[luckyjimm]

I gave up booze completely in 2003 and stayed off it for 22 months. At that point I'd lived in London for seven years. I drank way too much at university, often to blackout / vomiting my guts up. I had such disastrous hangovers. When I drank, I couldn't stop, etc, etc. But I thought that red wine was my best friend; I felt so relaxed and at peace when I drank it; it was my morphine. The problem was I felt good after a bottle, bad after two, and was basically a bum if I had any more. I went to AA for six months then stopped going but stayed off the booze.

The first few weeks without my crutch I found really hard; drinking had neutered my emotions, my sense of who I am or where I was going, it wiped out my memory. All that came crashing back and it was like a form of grieving, for the mistakes I'd made and the things I'd lost through my drinking. Also part of my self-image was that I was a drinker - I felt darkly poetic, that I had this vice which made me special. Drinking in odd situations made me feel edgy - I remember once going to Italy, my mum went out for 20 minutes before driving me to the airport and I'd bought a bottle of wine and just downed it, then drank again at the airport bar, then again on landing. I remember drinking on tube trains, always travelling drunk. Suddenly I wouldn't have that.

But so many disastrous things had happened to me when I was drunk. I was the kind of person who made drinks disappear. At university this was pretty much acceptable, but as I got older I wasn't hanging around with a drinking crowd - in fact, I had lost a lot of friends because of what drink did to me. It also made me overweight and lazy.

Not drinking is easy when you get used to it. Fortunately I made a new crowd of friends who liked going to art exhibition launch parties, meals in restuarants, poker nights and dinner parties much more than sitting around in pubs or bars. Even when they did that, my not drinking wasn't a problem. Being an out-of-control drunk is much more likely to cause you problems than being sober, on form, witty, in control of yourself and taking part in conversation with your wits about you; able to judge a situation well, and generally being a much nicer person because you're sober.

I'd really recommend giving sobriety a try. The period I spent not drinking was the best time of my life. I slimmed down, I made so many new friends, my social life was much better than when I was drinking, and there really weren't that many awkward situations. I was much clearer about what I wanted from life, and so much more effective at achieving it, compared with the periods before or after, when any ambitions I might once have had are lost in the fug of addiction.

When I wasn't drinking I did find myself getting into other vices for example strip clubs and then poker. Poker came to replace alcohol as my means of self-destruction. I did eventally start drinking again but, happily, I found I wasn't as interested in it any more simply because my urge to play online poker is so much stronger and I want to be sober for that. Now the blackouts and the vomiting don't happen to me any more, and I drink much less frequently than I did in the past. Which makes me question the idea of alcoholism - or at least I would add the condition that an addict can be "cured" of one addiction by replacing it with an equally powerful one!