Happy New Year of the Tiger— Friday 11th Feb 2022

                                                                                        

About a month ago I realised it was time to take my body back in hand—seriously. I had toyed with the idea for months but lacked the will and the consistency to do it. Giving up drinking was a big part of the plan too but has proved harder than I thought.

 I come from a long line of alcoholics on both sides of the family, though oddly, my father’s parents were teetotallers belonging to a very strict religious Russian Orthodox sect. He made up for their abstinence. My mother drank more than was good for her though you would never see her drunk and her father had died from over-imbibing the demon rum too before any of us were born.

 We four children were all brought up to become drinkers, wine was on the table on Sundays although I disliked it then, especially when mixed with water—the French way—a habit I find pretty disgusting to this day, but for the children, there was always a large bottle of Bulmer’s Woodpecker cider, sweet and fruity. In those days it came in a brown glass bottle with a hard plastic stopper that screwed into the top to keep the fizz. I don’t think that this was normal for British kids in the 1960s but our family was quite Avant-Garde in that respect. We had avocados too.

 My sisters were both heavy drinkers for years. Their stories are legendary. To her credit, my younger sister joined AA at some time in the early 2000s and has more or less stayed off it since. She has occasional lapses—I know when this happens because of her Facebook decorum. When she is clean, she posts photos of cute animals and Jeff Goldblum, she makes silly comments about willies and posts puns and dad jokes which make me either groan or snort out my coffee, but when she drinks, she trawls the internet late at night and becomes abusive and swears—surprisingly she has never faced a Facebook ban. In any event, she soon goes back on the wagon and starts again with the cute animals.

 My older sister died last year of a drink and smoking-related illness.

I have one brother who drinks regularly. If you asked him, I don’t think he would describe himself as an alcoholic, but a social drinker.

And me:

I drink more than is good for me. I am a stealth drinker and I drink at times that others would not suspect. For example, as I tend to work most of my hours at the weekend, with most hours on a Sunday, I often have a Monday morning hangover and then there is nothing I like better than a cheeky Monday morning drink as I prepare a healthy lunch for myself and the girls. The girls being my two very old and smelly Westies.

When I am around friends for a meal, I drink a glass or two of wine, I eat and I chat. I might have an after-dinner drink with them, but it is over a long period of time and I rarely appear more than slightly merry. To my shame, in the past, I did not control my drinking quite as well.

 Actually, I don’t drink much, but I drink almost every day. Most people would not even consider it a problem, but I do for a couple of reasons. One—it makes me lazy and two—after a couple of drinks I make poor food choices. Both things combined make me angry with myself for overeating and for wasting hours flicking through YouTube videos of Westies or dubious sci-fi movies. I also tend to binge-watch Netflix series’, a habit that steals my evening when I should be writing or drawing.

 Two and a half years ago I moved to Malaga city, and this is where my current story begins:

 It was August the 2^nd 2019. The lead-up to my move was extremely stressful for many reasons, which is probably a whole other blog, but as that time is now passed it will not become a blog, but perhaps one day, a memoir.

 After the move, my body and brain collapsed. I went through the daily motions, unpacking, food shopping, walking dogs, feeding dogs, looking for a new job, cleaning, cooking, drinking brandy & port, and sleeping a lot of the day away on the sofa with my then three Westies on or around me. It is truthful to say that I would be lost without the doggies. I probably put on around five kilos during that period.

 I was having a nervous breakdown but didn’t realise it—I am a supremely highly functioning depressive.

 I went for an interview for a job. I was not sober and sleepwalked through it, but somehow was offered a position at “The New English Academy”, which was right on my doorstep. I began work in September and was beginning to come out of my blue funk by Christmas of that year—work is a great healer. I enjoyed my students and my new colleagues, and my life was getting better again.

 After Christmas news of a new deadly virus and lockdowns in China were starting to become worrisome and as history now knows, first Italy locked down and then Spain followed suit on March 15^th 2020 and with it went my contact job at the academy and the people I was just getting to know. My life went online and like thousands—or even millions—of others I spiralled into another depression, just as the first one was receding.

 So, I walked the dogs, bought my provisions, cooked and cleaned, taught online, drank brandy & port, and slept away a good portion of my day on the sofa, watching the reflected sunlight as it travelled across the ceiling. And I gained another five kilos or so, as I battled depression, loneliness, and the greyness of lockdown in Spain 2020.