Day 5

Another day has passed in my very sober lockdown. I have gotten into a bad habit of sleeping in until late and going to bed very late (I keep wondering, would a glass of red wine help me fall asleep quicker?). I’ve read 2 books a week, run a total of 21.1 km over 3 days, and done a little bit of my jigsaw puzzle with Carla. Not very exciting. 

After endless pints of tap water and about 300 cups of tea later I finally had a go with a non-alcoholic beer with dinner this evening. 

It was Heineken 0% in a can. It wasn’t too bad to be honest, and surely a welcome change to tea and water. 

I’m not a huge fan of non-alcoholic wine (I'm a devoted wine connoisseur, after all!) or cocktails. I read some non-alcoholic cocktail recipes online, but I simply cannot imagine the taste of an Espresso Martini without vodka and Kahlua, or a Negroni without gin, vermouth and Campari (a cocktail of which ingredients are ALL alcoholic). I really, really don’t want to traumatise my cocktail experience by experimenting with these lightweight versions. 

While I sit down in the evenings, with my cup of ginger and lemon tea, and switch on the TV, I also realise that alcohol is steeped so deep in our culture that it literally is just everywhere, especially on your TV screen. 

Everyone identifies themselves with fictional characters, all the time. The more stuff you watch on TV, the more you  transform the perception of yourself from one character to another, always associating the best bits of them with yourself, and ignoring all their vices. 

Some of my very dearest and most favourite female characters of all time have really loved their drink - so should I blame them for my love for a good drink?  

Carry, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte from Sex & The City - always with a Cosmopolitan in their hand in fancy New York clubs and restaurants. Bridget Jones, the first “real” modern female character ever invented never turned down a drink even if it often got her into messy and embarrassing situations. Jessica Jones - a proper badass, cool, sexy superhero/killing-machine was downing vodka straight from the bottle. Grace and Frankie - well, that really painted a picture of a Botox filled role model of a 80 year old woman who wakes up to a Vodka Martini on daily basis - but with a life otherwise so enviable that you secretly hope that this will be YOU when you’re that age.  

When Googling about alcoholic TV characters, the search results range from “25 Best TV alcoholics” to “Most lovable on-screen drunks” and a “Hard drinking party girl” to, finally, in the bottom of the page, “The Prevalence of Alcohol in TV - Alcohol Rehab Guide”. 

I clicked on the last one, expecting to not really learn anything new but just seeing it printed and digesting the knowledge I already knew anyway, that one sentence stayed with me: “If people watch TV often, and are exposed to alcohol portrayals often, they are more likely to drink.”

We are all in a national lockdown right now, and I bet most people watch more TV and movies in lockdown than they normally would ever have time for. Sometimes I feel I’ve literally watched everything on Netflix already. I’ve now started with a silly ITV reality dating show, The Cabins, and even there having a drink is a big part of the game. 

Alcohol consumption, and its overconsumption, is so widely popularised and normalised, that you cannot even escape its influence on your own living room sofa. You’d think that not having the so called peer pressure of having few after-work drinks or that not having the option of going out on Friday night would help slow down the appetite for a good drink, but as it turns out, it even pressurises you through your TV screen. 

Luckily I’m only on my Day 5, and I haven’t quite felt the desperation just yet. However, I can’t imagine how I’ll feel on day 20, and if I’m even gonna get that far.