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What a disaster!
My diet has gone to literal pot as I find myself stressed out by deadlines and seemingly unable to stop eating. I am still a good deal slimmer than I was at the start of the year, but I am finding it difficult to put the brakes on again.
I’ve been having the occasional alcohol free beer, even though I am not a massive fan, but it seems to suggest a hankering for the real thing. I bought a box of Peronis for visitors and a box of Peroni Libera and tonight as I cooked a chilli I helped myself to a Libera and it hit the spot. I hadn’t managed to get any work done all day as I had lots of chores and was looking after the kids for the afternoon and after school, so my plan was to look through the four Relativity scripts ahead of tomorrow and fill in any gaps (if you said I’d only get four scripts ready for the read through -well done. You were correct).
I grabbed another beer from the fridge so I could pretend I was a drunk writer and poured it into a glass because I am classy and drank it slowly over the next hour as I worked.
I didn’t notice anything unusual about it to begin with. I actually thought it tasted a bit weaker and more non-alcoholly that the first one. You can only fool yourself for so long.
But it did seem a little maltier or something and I got a mild queasy feeling as if it was making me drunk. I mean, obviously I was imagining that… I couldn’t have accidentally picked out a real beer. It was in the same place as the non-alcoholic ones. What kind of maniac would put them there? Also it didn’t seem to have any kick to it.
But as I got to the dregs I suddenly worried that I might have made a mistake. I went to the kitchen to check and found that I had indeed picked out a regular Peroni and drunk nearly all of it. This was the worst of all worlds. I had had my first beer of 2019 and I hadn’t even realised that I was drinking a beer, so I hadn’t even enjoyed it as such. But to be fair it hadn’t seemed any different than a non-alcoholic one anyway and had just made me feel slightly queasy and affected my concentration a bit.
It sort of doesn’t count, of course. It was an accidental ingestion, but purists will claim that I have not had a dry year now. If I allow myself to think like that then I might actually start drinking again, so I am going to give myself a pass, because I didn’t know it was alcoholic and so didn’t get to enjoy it anyway. But the interesting thing was that it wasn’t enjoyable at all. Not just because of the disappointment of the error, it made me feel grotty and depressed rather than relaxed and buzzy. Even after one beer I would wake up with that dry mouthed thing later in the night. And after a good period of uninterrupted nights (by the kids anyway), with Catie out very late working, this was the night that Ernie chose to puke up on himself for the first time in ages. It’s possible I’d given him beer instead of milk - I am clearly not mentally sharp right now. But I got very little sleep as I looked after my confused and sad little boy.
At least this wasn’t a “I’ve drunk alcohol and now I’m going to drink all the alcohol” moment and I think it has made me more likely to not drink in 2020 (but we’ll see). Still feel like a dumbass though.
