Alcohol in my life, so far…

By Mandy

As a child my family enjoyed participating in sports and the most social event was our children’s football teams that we used to participate in as we had both girls and boys teams. No alcohol was drank during the sports games but our families did always get together afterwards and went to the sports and social club and when we were at the club it was acceptable for us children to actually taste the alcohol our parents had got but often we didn’t drink as much as we thought we should because we were too energetic.

And all through my early life past college alcohol was of no real interest to me as we didn’t have a lot of money so we often bought bottles of cider or cheap wine from the local shop but even when I did go drinking in pubs and clubs I never got drunk.

Mind you, when I joined the armed forces and started earning a proper wage I could afford to spend more money on items and drink and after being posted down to Kent after making friends quickly we did go partying quite a bit off base as when we were on base we weren’t allowed to drink heavily due to the nature of our jobs.

Once I’d left the armed forces and I then decided to go to university, the biggest change with that was during fresher’s week when I was forever handed out student discounts, leaflets and promotional events to go to pubs and clubs which when we all got together at our house the flat mates and I, we made full use of them so we often got drunk regularly from Monday to Thursday and binge drink on a Friday and Saturday, after all the university course I’m quite surprised none of us got alcohol poisoning.

However, a life changing event did occur and as harrowing as it was it did change our view of alcohol quite a bit as one of our neighbours who often came with us on a night out, she’d left us early as we’d all gone night clubbing and she didn’t appear at all drunk but the taxi driver who took her home then raped her and we didn’t find out till we all got home the next morning so we were all totally shocked. This did stop us from drinking excessively thereafter so we did still go out to pubs and clubs but we were a lot more wary of drinking and being more responsible.

And since leaving university what the doctors and health professionals class us as now is where binge drinkers as most of our alcohol is consumed on a Friday and a weekend.

Sometimes when getting home from work a glass of wine or a nice bottle of chilled lager is nice to have with our evening meal so overall my consumption of alcohol has been up and down throughout my life but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying a drink whether its alcoholic or not.