For twenty three years, Tania Glyde was a proud participant in UK pisshead culture. She wasn’t what most would consider as ‘alcoholic’ as she never drank during the day and most of her heavy boozing took place in bars or at parties. Her drinking started in her teens as a social thing, but slowly became a crutch that she couldn’t imagine a night out – or in – without.
Tania’s descent into dependency and depression - and her eventual decision to give up alcohol altogether - are chronicled in her acclaimed book Cleaning Up: How I Gave Up Drinking and Lived. A few months ago, after six years of sobriety, Tania had a stroke. She is only 41. She has been told it could, possibly, have been caused by her past binge drinking…
I’m not convinced about the unit-counting aspect of the Know Your Limits campaign. The maths of it is too hard – especially after the first drink – and the ‘science’ behind it doesn’t really apply as people have such different body types. It’s not just about being male or female. Being different weights and sizes makes a massive difference too, as does individual physiology: some people simply process alcohol better than others.
The trouble is that in Britain we have a rather childish streak when it comes to our drinking culture – we’ll talk about how we got so drunk we pissed ourselves almost with a note of pride. Obviously we don’t actually enjoy being smeared with sick, but we seem to consider that it comes with the territory of having fun and being a bit wild. Drinking gives us the permission we seem to crave to be juvenile, dirty and imperfect. We must be one of the few societies in the world where two people can go on a first date, get so drunk they puke and end up getting married. Being a serious party animal is increasingly seen as a badge of honour and that’s where having more disposable income comes in, as we want to show publicly how successful and rich and strong we are. It’s a continuum of consumption, where being a ‘lightweight’ is the ultimate putdown.
So, appealing to our vanity in terms of the night itself may not work – but perhaps ‘drinking alcohol makes you put on weight’ or a reminder that ‘drinking makes you feel shit the next day’ just might. If you got people to measure their hangovers – how they felt on a Sunday morning or at work after a ‘school night’ binge - using psychological tests about how they actually feel might make them realise that being semi-hungover all the time is going to make them depressed. It’s important to remember that depression manifests itself in different ways, which might not involve sitting crying at home, or staring into space – it could involve aggression. I don’t think most people realise how much the alcohol in our system actually affects us psychologically.
If everyone sobered up for a few months and let everything get out of their system, things would change radically. We’d realise how shit things are in terms of equality, pay, debt and so on, and would actually do something about it. Drinking is about anaesthetic as much as hedonism – as are all the drugs we do. Cocaine, heroin, alcohol and cannabis all actually work to anaesthetise our senses. They disinhibit you, but also kill pain and quieten our minds, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
It’s frustrating, the insidious way that pressure is on people to conform and consume. Nobody is forcing us to get into debt, claw up the career tree or the property ladder, be a super mum and a super model - it’s framed as personal choice, but choice is an over-exaggerated term. You let yourself get crowbarred into all kinds of things through group pressure and self pressure. You have to be a very strong person not to get sucked in. It’s a taboo, really, to be content.
If people in this country could be more expressive and take more time to smell the roses, this might counter that need to get plastered – but we may have gone too far to come back. We seem to be locked into a culture which gives such a strong sense of entitlement and which makes us so many promises that can never be fulfilled. The media are full of celebrities and products which actually make us incredibly unhappy without even realising it. I can’t blame any young person, especially girls, for reacting to modern culture by getting trashed, as it means you can get away from having to be the perfect person all the time. If you’re singing songs, grabbing guys’ crotches, having your eighteenth double vodka and puking everywhere, you don’t have to be that person anymore.
One idea I like is if we could turn our intoxication into more of a special ritual. If everyone could just plan to have a huge two-day party every two or three weeks, once a month, maybe at the full moon, and it was a big deal and everyone was involved and we could discuss it and recover together for a few days. I know it’s a fantasy but it might be a healthier and more satisfying way of doing it.
So the government hasn’t got it right yet – instead of understanding people they seem to treat them like an inconvenience to be herded around. If your job doesn’t have the potential to make you a millionaire then they don’t pay much attention to you. Therefore people can’t assume they can do whatever they like to their bodies and that the NHS will be able to bail them out. I’ve learned the hard way that they don’t have the resources, nor the understanding.
I’m not anti-booze - I used to love getting drunk, but it stopped being fun. Personally I’m always trying to learn from people who seem to have have found the right path in life, and trying to encourage others to find this for themselves, which in some ways explains my ‘sexual freedom’ work. I find that when people actually have an outlet to experience joy, release, expression and intimacy – in other words, contentment in forms of personal expression – they need booze less. I’m on a permanent quest for these sorts of things. Sobering up isn’t about having less fun. You can experience much more when you’re not anaesthetised by booze."
Cleaning Up: How I Gave Up Drinking And Lived, Serpent's Tail, £10.99
Tania Glyde website
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