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  1. In all of today’s excitement I completely forgot to post this.

    As I said when I got to 1000 days, I’m not one for blowing my own 🎺 but I am really proud of this. There have been difficult days, ( yesterday, for no reason whatsoever, I could have killed for a big fat bottle of chewy red wine,) but I could count them on the fingers of one hand; which isn’t bad out of 1,095 days.

    I don’t think I was an alcoholic but I could never have just one drink. As soon as I got ‘the buzz,’ it was on. Drinking red wine with my best mate Tony was so much fun; drinking Guinness and Jamesons chasers with my old pal Jack was dangerous; and drinking pint after pint with Des, my oldest mate, was heaven, just laughing and gabbling about music.

    In 2018, Des died; he basically drank himself to death; and I had a delayed breakdown. Then Tony got a horrible, vicious form of dementia and was gone in the blink of an eye; even though he stayed alive for a couple of years.

    I’d been worried about how much I liked drinking on my own; a couple of bottles of red could disappear so easily on a Friday night. Once Des & Tony had gone in such quick succession, it got worse. So when I retired and there was no reason not to drink every night, it really started to worry me.

    For Christmas 2021, a sommelier friend, @gastrogram89, gave me a fantastic bottle of my absolutely favourite red wine, an Amarone from Valpolicella in north-east Italy. It was the kind of bottle of red I could only dream of drinking and, on Boxing Day 2021, I drank it…..and another red and a few beers and a couple of Jamesons and then I figured that, if I was going to stop; something I’d been thinking about for ten years but which had been exacerbated by the deaths of my two best friends; then that bottle of Amarone, the very best bottle of wine I had ever drunk, was a good place to do it.

    And that was it. No alcohol has entered my bloodstream for 3 years, to the day. I’ve even asked for alcohol dessert sauces to be changed, ( hot sauces and gravy where the alcohol gets cooked out are fine,) in our favourite restaurants.

    So here I am, happy to be in control and 3 years sober.

  2. I’ve been thinking about mortality and health over the last couple of years. There’s been quite a few deaths amongst people I know through work. Some have been no surprise: the one who smoked himself to death, right up to the end, the one who fell downstairs, while almost certainly drunk and went to bed having bumped their head but never woke up and the one who had years of very hard living in all sorts of ways. However, a significant number have been relatively clean living, very much so in one case, a teetotal vegetarian, yet the one common factor seems to be cancer, where I would have expected heart disease or some other malaise to have been prevalent. The last funeral I went to was of a guy I’d known for 25 years or so, gone 3 months after diagnosis with renal cancer, barely enough time to put his affairs in order.
    I doubt I’ll ever be teetotal but I hope to tread the middle ground for many more years. Congratulations on your 3 years

  3. Many congratulations Niall !
    I went dry for the first three months of this year and then slowly back onto it, trying to tread the middle ground between all or nothing. It didn’t last too long and the taste/opportunity/ propensity to stress got me 🥴

    I can do all or nothing but in-between is a hard one for me. As it stands I got four bottles of whiskey and bourbon this Christmas that cost five hundred quid or so from my wife/family and there’s 25 plus bottles of cider in the garage with my name on them.
    I will absolutely go dry for three months on 1 Jan and hopefully figure out the best way after that.

    Good on you to though, you should be proud pal.

  4. Great work, Niall. My oldest pal is 24 years sober, and has had quite the journey, culminating in becoming a dad for the first time in his late 50s.
    Incidentally, I waited and waited to see the downside, any downside, to the extreme drinking in the final episode of Gavin &Stacey. Still waiting.

  5. Huge congratulations, Niall. You are absolutely right to flag this milestone, not least because it allows others the pleasure of celebrating it.

    You should be very proud, and it’s great to hear that you’re enjoying life. Well done mate 👏👏👏

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