"It's only small"

It is small. One glass. One bar. One order, which is a couple of taps. One episode. Small is why it's daily. Something large couldn't be daily, you'd notice it, and the daily works by being below the size at which you'd notice.

I'm not going to make this a health chapter, because that isn't the argument and you've heard it. But since the wine version is the commonest and the NHS has done the arithmetic, here it is once. The NHS defines a unit as ten millilitres of pure alcohol and gives a formula, the strength as a percentage times the volume in millilitres, divided by a thousand. A medium glass, 175 millilitres, of wine at thirteen per cent comes out at about 2.3 units by that sum. Seven of those a week is about sixteen. The NHS advises no more than fourteen a week on a regular basis, spread over three or more days, with drink-free days if you want to cut down. So one small glass a day, the one that's only small, is already over the line on its own, before the weekend. That's a count, not a lecture. If your treat isn't wine, do the equivalent count for what it is, and chapter 22 helps.

The size isn't really the point, though. The point is what small does to the story. Because the treat is small, it never has to be justified, so the earning is never examined. Because it's small, it can be added to without the sum ever looking large, one glass and then one glass and a top-up. Because it's small, a day without it looks petty, as though you were denying yourself a trifle, which makes the blank day in chapter 19 feel like an overreaction before you've tried it. And because it's small, it's the perfect size to become a routine, since routines are made of small things done at the same hour.

The honest objection is that a small thing every day is what pleasure in ordinary life looks like, and a book that came for your one glass would be a mean book. I agree. This book isn't after the glass. It's after the daily, and the daily is a small thing that has stopped being a pleasure and become a place setting. The test isn't the size. It's whether you'd notice if it were missing, and what you'd notice. If the answer is a flat evening and nothing else, the thing you've been calling small has got quite large.