Lonely and heartbroken, I first tasted beer at the age of 14. Decades later, after consuming enough alcohol to fill a petrol tanker, I realised it was time to cut back
It’s all about the first drink, as in the first drink of your life and the first drink of the day. This much I learned in writing a book about drinking less, which involved examining how I came to be drinking so much in the first place. And I trace it all back to a thoroughly miserable fortnight in Germany when I was 14.
It was a school exchange. I was paired up with a lad I’ll call Siegfried. We had nothing in common. This was entirely my fault, because in the week we filled out the form about our interests, I had taken up chess. I duly declared chess to be my main interest in life. It wasn’t. My main interests were football, music and the unrequited adoration of a succession of girls. I quickly realised I was hopeless at chess and gave it up but, by then, the wheels of the pen-friend selection machine were turning. It needed no particularly great application of Teutonic logic for me to be paired up with the German school’s chess champion.
