What the glass gets the credit for

Nobody keeps doing something for years that does nothing for them. If you drink regularly, the glass seems to be paying you in several ways, and it helps to lay them out before examining any of them.

Relaxation comes first for most people, the ten to seven glass. Confidence comes second, the feeling that you're better company with a drink in you, quicker and warmer and less watchful. Chapters 3 and 4 take those two, since they're the ones in the title.

Then there's fun, the sense that a night with drink in it is a night where things happen. There's sleep, the nightcap that sends you off. There's reward, the glass as the thing you've earned by getting through the day. There's belonging, the rounds and the toasts and the bottle opened when friends arrive. There's taste. And there's identity, being someone who knows their wine or likes a proper pint.

Each of these gets its own look later. Some hold up better than others. I think taste and belonging have more to them than sleep and confidence do, and I'll say why.

The tool for examining them is one question, and I'll call it the test question. What else changed when I picked up the glass? It's the question from the kitchen. Work stopped, the door shut, the shoes came off. At the party it's that twenty minutes went by, you found someone you knew, and the room warmed up. If a good part of the benefit can be traced to those other changes, then the glass has been taking credit that belongs to the setting.

It's easy to see why the glass gets the credit. It's the most visible thing in the scene, it's in your hand, and the culture you grew up in told you what it would do before you ever tasted it. Drink relaxes you, drink loosens you up, you need a stiff one after a shock. You'd absorbed all that by twelve.

There's a second reason, and I find it the more interesting one. You've got no comparison. If you've drunk at every wedding, every Friday night and every holiday since you were eighteen, then you have no information about what you're like at a wedding without it. Every good evening of your adult life had a drink in it, so drink looks like an ingredient of good evenings. It was also there at every flat one, every row in a taxi and every night you talked too much. It doesn't get credited with those.

The costs I'll name once and then mostly leave alone. There's the money. There are the mornings, even the mild ones. There's the sleep, which chapter 6 covers. There's a list of long-term risks that the NHS sets out plainly, including liver disease, high blood pressure, several cancers, and anxiety and depression. You know these exist.

The cost that gets less attention is the way regular drinking shapes an evening. After the second glass you won't drive, so you can't collect anyone or go anywhere. You won't start the form that needs filling in, or the book that needs attention. Someone has to check whether there's wine in the house, and it's a small bad moment when there isn't. The evening gets shorter and narrower, and because it happens every night it stops looking like a cost and starts looking like what evenings are.

None of that is an argument yet. It's the price list. Whether the price is worth paying depends on what you're getting, and that's what the next chapters test.