The Good Drinker: How I Learned to Love Drinking Less

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Chiles started drinking enthusiastically in his teens, continued in his 20s and although by his 30s he had small children, he still spent a fair amount of time in the pub. By his 40s he was famous and successful, socialising a lot, which always involved drinking. His pal, the comedian Frank Skinner, told him he envied his level of drinking, his ability to drink sociably without ending up falling asleep in a skip. Skinner hasn’t touched a drop in decades. Adrian Chiles with pal Frank Skinner He never thought he had a problem, going to the pub after work, downing a few pints most nights, enjoying a few glasses of wine with dinner. I’ve occasionally been asked why it is that I need to go for a drink before watching the Albion play. I’ve always answered with something lame, along the lines of, “You wanna try watching us sober”… where does this urge come from? I’ve raced off to games hours early to give me a chance to drink a lot of beer in a relatively short time … the craic is good, usually. Sometimes it isn’t, Occasionally it’s all rather boring. But I always make the effort. Why? Well..’ Poor Siegfried looked every inch the school chess player. He wore the kind of glasses that make your eyes look bigger. I too wore glasses, being shortsighted, so I suppose we did have specs in common, but that was it.

I think he makes a clear case for having a middle ground with drinking rather than abstaining altogether. He also comes at it from a familiar perspective, having had alcohol as a big part of social events and life in general, especially during his twenties/thirties. Just as everyone’s got a different idea of what constitutes moderate drinking, there’s plenty of disagreement as to what heavy drinking looks like. My own view is as follows. Based on no scientific expertise but plenty of reading, and discussions with countless medics and drinkers (and some drinking medics), if you’re dropping much more than 35 units a week – around fifteen drinks – you’re a heavy drinker.If you’re planning on doing Dry January that’s good. But if you’re doing it to give yourself a free pass to drink like a fish over Christmas and New Year, that maybe isn’t such a good thing. Perhaps use it to incentivise yourself to have some days off the booze over Christmas – for every dry day you have, shorten your Dry January by a day.” 5. Alternate booze with water Forty years later, having put petrol-tanker quantities of alcohol through my system, I see the significance of that first drink. And, more importantly, the significance of the first drink on any given occasion. The first one is the only one that matters; it’s the only one that brings about a wondrous change in your emotional state. All subsequent drinks are increasingly fruitless attempts to recreate that initial feeling. Grasping this truth is the surest route to drinking less. Relish the first drink, and perhaps a second if you must, but don’t bother with the rest. But then, conscious of how much he was drinking, he focused on himself for a 2018 BBC documentary Drinkers Like Me to test how his regular drinking affected his health. He discovered he was drinking up to 100 units a week and a doctor told him he had signs of liver damage. The popular broadcaster and columnist sets out to discover the unsung pleasures of drinking in moderation. If wine is being freely poured, fill your glass with water once you’ve drunk the wine. Don’t drink any more wine until you’ve finished the water.” 6. Consider alcohol-free drinks

Adrian never talks down to the reader and is very open about his shift in perspective when faced by medical advice to cut down (after being sure he wasn't doing much harm with his weekly units each week). Remember that if Christmas is great for you, it’s probably because you’re with your loved ones and people you like who you’ve not seen for a while. It’s not because you’ve drunk so much. Don’t give alcohol all the credit.” All of which is my long-winded way of saying that if you’re a heavy drinker, even if you’re experiencing (as I did) no noticeable ill-effects, think about moderating while you can. Because there’s a fair chance that one day, if you don’t, moderation won’t be an option. It will all be too late. For the love of drinking itself, it’s worth considering.Let’s put a figure on my proportion of “essential” drinking. I’ve got it at 30 per cent. So, 70 per cent of what I’ve glugged has been for nothing. Two miles of drinks for nothing. What an idiot. And not only have I gained nothing by squirting that lot through my system, I have to consider the downsides: the money, the calories and the detrimental effect on my physical and mental health. ‘There’s too much about drinking that I enjoy,’ says Chiles Whilst I'm sure for a lot of people abstinence is the only way, cutting down and being more thoughtful about my drinking of wine works for me.

I really enjoyed the "moderators" he includes as real people with their own tactics to keep consumption at a healthy level. I also enjoyed Adrian's personal stories which made this far less like a medical self help guide and more just about his own journey with Alcohol, which many should relate to. He never ignores arguments for people choosing to go completely teetotal and he also seems honest about the fact that there is no right answer for everyone and in some circumstances, moderation just isn't an option. A scan of his liver shows he has mild to moderate fibrosis – scarring – of the liver and “significant liver fat”. “You can’t carry on like this,” his doctor tells him. Chiles is at risk of cirrhosis, end-stage liver disease and liver failure. “And death?” says Chiles. “And death,” the doctor confirms. We are all at risk of death, of course, it’s just that heavy drinkers are taking as much as 20 years off their lives. He can reverse the damage, but it involves drinking much less and having three to four consecutive alcohol-free days. This leaves Chiles as flat as leftover champagne. If it’s somewhere where there’s wine flowing, I’ll have a glass of wine but when I’ve finished that I wouldn’t drink any more wine until I’d filled that same glass with water and finished that. That’s reducing the volume and stops you being dehydrated.” The presenter, who was divorced from broadcaster Jane Garvey with whom he has two daughters in 2009, and married Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner in September this year (he’s a regular columnist with the paper), recalls: “I was looking at my drinking charts the week before my wedding and the week after and the numbers were very high. But the point is, I can see it and I forgive myself. All the experts tell him to stop. “We know a third of the people coming into the unit with alcohol-related liver damage do not meet the criteria for alcoholism,” says David Nutt, the renowned neuropsychopharmacologist (“not easy to say after a unit or two”). Half of people who drink do it to deal with anxiety and depression, he says.But Mum and Dad decided I should go. I fervently wished they hadn’t. I’d never been so miserable in all my life; come to think of it, I’ve not been so miserable since. Never have two weeks passed so slowly for anyone, ever. The school was in a town called Leonberg, near Stuttgart. I got on with Siegfried every bit as badly as I’d feared. I looked longingly at my fellow schoolmates, all having wonderful times with their new friends. The German girls were conspicuously beautiful and plainly uninterested in either me or my fellow spectacle-wearer. We shambled wordlessly home. To his bafflement I refused all his offers of a game of chess. Eventually I relented just to show him how clueless I was, which didn’t take long. No more chess was played.