The kitchen again

Picture the same Thursday a few months on. The three o'clock meeting went badly again, because some meetings do. The train sat outside the station. You get in at ten to seven with your shoulders up.

Bag down, shoes off. You take the good glass from the cupboard and fill it with ice and tonic and a bit of lime, and you drink the first mouthful standing at the counter. You breathe out. It arrives at the same moment it always did, because it was always the front door and the shoes and the decision to be off duty. The radio goes on and the onions go in. The meeting shrinks to something for tomorrow.

You sleep through. On Friday you wake without the faint unease and don't notice its absence, which is how you can tell it's really gone. On Saturday there's a party. You stand there with too many arms for a while, as you always have and as everybody does. Then someone introduces a cousin, and there are campervans, and at eleven you drive four grateful people home.

Whether there was a glass of good red with dinner that Saturday is your business. This book never needed you to become someone who doesn't drink. It needed you to find out what the drink does. The relaxation was mostly the stopping. The confidence was yours, signed with the wrong name. The real part of the drug was smaller than its reputation, and some of what it fixed each evening it had caused the night before.

I won't pretend the months in between are effortless, or that every evening without a drink is an improvement. Some aren't. What changes is that you're choosing with accurate information, and a glass you choose is a different thing from a glass you need.

If you do one thing today, make it small. Count last week's units on the back of an envelope, or put a start date in your diary. Either takes about five minutes.