Normally when I write a blog post it's because I'm triggered about a topic. Something either angers me, amuses me or otherwise appeals to my sense of being a messenger to convey an important idea, as though I'm a frustrated cub reporter for a local newspaper. The opposite is true today. I'm writing about a simple milestone - I've just completed one year without drinking alcohol. Although I've had it in mind to blog about this for several months as the anniversary approached, I feel emotionally indifferent to it and I have no overriding message to get across. Still, here I am, bashing out the first paragraph at the keyboard but maybe if I'm lucky, the catharsis of writing about it may unlock a message for the big wrap-up at the end. Fingers crossed!

My doctor had been badgering me to quit or at least cut down my drinking for as long as I can remember. I dismissed the advice, thinking back to Harold Shand's quote from the movie 'The Long Good Friday' - "When my mum used to have a go at my old man about his boozing, he always used to say ‘If you drink less than your doctor, you're all right.’" Not that I did drink less than my doctor (though I'd heard stories) but this is more illustrative of the flawed rationalization, the classic pub logic that characterised my relationship with booze until recently.

Some weeks later, the results came back. They weren't as bad as I'd feared - no cirrhosis, no permanent liver damage. Yet. That would be the likely outcome if I continued drinking, the doctor explained. But I'd already made my decision. The problem was how to stick to it.

I'd never been without a drink for longer than three months before. I'd often made New Year’s resolutions, or embarked on foolhardy fitness drives in the past, only to find that maintaining these fads is almost impossible. They're impossible because they are necessarily 'displacements' from our normal activity. Just as a stretched spring snaps back when released, habits revert to their default state once the effort to change them fades. The trick seems to be to move the 'balanced' position in one's life but this is easier said than done. If we use the example of a see-saw, if you want to move an item on one side, the item or items on the other side have to move to accommodate the change. In our lives, the items that make up the balance on the other side of the see-saw can be anything - food, money, health, relationships, work, sleep. Any activity in one's life may need some adjustment. I should point out: I’m no life‐coach, just speaking from my own experience. This is how I feel after one year ‘on the wagon.’

Following the advice of one of the many sober influencers on social media, I decided to try to analyse my relationship with booze over the years, its origins and evolution. I certainly had to go back a long way. My parents used to enjoy a bottle of sherry at the weekend and indulged my curiosity about this as a toddler by pouring a glass for me too. The idea common at the time was that this was how the French took the mystery out of alcohol and had fewer problem drinkers in later life. I took to it like a duck to water and couldn't wait for the weekends to come around. In the celebration of things continental (these were still the days of Jeux Sans Frontières after all), as soon as I started work, having wine with dinner became the thing to do, and I explored with gusto the delights of Blue Nun and Liebfraumilch available from the Spar supermarket at the top of the road. Without a doubt though, starting work in the Civil Service really turned a mild interest in alcohol to a ritualistic compulsion.

Back in the ‘80s, when beer was less than two pounds a pint, the pub lunch was almost obligatory. We even nicknamed nearby pubs as "HQ" or the "social club". One afternoon truly felt like an episode of Life on Mars with Gene Hunt. I was having a pub lunch with the team from marketing. They were often out on the road, so having them all back at base was an occasion to celebrate, not that much of an excuse was ever needed! One guy stood up to get a round in and asked everybody what their poison was. The new girl, whose name escapes me, asked for a mineral water. There was an eerie moment of silence as the more weathered members of the group knew this was a less than ideal request. "Fuck off," he said. "I don't buy water. Get a proper drink or have nothing". She acquiesced and changed her order to a G&T. We all breathed again! This was what it was like back then.

Years later, when I ended up in Spain, the cards landed in a weird way and I found myself working on building sites to pay my mortgage. A similar orthodoxy prevailed. We’d meet up in the bar at eight in the morning for a coffee and a shot of whisky, do a day’s work, then head to the pub to drink (without eating) from six until about nine, then do it all again the next day. I gather this used to be the same back in the UK, although one of the guys I knew from those days recently reported back from building sites in blighty lamenting how empty the pubs were on a Friday afternoon, putting it down to the cost. Clearly for all its faults, Neoliberalism is having a positive effect on the health of builders’ livers.

Anyway, leaving the sojourn down memory lane, here I am today handling sobriety as best I can. I don't go to meetings or anything like that. The doctor offered to fix me up, but I figured it would be group therapy in Spanish, so of limited usefulness. I tried anti-depressants for a while, but these made things worse rather than better, so after a month or so I knocked them on the head. I console myself with the notion that I'm not an alcoholic. I can't be. It's not an available condition anymore. Today the medical establishment uses the term ‘Alcohol Use Disorder’, which is supposed to be a person-first, less stigmatising term, though I'm not sure I like the idea of being known as ‘disordered Steve!’ One small thing I do take comfort from is the reaction I get when people learn I haven't had a drink for a year. "Well done," they say, "I couldn't do that" Even people who are on the face of it quite moderate drinkers attribute reverence to the act of not drinking as though the very thought of not being able to have a drink - the concept of prohibition - is completely alien to them. I think something we all share at a deep level is the sense of being naughty and a bit rebellious when indulging in a vice of any kind. If I want to stick two fingers up at society and live life on the edge now I have an ice-cream, where the threat of type-2 diabetes is real!

So at the end of the day, what are the benefits of not drinking? Am I a nicer person? No, I don't think so. If anything I'm even more the judgemental curmudgeon I was before. That became apparent this week when I went to pick up my 'free' recycling bags and had to queue for 15 minutes at the designated town hall office. It seems to have grown to employ four people and is protected by a security guard, such is the unpopularity of the wretched scheme. Despite asking very nicely, the ‘jobsworth’ refused to give me two rolls of biodegradable bin-liners for my refuse (we were allocated two rolls when the infernal scheme started, now we're limited to one). On the way home, I couldn't help grumbling to myself. A roll of bags lasts three months if I'm lucky, so I would have to make this round-trip four times a year to satisfy the town hall recycling zealots. That’s two hours of my limited time on this planet sacrificed on the altar of corporate greenwashing - companies that exploit our planet’s resources without any financial accountability. Oops - see there I go again.

I have however dispelled the myth that it's the late night drinking that induces us to make dubious online purchases. Trust me - stuff still turns up from Amazon and AliExpress that I have only the vaguest recollection of ordering.

The only major benefit that quitting the booze has really made to my life is attention. Being more present means I spend a tad more time on things I would previously have deemed too boring and trivial. As a result I'm making better use of space in my house and time in my day. I had a six-month fight with sleep due to my dopamine system being wrecked to get to this place, but I'm glad I'm here. This couldn't have come at a better time as, and this will sound just a little bit weird, AI has come along on this journey with me, solving problems where previously there would have been roadblocks to progress. I can't help thinking if I'd tried to quit drinking five years ago, before Claude, Grok and ChatGPT were standing by my side as I go into battle against the demon drink, I just might not have made it!

I wanna job in Spain and basically need to know if there is work out there for me, I’d do anything I just wanna move for the sun.  Please help!!

Happy birthday to me! I've reached 58 which is in some regards an admirable milestone. From the Paleolithic era to the days of early modern England, a male commoner like myself would have been considered exceptionally lucky to see out his thirties. Most of the credit for this probably goes to vaccines and antibiotics, though the stable social period through which I've lived has seen little in the way of war and much in the way of an affordable, nutritious diet which has probably helped a lot.

Grateful though I am then, I can't help feeling a little less like celebrating my birthday as each year passes. One doesn't realise it but as a youngster, time appears to pass incredibly slowly. Then, as we age, the years soon start whizzing by faster than a Japanese bullet train. This is due to a phenomenon that I've mentioned before (in Things that wind me up http://andaluciasteve.com/things-that-wind-me-up.aspx ) called Weber's law. Weber noticed that how we humans perceive change, varies in proportion to the thing being measured. Although a year is always the same length, when we are children we compare a year to the total years we have lived, five or six of them or whatever. As we approach retirement, we maybe compare a year to say sixty or sixty five years. We can't but help then, thinking that years are getting shorter. Our perception of the length of a year varies logarithmically as we age. It is quite chilling to extend this notion, as author Anne Rice did in the 1984 Gothic novel 'Interview with a Vampire', to a life-form that has achieved immortality.  The vampire Louis in the book describes the ' terrible tedium of a perpetual earthly existence', as the years become centuries and the detachment from mortals grows, and as the world changes and the vampires do not. Imagine years passing as seconds. What a horrible thought!

OK you might think I'm writing this from the perspective of some grumpy guy who 'got out of the wrong side of the bed' this morning. You would be right. I just got my first spam-email for a funeral plan. That makes me feel more than just old. It makes me feel 'one foot in the grave' old!

It wouldn't be so bad if it was just a case of the years accelerating before our eyes but they seem to do this with such malice. I saw a meme on Facebook the other day which captured this very succinctly. It read "Getting older is just one body part after another saying 'ha ha, you think that's bad, well watch this!"

Temporary Kings is a novel by Anthony Powell, the penultimate in his twelve-volume novel, A Dance to the Music of Time. It was published in 1973 and remains in print as does the rest of the sequence. In the penultimate book of the sequence, Powell describes ageing as like being increasingly penalised for a crime you haven't committed.

It certainly feels like that My first pubic hair scared the hell out of me at aged ten. More recently I discovered my first grey pube which nothing on earth had prepared me for. One wonders what is next? Male-pattern pube-baldness? I hate to even Google it!

Alexander Smith wrote "An essay on an old subject" which captures the mood of ageing far better than I ever could. http://essays.quotidiana.org/smith_a/essay_on_an_old_subject/ He starts with "The discovery of a gray hair when you are brushing out your whiskers of a morning—first-fallen flake of the coming snows of age—is a disagreeable thing. So is the intimation from your old friend and comrade that his eldest daughter is about to be married. So are flying twinges of gout, shortness of breath on the hillside, the fact that even the moderate use of your friend’s wines at dinner upsets you. These things are disagreeable because they tell you that you are no longer young,—that you have passed through youth, are now in middle age, and faring onward to the shadows in which, somewhere, a grave is hid."

Another insightful piece about ageing was in something written by Ernest Hemingway which I read years ago. In fact it was so long ago I can't even remember if it was from a book, an essay or possibly someone else's recollections of him. I've been trying to track it down but without being able to remember any of the key words or phrases other than 'wine' I've had little success, as this is a topic he raises often. Anyway, the general gist was that he considered it a travesty of life that, as one ages, one learns to appreciate more and more the value of a good wine, while at the same time one's body conspires to reduce one's ability to drink the stuff. Having had the odd bout of gout I know what he means. Thank god for Allopurinol. There is a big slice of virtual birthday cake to any wizardly researchers out there who are able to locate the source of the original quote.

Being a bit of an introvert I've never much enjoyed the concept of celebrating my birthday with a party or other get-together. It seems oddly narcissistic to say "This is all about me" and to force my friends to come along, buy me gifts and express their liking of me and sing to me for no other reason than that is what birthdays are supposed to be for, i.e. sucking up to me and kissing my behind. I'm really much happier with a simple message on my Facebook wall, or maybe a valued card from those rare and special people who are not online. The less fuss and the less reminder that I'm getting older, the better I like it!!