It was just five weeks ago that my GP here in France told me that, because of my my high blood pressure and the results before her from my last blood test, I should forthwith stop drinking alcohol.

My first reaction was I confess emotional, like being informed of an approaching bereavement. I reckoned that I had entwined my life so closely with alcohol for the last 52 years that to remove it from my life was going to be like losing a very close friend. I had measured out my life not with coffee spoons but with wine glasses.
The great majority of evenings in my life were launched when I had my first glass of wine. When I ran my restaurant in Ireland one of my kindly staff would always have a large glass of chilled white wine ready by my elbow as I served the last main course of the night.
The starting gun, now, here in Languedoc in our Chambre d’Hote, went off at a much earlier 6.00 on most evenings. On work nights, when we had guests eating dinner, 7.30 was Apero time and at the time when we gave our guests their aperitif there was always one in the bottle for me also. Usually that hour before blast off would have had me glancing slyly but frequently at the clock to check my time left in dry limbo.
I really enjoyed that first drink, or two. This was the moment when the wrinkles on the internal brow were smoothed out by alcohol, the moment when all the problems of the day (and god knows I don’t have many) were turned from troubling anxieties into moments of acceptance.
So, I really enjoyed the first couple of drinks, this is true, but did I enjoy any of the many others I downed during the night? I don’t eally know. I do know that I thought that I did, and felt that that initial buzz from drinks one and two would be multiplied proportionately as these numbers increased.

The truth is that in a lot of nights I ceased entirely to count- these would be the nights when a certain forgetfulness would obscure my behaviour from my better self- a lack of memory which would also hide the night from me the following day.
Now I wouldn’t like to give myself too much bad press. The truth is that I usually succeeded being in control and, on nights when we had guests I remained so.
With family or friends this wasn’t always the case that could lead to moments of relaxation, a lowering of the guard and the consequent lost evening and the resulting guilt in the morning.

It would have been easy to blame my father for this, and I frequently and unfairly did. Dad had a troubled relationship with alcohol all his life.
It probably didn’t help that he came from a strictly teetotal family. Legend has it that on his wedding day, to give himself confidence to get through the ordeal of display and speeches he had a friend decant champagne into lemonade bottles which he then poured ostentatiously into tumblers under his mother’s all seeing eye.

But in fairness it was not his Mother who drove him to drink, the real crux of my Dad’s problems with alcohol was that he was a shy man, a man lacking in social confidence and he used alcohol as a crutch to achieve this. He was also someone who suffered from the highs and lows of depression and when high he loved to go against character and be the life and soul of a party, when low he needed alcohol to lift his mood.

Unfortunately for him he was born into a family where a quiet unostentatious life which would have suited him well, was not on the cards. Instead he was born one of Cork’s “Merchant Princes” and by his thirties he was in command of the huge behemoth which was “Dwyers of Cork” employing somewhere around two and a half thousand people between its huge wholesale warehouses and the many manufacturing plants which serviced this.

He was, it must be said extremely good at his job- it didn’t arrive precisely on a silver platter, and there were a lot of hungry first and second cousins jockeying for his position.

But it is also true to say that this whole display of public power didn’t fall easily on his shoulders and he used alcohol more and more to bolster his confidence and fight his related depression as the years went on.
I was the youngest of the seven and my three older brothers and sisters would have suffered differently from my father’s behaviour through the years. As the last I probably saw him at his worst and growing up in the family I felt little or no affection for him. This is of course a great shame but I console myself now with a late few years of mended bridges in our relationship before he died.
But this is not about my relationship with my father but rather about my inheritance from him.
I think that with honest hindsight that I can forgive my Dad’s over indulgence on alcohol far easier than I can forgive my own. I was born with a silver spoon of confidence firmly wedged in my baby teeth and depression was something which I was always to shake off easily, mainly by having a lucky facility to make friends and to always enjoy their company.

It would be good to say that my Dad’s relationship with alcohol had made the Dwyer siblings abstemious but this was not the case, we all enjoy a drink but, in honesty, I feel I did more than the others.
A strange thing about my Dad was that when the plug was finally pulled on his drinking (by the simple expedient of paying his work pension to my mother rather than him) he seemed to accept it without demur and then proceeded to spend the remaining ten years of his life doing crosswords and following racing form from a desk in the living room of my parent’s house in suburban Cork. This seeming unlamented withdrawal from alcohol I also now find significant for my present decision.

So here I am, sixty eight years old, strangely I have just realised very close to my father’s age when he quit drinking, facing my father’s decision and for pretty much the same reasons.
I had, however a couple of differences in style from my father but they were also truly part of his inheritance.
My drinking habits were always coloured, evidentially not coloured enough, by my father’s history. I was always aware of the perilous path I was scrambling on and did try and build in a few safeguards.
I tried to make one night of the week alcohol free (not always successfully) and always sacredly went off drink each year for the month of November. The November fast being the one which bolstered most my feeling of being in control.
But still I was always aware that even though I was a pleasant social drinker I was a fairly disastrous drunk.

So what is it like, five weeks later, thirty six days of being alcohol free?
The answer is surprisingly painless. I am no fool and the realisation had been dawning on me for some time that my days of drinking were numbered. Like my father I had been waiting for someone else to make the decision for me.
Strangely now, over a month later, I don’t feel at all deprived and other than a pang or two about the aperitif hour feel lucky that I feel no pain.
I started writing this piece with an eye to creating a fashionable list as: “Twenty Five reasons why I am happy off Alcohol”- but really this is not what it is all about. I don’t wish in any way to proselytise my new sober state. Everyone, it appears to me, has their own relationship with the demon drink and most are far better able to control this that I was- so I am not at all against alcohol. In fact I look back at my relationship with alcohol with affection and am now happy to realise that it just became time to call it a day.