April

LAST NIGHT, AS I slid along the polished floorboards on my knees, rocking the air guitar to Bon Jovi, it occurred to me: I don’t need alcohol to be ridiculous. For so long, booze has been my ticket to a world of silliness. I have danced on bar tops, belted out karaoke, and waltzed with stolen traffic cones, all under the protective cloak of drunkenness. But as I enter my fourth month without alcohol, I realise that I don’t always need a beer in my hand to be silly.

Nowhere is this more apparent than at an ’80s dance class. Without alcohol to amuse me, I’m open to almost any form of alternative entertainment — and this one’s a beauty. On Thursday nights, instead of enjoying pre-weekend drinks at my local boozer, I’ve been getting kitted out in legwarmers, fluoro tights, and a headband, and heading to an inner-city dance studio to bust out moves to classics from the decade that style forgot. We’ve done Alice Cooper, the Pointer Sisters, Xanadu, and, last night, the captain of cock-rock himself, Jon Bon Jovi. This is not a class for those who take themselves too seriously. So I decided pretty early on to leave my hang-ups at the door, rolled up in a ball next to my sweaty ankle socks and my vanity.

It gets me wondering, as I swing my ponytail around my head and pump my power fist in the air, why have I spent so much of my life worried about what other people think? Why has it taken half a bottle of wine for me to lose the self-consciousness that seems to follow me everywhere, like a playground bully? The more I think about it, the more I see that it’s not going to alter the course of my life irreparably if a stranger thinks that my bum looks big in my new gym shorts. If I flirt with someone at a party and they run for the door, it might be embarrassing, but it won’t kill me; and there’s unlikely to be any long-term ramifications from an uncoordinated dance routine or a dodgy note in a karaoke bar full of colleagues. As Mum’s been telling me since I was old enough to take fright at the sight of a full-length mirror, people are generally far more interested in their own lives than they are about the size of my bum or the relative boofiness of my hair on any given day. Yet I have wasted countless hours worrying about looking stupid.

This is part of the appeal of being drunk — it frees you from the suffocating constraints of social conditioning. You’re either so blind that you don’t know or care how you look, or you’re consumed by the giddy hubris of intoxication, which colours everything you do with that glowing hue of awesomeness. I must admit that I do miss the liberation of drunkenness; you have to work a lot harder to feel bulletproof when you’re sober.

So I have a choice. I can either be socially reserved, using my sobriety as an excuse for timidity, or I can let go of my inhibitions and channel my inner piss-head, minus the booze. This is what I did in February, when I saw one of my favourite bands perform: Primal Scream were touring, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of their seminal album Screamadelica. Hearing the wonderfully dishevelled Bobby Gillespie chunter on about the good old days in his gruff Glaswegian accent, as the iconic images of one of the defining albums of my generation played in a psychedelic light show behind him, I was transported back to the heady heights of my teenage years. As the first glorious bars of ‘Movin’ On Up’ rocked Melbourne’s Forum Theatre, it was the closest I’d felt to being pissed since I stopped drinking. The music was so exhilarating that I couldn’t help but dance like no-one was watching. But someone was. A picture taken by one of the Age photographers captures me dancing with such divine abandon — eyes shut, singing loudly, sweaty hair flying in all directions — that it prompted my friend Beck to comment on Facebook: ‘Holy sobriety. I didn’t think a girl could roll like that going pure.’ I’m learning that if I can lose myself in the moment, free of introspective bullshit, alcohol becomes superfluous.

But sobriety can’t make every night top-notch. At a less than enjoyable party earlier this month, I found myself hankering for a beer. Crammed into a corner, shouting banal pleasantries to strangers above the sort of doof-doof music you hear on government anti-drugs adverts, I fantasised about how a few beers might make this party better. Then it occurred to me: sometimes a shit party is just a shit party, and no amount of booze will change that. If only I’d figured this out earlier, I’d have saved myself a lot of energy making small talk with obnoxious try-hards and hooking up with charmless narcissists. Previously, if I was having a shit time, I’d drink more; I reasoned that the faster I could get pissed, the better the night would get. It wasn’t great logic, and it rarely worked.

There are, however, some things I’ve not yet learned to do sober. Sex and soda water have proven to be incompatible bedfellows. Apart from my Australia Day eve pash at Cherry Bar — a romantic interlude which, incidentally, fizzled out before it began — my love life has ground to a halt. When I pause to reflect on why this might be, I’m faced with a number of answers. Firstly, I realise that I haven’t been sober during sex in years, probably not since my eight-year relationship ended in 2007. After the split, I threw myself into a series of unsatisfying flings and one-night stands, unions all signed in the sticky ink of pale ale and vodka. I met most of the men in a bar or at a party — which, as we all know, is the ideal starting point for any meaningful relationship. There was the hot police officer, who insisted on having the true-crime television show The First 48 as the soundtrack to his performance, and tortured me the next morning by blasting out Cold Chisel songs as he drove me home in his Holden Commodore. Then there was the 20-something guy I picked up at 5.00 a.m., after deciding he was potential boyfriend material based solely on the observation that he was sexy and wearing a nice hat. In the harsh light of morning, I discovered that his hat was clearly designed to deflect attention from the fact that he didn’t seem to own shoes. And how could I forget the romantic charmer who did the deed and waited until I fell asleep to flee, leaving me to believe, for the first few minutes of the next day, that I’d dreamed the entire unedifying experience.

If this is the calibre of men I’m hooking up with when drunk, perhaps it’s better to be sober and celibate. The ugly insides of the handsome strangers I used to be attracted to are so much easier to spot now that I’m sober. Several times in the last few months, I’ve had guys chat me up, only to see them lose interest when they discover I’m not drinking. It’s disappointing, but instructive — the kind of guy who needs a woman to be drunk before he can make his move is not much of a man.

This year, I’m going to have to change my tactics. If those Sex and the City gals are anything to go by, I won’t need alcohol to pick up blokes: I’ll find my guy easily by seductively perusing canned goods at the supermarket, or by pretending to shop for power tools in a hardware store. Perhaps I’ll join one of those singles cookery classes, or adopt a dog to act as a man-magnet.

While sober dating scares the hell out of me, it’s got to be better than drunken dating disasters of the past.

WHEN I TOLD my editor that I was giving up booze, she thought it would make a good feature for the paper. We weren’t really sure how the piece would take shape, but we figured that an examination of Australia’s drinking culture, told through the eyes of a binge-drinking health reporter during a break from booze, might hold some interest for our readers. Now, she’s shocked to learn that I’m voluntarily opting to stay sober for another three months. She presumed, as I did, that when 1 April came along I’d have the drinks lined up on the bar, trumpets sounding and party poppers popping, as I counted down the last few seconds of sobriety and prepared to embrace my old pal boozy mcbooze-pants. Instead, I find myself writing a piece about my three months without alcohol, and how it has changed me so much that I’m extending my drinking ban until July. Outing myself as a massive booze hound in the national press was not part of my career plan, but this is exactly what I’m about to do.

The night before we go to print, I’m hunched over the news desk, staring at a printout of the next day’s paper. There I am, dancing like a maniac at the Primal Scream gig, my toothy grin and wayward mane prominent above a 2500-word confessional about my binge-drinking ways. My editor laughs. ‘I can’t quite believe you’re doing this,’ she says, and I shoot her a look so panicked that it prompts her to rest a hand on my shoulder and tell me not to worry. It doesn’t reassure me. Holy shit — what the fuck am I doing? Tomorrow my colleagues will read this. Health professionals who respect me, and know nothing of my party-girl side, will view me in a different light. In 12 years of journalism, I’ve never had something so personal published. Our job is to report the news, and occasionally to give our opinion on it, but rarely to become it.

The next morning I wake up early to grab the paper. My tale of drunken debauchery takes up an entire broadsheet page. My face beams back at me; it’s huge. In a secondary picture, I’m captured grinning inanely, my head wedged between two large glasses of beer — somewhere a village is missing its idiot. This morning I’m cocooned inside my flat, the blinds drawn, but I feel as if I’ve invited the world into my living room. I am starkers, in body, mind, and moniker.

Then the text messages start. Friends reading my story in bed while contending with mammoth hangovers tell me that they found it inspiring; it’s made them think about how much they drink, and why. The head of public affairs at one of Melbourne’s major public hospitals messages me to say that he found the article courageous and life-affirming. On Facebook and Twitter, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, contacts, and complete strangers are talking about the story in terms that make my heart lilt and my cheeks redden.

It’s not even lunchtime, and the article has become the most-read story on the Age website. Dozens of people leave comments. Reading them, I realise that this is not just my story — my love–hate square dance with alcohol is one that countless others are having, week after week. Many are desperate to find a new dance partner. Some comments are from women my age, caught in a cycle of partying that’s no longer satisfying. Others are heartbreaking: a man talks of his alcoholic father, reduced to drinking methylated spirits after retirement left him without the financial means to accommodate his habit; the father had died three weeks ago, brain-damaged, broken, and too young. For some, my story was neither uplifting nor motivational. One reader says that she found the article sad — sad that my peers define me by my drinking, and sad that I was scared to be my true self. Another thinks that the problem is not alcohol, but my inability to say no and to respect myself. One says that a six-month period of sobriety last year was ‘the most boring and depressing time of my life’, and informs me, ironically, that booze bans are usually instituted by social bores. A number of teenagers relate to my experience, saying they feel pressured to drink in an environment that views abstinence as abnormal. Nothing I’ve ever written has had a response like this — it’s like group therapy for binge drinkers. It suggests that this is a conversation worth having.

By the end of the day, more than 30 new bloggers have signed up to Hello Sunday Morning, most of them saying that they were inspired to give sobriety a go after reading my article. Looking at their posts, which are full of the trepidation that comes with that first step, I’m reminded of how far down this road I am: I’m reminded of how insurmountable three months without booze seemed back at the start, and how insignificant another three months feels now. As I go to sleep, my body feels warmed by a day like no other. My head spins as if I’m drunk. It is 100 days today since I last had a drink. Sobriety has never been more intoxicating.

WHEN I GET to work the next day, there are more emails from readers, friends, and contacts. Chris Raine calls, and tells me that the Hello Sunday Morning server is struggling to cope with the number of new sign-ups. Colleagues are messaging me, and stopping me in the stairwell with supportive words. It’s great that people have connected with the story, but I’m mindful that it also revealed I was a party-hardened reprobate who verballed her boss while drunk, and used alcohol as both an aphrodisiac and an antiseptic. Under the glare of the Age cafeteria’s down lights, I start to wonder if my loquacious confession was perhaps a case of oversharing. I worry even more when one colleague wishes me strength, and emails me the link to a 12-step recovery program.

Thoughts of rehab are quickly shelved when I get an email from a publisher. They read the article and loved it; they want to meet with me and discuss book ideas. I call Loretta in shock. As she squeals down the phone, an email arrives from another publisher. I hold my head in my hands. It feels heavy, as if it might roll off my shoulders. Writing a book is all I’ve wanted to do since I was a nerdy eight-year-old, lost in blissful oblivion with my nose buried in an Enid Blyton story. Who would have thought that getting pissed every weekend for most of my adult life might be the way that dream comes true?

Later, I get a call from Channel Nine. They want to fly Chris and me to Sydney the following week, to appear on the Kerri-Anne show. I have to stifle a giggle. I know that while my friends will be delighted my article has won me professional accolades and approaches from publishers, the achievement of being interviewed by the queen of daytime television will bring me the most kudos in their eyes. This is a woman so outrageously kitsch that she once persuaded a sitting prime minister to dance the rumba, and a federal treasurer to bust out the macarena, on national television. I immediately say yes.

During the week, Kerri-Anne’s producer is in frequent contact. I’m told that the interview will largely be based on the content of my article, and will centre on the challenges faced by a binge drinker who takes a break from alcohol. Chris and I are advised that we’ll be sent a series of questions, and that our answers will be provided to Kerri-Anne as ‘background’; I’m not sure why this is necessary, but I’m happy enough to do it. Yet when I get the questions, alarm bells ring. One reads, ‘When you were having a lonely evening at home with just a bottle of wine for company, did you ever feel ashamed?’ They also want to know how many drinks I had a day, and whether I ever drank at work.

I call the producer. ‘It sounds like you’re trying to paint me as an alcoholic,’ I explain. She tells me that’s not the implication, and that these questions are just to help Kerri-Anne ‘get across the issue’. I’m wary, but she’s persistent. I tell her that some nights I might have had only a couple of beers or, if I stayed home, nothing at all. But, thinking back to the marathon midday-to-5.00-a.m. Christmas party last year, I say that on rare occasions I might have had, for instance, ten to 15 drinks over a long period. This, I later discover, was a mistake.

When I arrive at Channel Nine studios in Willoughby, on Sydney’s north shore, I’m nervous. It’s my first television appearance, and it’s live. I at least look respectable after being made over by the hair and makeup department, but I worry about having a brain spasm and being rendered mute on national television. Conversely, Chris, who could talk under wet cement, is chilled. We’re led through a rabbit warren of stairwells and corridors to Nine’s basement studio, where we’re miked up and ushered on set without further instruction. We’re seated on a pastel couch under lights that make me squint. The camera is trained on Kerri-Anne, sitting opposite as she wraps up the previous segment. We’re presuming she’ll then throw to a commercial break, allowing her to introduce herself and put us at ease before we’re on air. Instead, she begins introducing our segment. ‘On a big night of partying, my next guest, Jill Stark, was drinking about 15 drinks a day …’

Fifteen drinks a day? My mouth drops open, and a snort escapes. I spot my face contorting in the monitor opposite and realise, to my horror, that I’m on camera — the image of my dumbfounded face is at that moment being beamed live to the nation. I compose myself as she continues to tell her audience about why I quit drinking. ‘After one too many hangovers and a few regretful alcohol-related incidents, she decided to turn her life around.’

The interview is a train wreck. She infers I was a booze-hag, calls me Irish, and asks if I had ‘big issues’ with alcohol; the implication is almost that I was sneaking gin in the toilets at work just to get through the morning. She introduces Chris as someone who ‘wrote a blog’, without offering any further information, and depicts him, too, as a problem drinker. But it’s live television, so we keep smiling and try to bring her back to the point: that we live in a culture that makes not drinking increasingly difficult. We’re no different from thousands of Australians our age. It’s disappointing that she either doesn’t accept this, or chooses to ignore it. Even more disappointing is the caption — ‘Jill Stark, reformed alcoholic’ — posted beneath a link to the video on the Channel Nine website the next day. When I call up to complain, the producer apologises, telling me it was a ‘human error’. But it feels like a stitch-up.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised. It’s not the first time I’d had this sort of reaction to my temporary abstinence. The assumption is that if you have to cut alcohol out completely, you must have a problem. This idea fails to take into account our culture’s unrelenting social pressure to drink, and drink to excess.

Tellingly, as we left the set, Chris asked Kerri-Anne what it would take for her to stop drinking. She rolled her eyes theatrically, saying with a smile, ‘Oh, there’d be manslaughter charges,’ and proceeded to regale us with tales of the entertainment industry’s proud tradition of heavy drinking. ‘Work is my handbrake,’ she said, with a forced laugh. The hypocrisy nearly choked me. But I smiled and said nothing. What would be the point? I was learning that although this drinking culture touches us all, not everyone’s ready to own their part in it.

IT’S GOOD FRIDAY and I’m invited to a friend’s place for dinner. I’m working through the Easter weekend, and have just knocked off. My four friends have been drinking beers all afternoon, and by the time I arrive, they’re quite merry. It’s a longer holiday weekend than usual, with Anzac Day falling on Easter Monday, making Tuesday a day off too. Everyone’s in the holiday mood, and the vibe is super-chilled. But I’m not feeling it: I’m still carrying the tensions of the newsroom, and I have to work tomorrow. For the first time in a while, I really miss beer. I just want to be on the same plane as my mates.

Knowing that I can’t drink, I opt for Plan B. There’s a joint going around; I take a few puffs. It hits me immediately. I’m not a big dope smoker — I’ll have the occasional joint if it’s passed to me at a party, but that’s all. It usually takes a while before I feel the effects, yet today I’m stoned off my face after the first few tokes. It’s not a good feeling; my body’s become so accustomed to being in control that it doesn’t react well to this foreign substance. I feel sick and my head’s spinning. It makes me realise that taking drugs to circumvent my sobriety is not a great idea. The whole point of taking a break from drinking is to find out what life’s like in an unaltered state, so getting stoned feels like cheating.

In the taxi home, I see dozens of people streaming out of bars. I’ve never paid much attention before because I’m usually working, but it seems that the Easter holidays have become a major event in Australia’s drinking calendar. The next day at work, I look up some figures. Data from Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre shows a huge spike in alcohol-related injuries, hospitalisations, and assaults on the day before the Good Friday holiday. The number of people hospitalised due to serious motor-vehicle accidents also peaks on this day, as people celebrate the start of the long weekend.

What’s more dispiriting is that Anzac Day — a day to commemorate the Australians who gave their lives in battle — has also become an occasion to get plastered. The rate of ambulance attendances for people who have passed out from drinking, and the number of presentations to emergency departments for alcohol-related assaults, increases by 50 per cent on this day. The 24 hours before Anzac Day are also associated with a higher risk of traffic accidents for people under the age of 25.

Arguably, public holidays are always big drinking occasions — people who don’t have to work the next day are more likely to over-indulge. But the association between drinking and a day to remember fallen war heroes has recently been fostered, or at least co-opted, by the alcohol industry. The most obvious example of that is the VB Raise A Glass Appeal. This Carlton & United Breweries campaign began in 2009, and encourages Australians to show their respect for fallen diggers by raising a glass of VB, and donating money to the Returned and Services League and to Legacy, which cares for the families of deceased and incapacitated veterans. The adverts, shown each year around Anzac Day, are designed to tug at the heartstrings. We hear from Bill, who reflects on his service in the navy during World War II. Sitting at home in his armchair, stroking black-and-white photographs, he talks about his mate Paddy, who was ‘sent to God’ when a plane hit them. The ad ends with a shot of Bill holding a beer as he gazes out the window, an empty chair next to him, overlaid with the words: ‘Wherever you are, whatever you’re drinking, raise a glass for our fallen mates.’

The campaign is unquestionably for a good cause, and has raised over $2.4 million since it began, with VB donating $1 million of that. CUB makes no money from the campaign, as 100 per cent of funds go directly to the RSL and Legacy. But you have to wonder about how much goodwill these adverts buy the brewing giant — to have your brand associated with helping Aussie diggers, the most enduring symbol of national pride, has got to be worth its weight in gold. And telling the public that they can show both patriotism and respect by drinking beer is marketing genius. Every time someone donates online or sees one of the adverts, they’re exposed to VB branding. For the public, this perpetuates the notion that drinking not only makes you more Australian, but is also the way that we commemorate the casualties of war. When you knock back a beer on Anzac Day, you’re doing it for your country.

Another advert from the series features General Peter Cosgrove, the former chief of the Australian Defence Force, sitting at the bar in a pub. ‘There are many departed friends I’d love to be sharing a beer with at this time of memorial,’ he says, before urging viewers to honour the soldiers’ sacrifice by going to the campaign website. ‘On behalf of all our fallen heroes and their families: cheers,’ he concludes, raising a glass. Although Cosgrove retired in 2005, for many he is still one of the most recognisable defence leaders of recent years. I’d expect army chiefs to show respect for the dead, but I’m surprised that they’d get into bed with a beer company, good cause or not, when the defence force is struggling with a drinking culture that its own leaders admit is out of control.

The chief of army, Lieutenant-General Ken Gillespie, stated that in 2009, more Australian soldiers died from alcohol-related misadventure than in the war in Afghanistan. He declared that the drinking culture had been condoned, if not actively promoted, by the organisation’s leadership; soldiers often saw heavy drinking as their reward after long tours overseas. They’d been living in confined conditions for months, often in fear for their lives, and by the time they got home, they felt they’d earned the right to unwind by drinking with their mates. The problem began in the post-Vietnam era, Gillespie said, when defence cuts sapped morale and the army’s public image took a battering over perceived failings in Vietnam. As a result, the leadership, himself included, spent far too much time at the bar. In an email to commanders, Gillespie wrote that he was sick of seeing near-daily reports of soldiers being killed, injured, or arrested due to drunken bad behaviour. His comments were a wake-up call — this year, the defence force advertised for a team of alcohol and other drug coordinators to set up support programs for soldiers with substance-abuse problems.

It is not a new thing for soldiers to have a beer to unwind after the horrors of battle. The idea for the Raise A Glass campaign came from a photograph found in the old Victoria Brewery, which shows soldiers from the 2/1st Australian Machine Gun Battalion in Egypt in 1941 — the men have formed the letters ‘V’ and ‘B’ out of empty beer bottles. But there’s a difference between kicking back with a couple of beers, and drinking so much that you injure yourself or a comrade. If even the army, a proud symbol of nationhood, has an alcohol problem, Australia’s drinking culture could take a long time to change.

I’VE BEEN OFFERED a publishing deal. The book will be a tale of a whole year of sobriety. When I was offered the contract, my first thought was: I can’t wait to tell my folks. My second was: I can’t wait to get pissed and celebrate. It’s going to take a while to recondition my brain not to reward myself with alcohol for all of life’s triumphs. Instead, I celebrate with a lovely dinner in an expensive restaurant with some of my closest girlfriends. I raise my glass (mineral water) to theirs (pinot grigio) and toast the start of a new chapter.

My friend Jodie gives me a desk as I prepare for the writing process. It has good genes; it gave birth to her PhD. I buy a high-backed leather chair with padded seat and ergonomically designed arms. I buy expensive stationery, and place framed pictures of my family on the desk to gaze upon for inspiration. Everything’s as I’d imagined it: the inner-city traffic hums outside my window, and the skyscrapers twinkle in the distance as darkness falls over fabulous Melbourne. But when I sit down to write, I’m blank. I’m gripped by interminably long periods of nothingness. Something’s missing — I need a drink.

The irony, of requiring a glass of wine to write a book about the benefits of not drinking, isn’t lost on me, but I can’t help worrying that I have cauterised my creativity by removing alcohol from my life. History is replete with artists, musicians, and writers who relied on alcohol to expand their minds and enhance their creative talents. It was the drug of choice for many of the world’s most celebrated writers. Welsh poet Dylan Thomas liked a drink — so much so that it killed him (he succumbed to alcohol poisoning in 1953, after downing 18 shots of whisky). William Faulkner, a gothic writer from America’s Deep South, favoured the mint julep, a bourbon-based cocktail. Oscar Wilde’s drink of choice was absinthe, a potent anise-flavoured spirit that was once banned for its apparently hallucinogenic properties. Wilde described it like this: ‘The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful, curious things.’

I wonder if my writing will be less wonderful without alcoholic assistance. I need advice from someone who knows. I contact Australian author and columnist John Birmingham, who wrote He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, a comic, semi-autobiographical novel about share-house living that became a cult classic and was made into a movie. On Twitter, he often spruiks the merits of a good drink as an accompaniment to writing. Sometimes, while on tour, he uploads pictures of the martini or whisky he’s about to enjoy. His prolific drunken tweets have become a must-follow feed of profanity and comedic entertainment. Alcohol seems to be a fundamental pillar in his book-writing process, as evidenced by tweets such as this one: ‘Superchilled vodka? Check. Dangerous stimulants? Check. Freshly shaved Playboy bunnies? Double check. OK. Looks like we got us a book plan.’

We’ve never met or spoken, but when I call him at his Brisbane home and introduce myself, he responds warmly: ‘Maaate, what can I do for you?’ I explain that I’m writing a book, and I’m worried that my creativity will be muzzled by my sobriety. He’s a successful novelist who enjoys a drink — could he have done it completely straight? He tells me that Felafel was written in five weeks of 18- to 20-hour days, living on ‘hot chips, whisky, and amphetamines’: ‘It was written largely under the influence because it was such a grotesque time pressure to get it done that I needed a way to keep myself up, so pills and booze was the way I did that, and specifically whisky. Beer just bloats you and you don’t feel like [doing] anything; wine puts me to sleep, like a soporific effect; but whisky, I found, for some reason, fires me up at night. It’s probably why they used to call it firewater. I know from long experience that if I have to work through until one, two, or three in the morning, the way to do that is to have my first whisky at about 11 o’clock at night. Not to get absolutely shit-faced because you’ll just pass out eventually, but one whisky an hour, for some reason, acts as a stimulant for me and lets me go for a couple of extra hours.’

This isn’t exactly the answer I was hoping for. But he assures me this is not his habitual writing practice. During the day, he only allows himself non-alcoholic liquid refreshments, such as green tea or iced water. ‘In the natural course of events I don’t drink at all, and if I’m going to take a drink in the evening, it’s because I’m editing. There’s something about editing — you’re not relying on any creative centres of the brain; you’re just going through what you’ve done previously. It’s process work: you’re looking at sentences, the rhythm of them, and it’s almost like you’re taking them apart like a motorcycle engine and trying to put it back together in a more efficient manner. Particularly if you’re using the George Orwell rule of never use ten words when two will do. There’s no poetry involved; it’s just mechanics, and, in that sense, it’s easily done with a drink in your hand.’

He advises me not to drink at all while I’m writing the book. Alcohol will make it harder for me to think clearly, and it won’t enhance my writing. Contrary to what I fear, creativity needs clarity, not intoxication, he says. It’s unexpected advice from an author who has written newspaper columns that are practically love letters to hard liquor. But there’s an element of performance to that, he says. He’s an entertainer, who plays up his public image as ‘some sort of crazed beast’. And his drinking always occurs after his writing day is done. He blames Hunter S. Thompson — the creator of gonzo journalism, whose work was heavily coloured by his use of alcohol and hallucinogenic drugs — for creating the myth that good prose requires chemical assistance. ‘I get young baby writers and journalists who want to meet me, and I’ll do that a couple of times a year almost as a public service, and a number of them turn up with fucking six-packs and bags full of dope. They just want to get on it. And I have to say, “You’re here to fucking work — and more importantly, I’ve got a meeting with my accountant and my agent this afternoon. I’m not doing this shit.” Thompson has almost an iron hold over the imagination of a particular type of young writer. They just assume that they’ve got to do the same stuff. What they don’t see is that, yeah, he was rat-shit while he had those adventures, but when he sat down to write, he did it completely fucking straight. And he would often rewrite a page 18 or 19 times to get it just right.’

As I wind up the interview, he reminds me that many of the great writers who relied heavily on alcohol ultimately ruined themselves by drinking — often through fear of failure. ‘To sit down and decide to write a book is, in some ways, to take one step along the path to your eventual doom. It almost certainly isn’t going to work for you, it almost certainly won’t sell, and there are so many people who have gone down that path and it’s destroyed them. You’re putting down that first step yourself, you’re embracing it — and to suddenly start drinking while you’re doing it is to almost hurry yourself down that path.’

Well, if I am on a path to my eventual doom, at least it might take me longer to get there by not drinking. But as I look for non-alcoholic ways to fill the gap left by wine and beer, I realise that some substitutions aren’t much better than booze. Instead of sitting down to write with a glass of pinot, I’m inhaling chocolate as if it were oxygen. It’s turning into quite a problem. This isn’t a couple-of-Tim-Tams-a-night kinda thing; I’m talking a sell-the-family-heirlooms-and-sew-your-stash-into-the-mattress type of habit. I had low-level dependency issues with the brown stuff before I stopped drinking, but now my addiction has morphed into a beast that won’t be sated by anything less than a chocolate fountain hooked up to its veins. If I don’t have chocolate every night, I get antsy.

Easter didn’t help. By the end of the holiday weekend, I’d eaten my weight in foil-wrapped eggs and was in fear of developing a body shape to match. At first I told myself that this was my treat: a girl’s got to have some pleasures in life. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink coffee, I don’t do drugs — apart from that ill-considered joint over Easter, which, the next day, caused me to have the closest thing I’ve felt to a hangover in four months — and I’ve even managed to kick my two-can-a-day Diet Coke habit. Chocolate is my only guilty pleasure. But the ‘treats’ I’m mechanically shovelling into my mouth aren’t rewarding anymore; it feels out of control, a bit like my drinking was just a few short months ago. The significance of that is something I’m not yet ready to explore.

As I start planning the book, and another eight months without alcohol, I ponder where it might take me. Will I, by year’s end, have changed my relationship with booze so much that the mere thought of an amber ale will make me nauseated? Or will I plunge back in, as if the year off the piss never happened? I suspect that finding out is going to be a bumpy ride.