No Amount of Alcohol is Healthy...Where Does That Leave a Gal Who Loves a Drink?

As health guidance – and social attitudes – shift ever further towards abstinence, has imbibing, even at a low level, become tantamount to a drinking problem?

I’m writing to you from my hangover. It’s not a bad one, just a bit of sticky pressure mid-forehead with some cloying sweetness furring over my tongue. In my history of hanging, it is frankly unremarkable. At this stage in my life, I’ve experienced something comparable more than a hundred times, yet I have nearly always seen myself as a moderate drinker. In my mum’s supermarket in the Dordogne, there is a sign above the booze aisle which says ‘two glasses a day, but not every day’, spelling out the French health department’s current advice. Whether or not Gallic vested interests in du vin come into play here is certainly up for discussion, but growing up, this measure was about par for how I saw moderate—and thus acceptable—drinking. I guess it is the mould in which my own habits have been made.

These days I rarely get properly gazebo’d. Maybe once or twice a year. Additionally, about once a month I will feel like I do today and find myself reaching for an Anadin with chagrin. In my circle this is again pretty par. In comparison to how I used to drink in my late teens and twenties, it is positively monastic (though of course ‘tis to the monks we owe our very best beer). In comparison to some of the adult drinking I grew up around it is laughably softcore. 

But something has shifted more broadly in our culture, and it is gaining speed, certainly at least since the pandemic. Perhaps it’s because of my age and sex, but I find I am constantly being targeted with terrifying information about the impact of booze, especially on women, especially in midlife. The tut tutting from puritanical types has become a daily deluge of disapproval from people of all walks. It’s as if we’re heading for a new Prohibition era, based less on feckless parenting and more on longevity.