking immoderately or heavily or even excessively, but drinking absurdly. As in, drinking in one day what the British Medical Association (BMA) recommends you drink as a maximum in a week.
The received wisdom from alcohol addiction experts is that the amount doesn't matter – it's the need to drink that counts. Whether you require, or think you require, one stiff measure to function or seven, is not the issue. That's the line, and I'm sure there's a lot of truth in it, and I defer to those with greater knowledge than I. And yet common sense tells me that if you're knocking back three pints a night you've got less of a problem than if you're knocking back eight.
As regards my consumption, while I always liked a beer, bladder size and gut-related vanity prevented overindulgence in that beverage. My own tipple was vodka. Or became vodka, rather, out of necessity. I never particularly liked the stuff, but it was cheap (a half-bottle of Glen's finest retails at £7.29, a mere 56p a unit) and it went down easily. Also, that old alkie faith in Russia's ruin not having a detectable odour and leading to less ferocious hangovers is sort of true. As the drunk's rocket fuel of choice, vodka is certainly more discreet than whisky, brandy or gin.
Although not discreet enough for sober, halfway perceptive witnesses not to notice that Robert is a bit pissed. Or indeed for Robert not to feel crappy in the morning.
Part of me remains amazed that this problem engulfed me in the first place. I was never much of a drinker in my youth. Growing up in the Seventies, neither of my parents were big on alcohol. As for their parents, all four were more or less teetotal. They didn't have the money to spend on discretionary items such as alcohol and they didn't approve of it anyway. In the case of my dad's parents, their objection stemmed from northern Methodist temperance. In my mum's family, booze offended both their working-class pride and their dedication to what they saw as a higher political and social cause. My mum grew up on a south London council estate – I vividly remember my grandma disparaging those families she deemed less than respectable. Her chief criterion for doing so was that they drank. Drinking was a sign of weakness and a lack of fibre, ambition and seriousness.
My dad wasn't a pub man. Even when the family became more affluent in the Eighties and Nineties, and in common with many people were more able to afford to have supplies of booze in the house – and, like many Brits, when Mediterranean holidays exposed us to the delights of wine – while I saw my dad tipsy, I never saw him drunk. As for my mum, she barely touched the stuff. I know there's solid evidence that alcohol abuse is genetic. It doesn't seem to apply in my case.
Throughout my teens, my twenties, my thirties and into my early forties, my drinking was consistently moderate. Sure, I had my moments, at the college football team end-of-season dinner, and on holiday. But those moments were few and far between. What makes you a problem drinker is not a sporadic binge; it is knocking back large quantities day after day after day. For my first 40-plus years, I did not do that. Drinking far too much once a month isn't ideal, but it doesn't add up to anything dangerous. Drinking a bit too much (or a lot too much) every day does.
I used to think this trajectory from youthful moderation to middle-aged excess was unusual. And maybe it was, back in the day, when the norm was to go a bit wild for a few years before settling down to your responsibilities. Digging into current research, however, I find my journey is bang on trend. According to an article in The Times in 2018, for example, doctors were reporting a fourfold increase over the past 20 years in middle-aged people with a drink problem.
I can relate to that. I'm not saying my contemporaries drink as much as I did, but hey, many of them give it a right old go. From the standard half a bottle of wine a night, every night (which adds up to 35 units a week, more if you let rip at the weekend), right up to the 100 units a week that TV presenter Adrian Chiles (then aged 51) 'fessed up to in a documentary 18 months ago, most members of my generation are chucking it down.
I interviewed Vinnie Jones not long ago. Having been, by his own admission a major boozer for much of his life, Vinnie knocked the sauce on the head seven years ago. "Drinking's a young man's game," he told me. I knew what he meant – even though, in point of fact, his hard-earned insight is no longer true. Witness the much commented- upon abstinence among millennials. Certainly my own children (born 1997 and 1999) barely seem to drink.
Overindulgence is not just an issue for the middle-aged either, but specifically for the middle-aged middle class. When asked in a survey in 2018 if they had drunk alcohol in the past week, almost 80 per cent of Brits earning over £40,000 a year (the average yearly income is about £28,000) said that they had. That compares with just 46 per cent of those earning less than £10,000 who gave the same answer. Six per cent of those in the highest income bracket described themselves as teetotal, as against 28 per cent of those in the lowest. Well-off baby boomers are most likely guzzling more at their polite dinner parties than are the local wasters reeling around on the park bench.
Every day, I pass Maria and her pals in the park, each of them clutching a can. I have to remind myself that if Maria and I compared consumption, I'd probably be well ahead.
I know what I'm talking about. As an inveterate record-keeper, I've got the stats. In 2007, the year I turned 43, I drank 747 units of alcohol. That's as near as dammit two units a day. That year, I didn't drink at all on 178 days. That's as near as dammit 50 per cent. Which means when I did drink, I averaged four units. Nothing to worry about unduly, but creeping up nonetheless.
The following year, 2008, the creep became if not a sprint, then certainly a decently speedy jog. Something had changed. I went from two units a day and 50 per cent dry to 6 units a day and just 10 per cent dry. Which means that nine days out of every ten, I had some booze. Almost seven units of booze in fact (on drinking days), which is the best part of a bottle of wine. Or, more specifically, three delicious margaritas at the cocktail bar that opened on our local shopping street that year.
When I used to drink, it was in a social context. In the evenings. With other people. Not in the day. Alone.
Yup, if I'm looking for excuses, 2008 encompassed a perfect storm of plausible get-out clauses. That year, the children turned eleven and nine respectively. Too young to leave home alone without a babysitter – and we didn't – but not so young that we couldn't call on a neighbour or a pal for an hour or two and know they'd be OK, given we were only 200 yards away.
I mean, c'mon! Nicola and I (especially Nicola) had been model parents for more than a decade. We deserved some downtime. As luck would have it, south Hackney had begun to gentrify at a rapid rate. The gentrification included a range of agreeable watering holes. At the same time, Nicola's cousin Steve and my cousin George – thirsty men, the both of them – came to live nearby.
Party time!
That consumption pattern gurgled along happily for four years. Up a bit, down a bit, not much change. Too much, obviously, at 40-ish units a week, but nothing absurd. Nothing outrageous. And, while I drank almost every day, I didn't always drink a lot. And when I did, it was in a social, public, having-a-blast context. In the evenings. With other people.
Not in the day. Alone.
Compared with what subsequently happened, my drinking in those years – covering my mid to late-forties – seems restrained. Even so, I must have known I was overdoing it, because in 2010 I decided to cut back radically, a decision I announced on the front cover of this very magazine. And for a while, I did manage to revert to a much more modest intake. In the first three months of 2011, for instance, I averaged just two (and a bit) units a day, with well over 50 per cent of those days completely dry. And then that summer my dad died suddenly, and by the end of the year I was back to where I had been.
And then, 2012, bam – from around 6, maybe 7 units a day, my intake doubled, to almost 14. To be clear, that's 14 units per day, not 14 units per week, which is the BMA recommended maximum for a man. I registered precisely three dry days that whole year. As in, I drank alcohol on 362 out of 365 days. No, hold on, 2012 was a leap year: make that 363 out of 366. Is that better or worse? You decide!
By this stage, I reckon I was starting to compete with Maria, if only because, even at a scandalously cheap 50p a unit, I don't think she can afford to down much more than I was getting through at that point.
I mention my dad's death as if it were causal, but to be superhonest, while naturally it hit me hard, it won't wash as an excuse. My mum more or less instantly sank into a profound depression which lasted until her own death four and a half years later, in December 2015. Managing her affairs, travelling up to the family home in Hull from London every two or three weeks, calling her sometimes for hours every night, my life certainly got a lot more stressful. But the extra boozing didn't result from that stress; it exacerbated it. My drinking had been on the rise before my dad died. His absence and the added responsibility it brought could – indeed, should – have prompted a serious reduction. Instead, I went the other way.
That said, and this isn't a justification, merely an observation, losing my dad (the first irreversibly bad event to befall me, at just shy of 47 years old, potent evidence of human progress) did engender two relevant reactions. One was, "Aw shit, we're all mortal after all, even my dad. I might as well enjoy myself." My other, rather more subtle, takeaway from the old fella's demise was a sense that my connection to the earlier, more austere, more ascetic and specifically more alcohol-free age that he embodied was broken. He wasn't around to keep me in check any longer, basically.
Fourteen units a day is almost one hundred units a week. Which is problematic. In and of itself, but especially if it persists. Neck that amount for a year and then rein it in and you'll probably be OK. Keep at it for any length of time, and your body will start to protest. You'll put on weight. You'll oversleep. You'll forget important dates, not turn up when you should do – or, worse, turn up drunk. When that happens – not always, but inevitably – you will sometimes make an arse of yourself in public. People will start to notice.
The first, second and maybe even the third time, depending on previous experience, your degree of intimacy with them, the frequency and nature of your behaviour, they'll forgive you. They will accept – if not perhaps always believe – your excuses: under the weather; exhausted; on antibiotics; overworked; depressed; issues with the kids; issues with the parents, etc.
Your family/friends/boss/colleagues will accept these excuses in part because sometimes some of them will be true. They will, however, become less true less often.
And thus, as night follows day, you will get rumbled. However high-functioning you might consider yourself to be. However clever, cunning and cautious you are about covering up and compartmentalising your behaviour, if you're regularly drinking that much alcohol, you're on the edge of losing control a lot of the time.
Having shielded the children from their dad's grim addiction, my wife finally told them.
And that really, was the story of the eight years from my dad dying up until last summer. I drank less. But I still drank. My wife became gradually more concerned. I said I'd cut down. I didn't. I said I'd limit myself to wine. I said I'd stop altogether. I didn't. Three, four, five times a year, I'd get busted. She'd come home early, or I'd come home late, and I'd be unable to disguise the intoxicated state I was in. She'd accuse me, with a growing degree of certitude, of being drunk. I'd deny it. She'd stand her ground. I'd continue to deny it. She'd cite the evidence, going all forensic on my ass. I'd turn nasty. She'd get upset. More than anything, Nicola was concerned for my health.
She was right to be.
The next morning, head banging, sobering up, full of guilt and contrition, I'd admit that, yes, I'd strayed from the path of righteousness. Nicola would forgive me, while remaining angry. We'd have a shitty three or four or five days. After which, my wife being a relentlessly optimistic soul (for which, much thanks; given a different personality, she'd have binned me), we'd crack on.
What changed following my admittedly spectacular tumble in July last year? Nicola had found me out many times before; what was different about that particular incident? That question is easily answered: having previously shielded the children from the grim reality of their dad's addiction, she told them all about it. Fair play. They were by then 22 and 20 years old respectively. They weren't little kids or vulnerable teenagers any longer. And Nicola was at her wits' end as to how she might get me to stop. She judged that Sam and Rachel were mature enough to handle the truth. She duly dobbed me in.
And it worked. Long story short: the kids were aggrieved (without, I detected, being entirely surprised) and they were also desperately, heart-rendingly insistent that I change my ways.
So I did and I have.
It turned out that while I was prepared to risk the destruction of my relationship with my wife, I could not countenance doing the same to my children. Blood is thicker than water, right? Whether that makes me a good dad or a bad husband, I don't know. I'd settle for average in both departments.
For whatever reason, I've found coming off the booze these past six months peculiarly easy. No tremors. No cold sweats. No movie-style "Christ I need a drink" moments. I've had fairly frequent twinges of desire, admittedly, but none so twingey as to countas a craving. I'm not claiming any unusual reserves of willpower. Not least because on the three occasions since July when the twinge has escalated into something more severe, I have succumbed to temptation every time. Twice I managed to avert a serious relapse. The other time I, er … didn't.
Still, as I never tire of saying to my wife once the dust has settled on the latest episode, all we can do is move on. And we do.
Written by: Robert Crampton
© The Times of London