The kitchen at ten to seven

Here's an example. It's a Thursday. The meeting at three went badly, the train sat outside the station for twenty minutes, and you get in at ten to seven with your shoulders somewhere near your ears. You drop your bag in the hall and take your shoes off. You open the fridge, pour a glass of white wine, and take the first mouthful standing at the counter.

You breathe out. It's the first proper breath since about half past two. By the time the onions are in the pan the radio's on and you're half listening to it. By the time you sit down to eat, the meeting has shrunk to something you can deal with tomorrow.

If somebody told you at that moment that the wine had done nothing, you'd think they'd never had a day like yours. You felt it work. It took one mouthful.

I'm not going to tell you that you imagined it. The relief at the counter is real, and a book that starts by denying it deserves to be put down. What I want to look at is the timing.

The breath out came with the first mouthful. Alcohol doesn't work that fast. In one small study, fifteen men drank beer, wine or vodka and tonic over twenty minutes on an empty stomach, and the researchers tracked their blood alcohol. It peaked at about 36 minutes for the vodka, 54 for the wine and 62 for the beer. With food in the stomach it's slower still. Some alcohol reaches the blood within minutes, but nothing like enough to drop your shoulders at the first sip.

So something else did that. Here's what else changed in the same two minutes. You got home and the front door shut behind you. Your shoes came off. Nobody in that kitchen can ask you for a revised forecast. You had something cold that tastes nice. And you told yourself, in the act of pouring, that the working day was over.

I think that last one does most of the work. The pour is a small ceremony. It's how you announce to yourself that you're off duty, and the announcement is what your shoulders respond to. The wine then arrives in your bloodstream half an hour later, adds a mild sedation to a person who has already relaxed, and takes the credit for the lot.

You've seen someone at a pedestrian crossing press the button a second time just as the lights change. They step off the kerb feeling they made it happen. The lights were about to change anyway. The glass at ten to seven isn't quite that, because alcohol does do something when it gets there. But the first sigh belongs to the button-pressing kind of cause.

Three terms will come up through the book, so I'll fix them now. "The glass" means the drink as the thing you give the credit to. "The setting" means everything else that changed when you picked it up, the place and the company and the time and what you'd just stopped doing. "The credit" is the story you tell afterwards about which of them did the work.

The same question applies to the other place you'd say drink helps, which is a room full of people. You arrive stiff, you get a drink, and twenty minutes later you're fine. Chapter 4 looks at what happened in those twenty minutes.

For now, one observation. If you have a drink this week, look at the clock when you pour it and again when you first notice yourself relax. Then list what else you did in that gap. You don't need to change anything yet. You're only checking my claim about the timing against your own kitchen.