My column from a fortnight ago seeking advice about how to limit my alcohol intake has produced a huge response — and not just from readers. At a dinner last week to commemorate Paul Johnson, a famous historian told me how he manages to be so prolific while still enjoying several glasses every night. He rises each day at 4:30 am, spends six hours at his desk doing serious work, then does an hour of admin, has a nice lunch, followed by an afternoon nap, another couple of hours’ work and finally a good dinner. “The key is the afternoon nap,” he said. “It’s a way of turning one day into two.”
Unfortunately for me, this requires a superhuman effort of will, but then so did many of the other suggestions. One reader was quite taken with my proposal to limit myself to 100 bottles of wine in 2024 and proposed I “earn” each unit of alcohol by engaging in vigorous physical exercise.
‘No, you don’t drink because you love the taste. You drink because you’re a drunk’
He pointed out that the average bottle of wine contains about ten units and included the following guide, which he claims to follow religiously: running = 1 unit/mile; walking = 0.5 units/mile; rowing = 1 unit/km; skiing = 2 units/hour; and swimming = 6 units/mile. “You could drink your 100 bottles this year, but you’d need to run 1,000 miles,” he said, adding: “I do more than that.”
At least this scheme has the advantage of allowing me to drink my allotted quota, unlike another suggested by a reader I’ll call Stanley. “Each week, grant yourself one decent bottle of red wine for every point the Queen Park Rangers earn,” he wrote. “As an ardent Rangers supporter this will give you even more skin in the game.”
That’s all very well Stanley, but QPR have only earned twenty-one points since August 5, which works out at less than a bottle a week. Given that our performance shows little sign of improving, I don’t think I could be quite that abstemious.
Several readers urged me to give up altogether. A freelance book editor whose father and two brothers are alcoholics told me I sounded like someone speaking for the first time at an AA meeting and still in denial. He paraphrased my article as follows: “I mean, just because I passed out in a cab and had to be helped to get into my house, that doesn’t mean that I’m an alcoholic, does it?”
He then replied sarcastically — “No of course not, and thank you for sharing that, Toby” — before telling me what he really thought: “It means that you are not in charge of your relationship with alcohol. And no, you don’t drink because you love the taste. You drink because you’re a drunk. Sorry. Your article is a catalogue of the excuses that drunks use to hide the truth from themselves.”
That sentiment was echoed by Allan, a seventy-year-old who has been on the wagon for seventeen years. “That sumptuous pleasure that used to require a glass of vintage port or Château d’Yquem is now obtainable from a deep breath,” he wrote. “Alcohol is a fraud and a cuckoo in the nest. It allows you transitory re-experiences of your natural ability to feel which it takes from you. It is humans who feel, not drugs. Give it up, Toby.”
I found these messages quite sobering, like being told a harsh truth by a kindly headmaster, but some of my correspondents were more indulgent — eighty-year-old David, for instance. “Lying in the bath and deciding whether to have a dry martini or a negroni or a simple large gin and tonic is a nearly unbeatable pleasure,” he wrote. “As well as the pre-dinner cocktail, I always drink two large glasses of red wine with my dinner.”
He added: “As you are considerably younger than me you may want to drink a wee bit more each day but don’t give up. It is one of the real pleasures in life when taken in moderation.”
A wee bit more! For the most part, people urged me to drink less each day and had lots of helpful suggestions for how to achieve this. A smaller glass, for instance, to create the illusion I am drinking more: “My previously favored large wine glass had me almost finishing a bottle after three half-filled glasses,” cautioned one reader.
A middle-aged woman pointed out that Jancis Robinson, who has a professional duty to consume alcohol, drinks a glass of water for every glass of wine, and in that way avoids getting a hangover. An elderly gent who, like me, lacks an “off switch,” shared his secret of stopping after three glasses: he makes himself a cup of milky tea. “If you do have another sip of wine the milk residue in your mouth will ruin the taste,” he says.
Thank you for all your suggestions. I’m going to stick to my 100-bottle plan, but if it fails I intend to take the pledge.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
