The Longest Hangover: 23 Years as an Alcoholic

By Tania Glyde, The Independent UK. Posted February 12, 2008.

I woke up in a cold bath. My neck was stiff and hurting, but it soon became clear that I wasn't dead. This wasn't supposed to happen. On the third go, I thought I had assured my demise by drinking as much vodka and smoking as much heroin as I could manage, and then getting into a hot bath. This time was supposed to be IT.

It became too cold to stay in the bath, so I went into the living room. I walked around naked for a while, and then slumped on the loo, mission aborted. I had been very, very lucky, but, even in this early morning haze, I knew something had switched in my head, and I was now on a mission to rebuild my entire life.

My third suicide attempt came at the end of a three-year period where pretty much everything that could go wrong had done so. My nomadic housing situation was an embarrassing disaster and had, in itself, driven me almost to a breakdown, I had been dumped by an agent who had been unable to sell my third novel, my health was ropey, I didn't have a penny to my name, and, if all that weren't bad enough, I couldn't even get myself admitted to a mental hospital.

After two years of this, I met a man who was a troubled soul, a coke addict and an alcoholic, who took me on lots of holidays in return for which I supplied sex on demand and an enormous amount of therapy. Suntan aside, I paid a very heavy price for this relationship. When I discovered the extent of his dishonesty -- the receipts, the condoms -- I unravelled for the last time, not helped by the amount of cocaine I was taking. I look back and cringe at my total lack of self-respect, and anyone might have thought I was determined to destroy myself. But let's remember: like guns, alcohol and drugs don't kill people -- people kill people.

I'm well aware that a person can be a problem drinker without ever touching illegal substances, but for me, and millions of others, alcohol was the ultimate "gateway drug". Although, bizarrely, I lost my virginity sober, I didn't have sober sex for another 23 years , and every other new substance or behaviour I tried was done while cushioned in alcohol. People do more sexual, narcotic, or violent things under the influence of booze than anything else. It's the sheer weight of numbers that I can't get over.

I just don't know why governments don't do anything about all the crime that's committed, day in and day out, which, without alcohol in the mix, simply wouldn't happen. Alcohol is, exponentially, an bigger gateway drug than cannabis has ever been or ever will be, and it's about time that the Government woke up and stopped wasting everyone's time with the "war on drugs", which is about as nonsensical as the "war on terror". And now it's January, official "wagon" month in the modern British citizen's calendar. Everybody's doing what they spend the rest of the year talking about -- giving up alcohol and other intoxicants. People are desperately proud of their January abstinence, not least because this excessive self-denial will entitle them to party all the harder come 1 February.

I remember one of these parties, called Candle Massive by the hosts, in homage to the religious festival. The day leading up to that party sums up my final drinking years pretty well. I got up in the morning incredibly depressed and desperate to talk to someone, but turned up for my appointment at the mental health unit only to be told I had got the wrong day. Reception claimed that this was my fault, and, when I protested, the security guard stepped forward in that staggeringly inappropriate way they do in hospitals. This being the NHS, there was, of course, not a respite counsellor. I nearly, so nearly, threw myself under an ambulance. In the evening I did a spoken-word gig at the ICA, where one of my fellow performers cunningly stepped on to the stage while I was reaching the climax of my piece, spoiling the effect completely. Afterwards, at pay time, the promoter made a great show of writing another performer's cheque away from where I could see the amount.

I got to the party at midnight, where a social worker sat on the bed, blissfully hugging a mirror laden with all manner of powders and pills, and teachers, lawyers and media types craned over all the available flat surfaces, and took it in turns with a straw. Sometime in the early morning, when our noses were crusted and we were all shouting, a man told a group of us girls that he would give us each a line of Charlie in return for a lick of our you-know-whats. Without a second thought, we formed a queue.

There was no way I was going to give up my only source of pleasure in life. How do you give up alcohol for good, in our culture -- a culture where people rush to the bar like starving animals at any opportunity, and where celebration and ritual have been completely obliterated in the name of -- what?

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