100 DAYS IN THE LIFE OF A RECOVERING ALCOHOLIC

Monday August 1, 2006

My name is Maurice and I am an alcoholic. I have changed one but I cannot change the other. I have decided to write this journal for the next 100 days of my attempt to recover from alcoholism. I am not going to research it or craft it, I am going to write it and live it, writing only from 11.00 pm to midnight at the latest each day. I am going to write about the here and nows and my history and see what happens.

Today I looked at the plans I had made for myself on a piece of paper last night. At the head of the sheet of paper I have written ‘1 Day at a Time’, today’s date, day 400 and ‘Spiritual Recovery’, and beside them ‘God Will Decide’. Also on my sheet are some encouraging instructions – ‘enjoy the day’, ‘give yourself a break’ and ‘start living Maurice’, and some chores and errands.

My day begins with my ‘am regime’: sit, read, pray and poem. My second sponsor in alcoholics anonymous set me onto this. I do some of it. I say the serenity prayer kneeling at the end of my bed, more or less without fail. I pray for my defects to be taken away. I don’t sit still and think. My sitting is incidental. But I do read today’s Daily Reflection from the book by AA members for AA members. There is a lot of God in there but then so much of my drinking was the misery of the man without God. I also read a chapter from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, usually with my second cup of very strong tea.

I only recently added the poem to my daily am regime, taken from ‘Poem for the Day’. A secular companion to the God of recovery. Today it was ‘The Waking’ by Theodore Roethke. I’d not heard of him before, but recovery can be as obsessive as drinking so his line that ‘The shaking keeps me steady’ resonates for me when the editor’s notes explain that the author saw his ‘breakdowns as in essence spiritual crises’. I haven’t had a nervous breakdown, what I’ve had is alcoholism. But to steadiness from shaking makes sense for some of the turbulence I have felt at times in recovery

My day is mundane, but my moods soar and fall. I am on Step 4 of the 12 Steps in the AA programme of recovery, where we make a fearless and searching moral inventory of ourselves. I have become ready to do this properly only in the last couple of months. I have gone back over my life and tried to be thorough and honest. I have reached two years ago so I am now listing the denials, evasions, anguishes and degradations of active alcoholism. It is ugly but I use the excellent advice given to me by a fellow member last week: ‘clock off’. So when I’ve finished another instalment of Step 4 I break for a comedy video.

In the evening I follow a well-trod path. I go swimming and then I attend one of my regular AA meetings. In my early days I would incant the serenity prayer as I swam – one word for each stroke. I walk past numerous restaurants and pubs to get to the meeting in the crypt of a church. I have been going to this meeting since February so I know almost everyone there – about 15 of us – but I still feel a small knot of fear in my stomach as I make my way there. The speaker helps me by saying how she makes lots of mistakes in recovery. That is good to hear. The more I keep my recovery to myself, the more I think it has to be perfect. I don’t speak at the meeting. I share too little. But I have a commitment there so that keeps me going back. I walked some of the way home with my current sponsor, a man ten years sober. There are a couple of faces at the meeting which I only see on Monday nights. I like that almost secret society element to it, healthily or not. I started this on the dot of 11.00 pm. I’m breaking off now to make my plan for tomorrow. I will lie on the sofa and stare at the centre of a clock which – from very early on – I saw as representative of a power greater than myself.

Tuesday August 2, 2006

I drafted in a prayer for a sober day into this morning’s am regime. I have now thanked the clockface for that wish having been granted. A lot of alcoholics who are regimental about their recovery do this.

I did another instalment of my Step 4. I am now up to only two years ago, the final year of my active alcoholism, so I have to return to and record several set-piece disasters but also the constant strain inflicted on my partner, my parents and the rest of my family. By now my character defects are rampant: selfishness, self-centredness and dishonesty at every turn. All I could do was drink and think about drink. Last week I told a fellow AA member that I had Step 4 blues and he said that doing Step 4 properly was taking me away from the devastation and heartache I caused. I was on day 393 and he was on the 393 bus: coincidences like this must be cheerfully attributed to a power greater than ourselves.

I am not working at the moment. I have managed to find myself a sequence of short projects to fill my time over the last 400 days. But the year of living safely is over now. So I look for jobs that I can’t do in places I can’t go to: Belfast, Lancaster, New Zealand. Or more humdrum jobs around here. Projecting the future is one thing we alcoholics are urged against but I appoint myself to several posts after inspired, combative interviews before I switch my computer off and attend to household duties, majoring today in washing a huge duvet at the launderette.

I spoke to my parents on the phone. This is where the here and nows and history collide. As my Step 4 reminds me, they bore the brunt of the last months of my drinking. But now they know that I have been sober for over a year. For them, in a way, my alcoholism is over. They know that alcoholics are always alcoholics but they trust that I am on a better path. They know that I go to meetings regularly but I would be surprised if they knew about Step 9, where we are able to make amends to all persons we have harmed. But that’s in the future for me. People who have been in AA for a long time often say that the Steps are in order for good reason.

I meet my girlfriend Tanya at the swimming pool. She has been for a couple of drinks with her colleagues. I can smell the alcohol even through the water. Sometimes this causes friction and unease between us but today it is all right.

I don’t normally go to an AA meeting on Tuesdays. In my early days, before I started on the am regime, I used to have days off in recovery, as if I was only an alcoholic on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. I treated my alcoholism sporadically, even though I wasn’t drinking. How many meetings to go to? At the moment I go to four a week. But there have been several emergency meetings for me on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

I bumped into two fellow AA members on the bus home, the smiles of recognition always a small push in the right direction.

Wednesday August 3, 2006

The am regime is imperative but I gave myself a break from Step 4 today. My sponsor has advised me to take my time to do it properly. That doesn’t mean not doing it. Time can be my friend. I am only 402 days sober.

I played football at lunchtime today. That’s something to be hugely grateful for. There was no playing football in the last years of my drinking. So I enjoy it but regret that there could have been many more games.

I went to an evening meeting which has been one of my regulars since my return to London in the Spring of 2004. I went there drunk and I had drinks on my way home from it before I started on this sequence of sobriety. But I kept going to it and it has been good to me. The speaker at the meeting had his last drink on June 27 1986, exactly 18 years before me. My first sponsor was at tonight’s meeting. Last year I did Step 3 with him, making my life and my will over to the care of God as I understand him. So that was all very auspicious. But I handed in my commitment which I have had at the meeting for a long time. That felt bad even though it was a perfectly sensible thing to do. One friend of mine in AA said he felt like he’d murdered someone when he handed in a commitment. I still have three other commitments, Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays. I mustn’t allow my alcoholism to persuade me to throw those in as well. This Wednesday meeting has become quite big. I find it hard to share there.

I rang my sponsor on a ludicrously small point of procedure. We have an uncanny amount of common ground.

Thursday 4 August 2006

I resumed my Step 4 today. I have now reached the six weeks I spent in a treatment centre for drug addiction and alcoholism in February and March last year. I was an untreatable alcoholic at that stage. Whatever promises I made when I was there, I was always going to try drinking again after I left. I wasn’t beaten in the way that I became by the relapse I had in June last year. Some funny things happened at the treatment centre. One rule was that any sexual relations between residents was punishable by instant discharge. One night a woman offered me oral relief: I declined but said that there was certainly no doubt it would have resulted in ‘instant discharge’. I have shared in meetings recently that I cannot recreate the mindset I had when I was there, certain in my heart of hearts that I would drink again. I hadn’t grasped the seriousness of my disease, even if one of the counsellors said that ‘it’ll be the death of you Maurice’. I didn’t accept that treatment wasn’t punishment. So one of my big defects at the treatment centre was dishonesty, to the counsellors, to my family, to the others at the treatment centre, to my better nature even.

I bought myself some delicious apple and raspberry juice today, at the supermarket where I used to get cheap wine. I even drink it late at night like nightcaps of old. Not quite as much as in my early days in recovery, which I used to call last of the soda and limes. One way to confirm to my parents that I am not drinking is to slip into the conversation, probably none too subtly, that I’ve got some exotic soft drink in the fridge.

I went to my regular Thurday home group this evening. It was a powerful meeting full of the pain and pleasures of recovery, and the eternal reminder that we are never cured. Meetings are meetings are meetings but this was good for me and cathartic.

My brother in law is here tonight. He has seen me a lot in active alcoholism and in the early stages of recovery. He must notice the difference. He wrote me a letter when I was still drinking pleading with me to take action but I ignored his and other heart-felt pleas. That is the rampant selfishness of the alcoholic in full cry. He will be on my amends list too, as and when.

Friday 5 August, 2006

Did I do enough about my alcoholism today? That is always the problem in recovery. I didn’t have a drink and I did my am regime and I talked to a friend and fellow member but that was it. I didn’t do any more Step 4; I didn’t go to a meeting and this evening I was out with old friends at a restaurant and then at an open air performance of ‘The Children of Hercules’. It’s not so much the sight of drinks as the smell and the sound of it all. I rarely go out these days except to AA meetings. I suppose today I felt that the power of last night’s meeting had guaranteed me a few days sobriety. I’m not sure it really works like that.

The friend who called me is a fellow regular at the meeting last night. He was my temporary sponsor for a few weeks in the spring but neither of us felt that he could take me through the steps. We get on very well but we almost fell out when he batted back my suggestion that we do the Step 3 prayer together to confirm my commitment to the Steps, even though I’d already done it last summer with my first sponsor. He said that doing Step 3 doesn’t wear out. I felt like a little boy left out of the football team. But we get on fine again now. Now I am fortunate to have found the right sponsor to take me through Step 4 and onward. I went through a protracted phase camped on Step 3 where I would blurt out in meetings that God didn’t want me to drink and that was that. But I knew I couldn’t duck Step 4 for ever.

Saturday 6 August 2006

For the past eight weeks or so I have had regular sessions with my sponsor on Saturday mornings but he is away on holiday this week. So far most of our sessions have been taken up by the details of my Step 4. We resume next weekend. He knows more about me than almost any other person and gives freely of his time and experience.

I did some more Step 4 today, mostly on my attempts to drink again after I had left the treatment centre and returned to London. My girlfiend would ask me if I had had a drink and I would sigh and say no when I had. So I have reached the last time I had a drink, June the 27th 2004, the end of a horrific week on my own in France. I have to remind myself that there was no iota of pleasure in that experience. I ended up in a treatment centre because I am an alcoholic; I go to Alcoholics Anonymous because I am an alcoholic.

I went to another of my regular meetings tonight. The ups and downs of AA are very strange. After the near-elation of Thursday’s meeting I felt very low in and after this one. I need to work on my gratitude – the meetings are there and help to keep me sober. I should have shared that tonight. I didn’t bring anything to the meeting. Perhaps doing Steps 4 and 5 will bring an end to counter-productive self-absorption. One drunk member said it in a meeting last week: ‘I’m sick of being so fucking selfish’.

We are feeding the cats next door while the neighbours are away on holiday. They have drink in their house but I can only see myself taking a swig of it in a cartoon image.

Sunday August 7, 2006

Does praying help? I sometimes pray for my defects of character to be taken away in specific situations and relationships. I prayed for greater tolerance with Tanya today after we rowed a lot yesterday. We did get on much better today. One man in AA who is several years sober and a puzzled convert says that it is best to act as if God exists.

58 weeks sober today, that’s 406 days. I told one friend in AA that I owed him ten per cent of my sobriety. So even with his share that’s a year net. Mind you, I’ve gone through phases of mistaking growing friendships for enhanced sobriety. But that’s too hard. The ten per center says we gravitate to where we should be and who we should know.

Monday August 8, 2006

I resumed Step 4 covering my thirteen months of sobriety. My behaviour and attitude are a whole lot better, and it is an immeasurable relief to Tanya and the rest of my family that I am not drinking. But of course my defects of character persist, often in clearer relief for not being drunk.

I haven’t many resentments within AA. I couldn’t really open up with my first sponsor. I would hope he was out when I called him, and be inhibited if we were in the same meeting. I was with him for about six months until we went our separate ways in January this year. But we parted on good terms.

Then I had a phase of not having a sponsor. At first I felt very free and light in this phase but then I was regressing towards being a dry-drunk, even though I was attending meetings. As I’ve already said I almost fell out with my second sponsor over Step 3 so my part in that has to go in my Step 4. Perhaps I owe him an amend for having thought ill of him. I will have to ask my current sponsor about that one. I also listed resentments against Tanya, my parents and my sister since I’ve been sober.

I followed my usual Monday evening routine: swimming then meeting. I take the physical side of recovery for granted now. I am physically well, but in no danger of becoming obsessed with exercise. At the meeting the speaker said that she had done a lot of things for appearance’s sake in her life; that recovery is slow; and that her Step 4 had been arduous. It helped me to hear all this. The ten per cent man was there so we had a big hug.

Again I didn’t share in the meeting. I braced myself a few times, then other people got in before me. Now I have to write out my plan for tomorrow. Tuesday August 9, 2006

It was Philip Larkin’s ‘Days’ in the Poem for the Day book today. I once read in a review that Larkin was a drinker on a heroic scale: a half bottle of sherry before going in to work. That sort of thing consoled me in the days when I mistook my active alcoholism for functional heavy drinking.

I need to work on my gratitude. I spoke to the ten per center today and we agreed we should be marvelling at the simple fact that we weren’t drinking.

But we also need to learn to enjoy ourselves. In very early recovery I attended a relapse prevention session at a local day centre, where we were asked to think of treats to reward ourselves for a sober day. It took me a very long time to come up with raspberries and a bath. This afternoon I bought some cds. That was an unusual thing for me to do, breaking my iron grip on my finances. And I felt better for it. I played Scrabble tonight with Tanya and my brother-in-law, also enjoyable. One of my problems has been to feel needlessly embattled and apologetic in recovery. In recovery we laugh; I didn’t laugh at all in the last years of my drinking. That’s worth remembering. Today felt like a day when I got the benefits of AA without going to a meeting.

Wednesday August 10, 2006

So did today. I spent the day out of London with a friend near where we grew up. This sort of day hasn’t been possible for four years because of my drinking. I just wasn’t available or reliable for a long time. I have rarely strayed from the tram lines I laid down in early recovery: mini projects, swimming and meetings. I have only spent one night away from home this year. I suppose I have been in secondary treatment but in the outside world. So today’s outing was a little dart across the bridge to normal living, or at least to a good sober day’s fun.

So for the first time since this journal began I’ve gone two days without a meeting. Today I read the daily reflection before I left and a chapter of the Big Book when I got home. The comfortable certainty of my Thursday home group awaits me tomorrow.

Thursday August 11, 2006

It was a good meeting tonight and I needed it, because I was very fearful today. I shared at length. I can’t regulate AA of course, but I prefer it when the meetings are not too big. Tonight we were about 15. A fellow member made me laugh when he said ‘is this it: church annexes for the rest of my life?’

Tanya is going to her parents for a couple of nights from tomorrow so I have to be careful to keep busy and not to isolate.

Friday August 12, 2006

I haven’t done enough about my alcoholism today. I did the am regime but I haven’t spoken to another alcoholic, and I didn’t go to a meeting. So I haven’t given myself a chance to be free from some of my feelings of restlessness and fear.

I hope to be speaking to my first friend in AA since I came back to London later on tonight. I’ve never been too sure he is an alcoholic in the way I am. He quite often has relapses, and they don’t seem to damage him too much. There have even been a couple of times when I’ve resented this. But he is someone I can have long late-night chats on the phone too. At least I’ve got through the day – day 411 – sober and safe.

Saturday August 13, 2006

I went to my regular Saturday night meeting tonight. I felt some self-pity at having to be there at first. But this week I managed to share some simple gratitude at the meeting being there for me to end a day of isolating.

I had a good long chat with my friend last night. I went through a phase of resenting his relapses. One time I spoke to him and he was obviously drunk and I resented his being able to use alcohol to relax at no disastrous cost. I know I can’t do that after my last session in June 2004. But now I’m glad to know him as someone to talk to who has known me through so many months of my recovery so far.

Sunday August 14, 2006

I went round to my sponsor’s flat this morning, our first session for two weeks. We went through some more of my Step 4, mostly trends and incidents from my active alcoholism, wrecking a family Christmas for instance. Of course, I am forever hoping for smidgeons of praise from my sponsor but he knows that undiscerning encouragement is not the way for me to get well. There is a huge lesson there for me if I come to sponsor people. I have to stop feeling sorry for myself for having to do Step 4. It isn’t pleasant going over old failings and ongoing defects but it is part of the programme of recovery. We may only need a few more sessions. The bits of my Step 4 we looked at today were uncomplicated: just the selfishness, self-centredness and dishonesty of the active alcoholic. We’d got me into the treatment centre by the end of our session.

Monday August 15, 2006

I had an hour of counselling this afternoon. These sessions have been vital in my recovery. I first saw this therapist once about two years ago. I turned up late, I had already had a drink, and I carried on drinking afterwards. He says that I seemed very depressed and made almost no eye contact at all. I can well believe it. I wasn’t open to it at all. Through my drinking I would say that the last thing I needed was to rake over my past. I had no idea about the potential benefits of recovery, about the difference between self-pity and self-care. I started seeing him again in May of last year, after I had relapsed several times on my return to London from the treatment centre. The sessions have continued through my – touch wood – final relapse in June last year. Only then did the therapeutic breakthroughs begin.

At first we had weekly sessions, then fortnightly. We tried to stretch it to three weeks between sessions but this hasn’t really worked yet. At first I had more trust in the counselling than I did in going to AA meetings. For a start you have to speak in one to one sessions whereas you can keep silent in AA. For a while in the spring, when I didn’t have a sponsor in AA, I used the counselling as a replacement for doing the 12 Steps.

It took me a long time not to see the counsellor as an authority figure, even though he strains not to play that role. There was no reprimand from him about my relapses, for instance. I have a lot of trust in this process now. He is also in recovery, of course, but he’s been with his God for a great many years more than I’ve been with mine.

I went to my Monday night meeting. I didn’t share but I didn’t too much isolating today and I felt a lot better for it. There’s a lesson there for me but I doubt I’ll ever learn it. Day 414 and I saw a 414 bus in West London.

Tuesday August 16, 2006

I did the bare minimum about my alcoholism today, just the am regime, and a tiny bit more Step 4, no meeting, not even a conversation or a text exchange with another alcoholic. I made all sorts of projects about what I am going to do in the future, and had all sorts of imaginary conversations with the other people involved in them.

Am I more sober than I was two weeks ago at the start of this journal? By the time you get to any sort of landmark, you realise the true value of ‘one day at a time’. But writing this feels like further insurance against drinking, though not the most obvious route to freedom from the bondage of self.

Wednesday August 17, 2006

I went to a meeting at lunchtime today, a rarity for me. That has definitely been one of the ways I’ve made it hard for myself in recovery, by not going to enough different meetings. There are hundreds of meetings in London, but I’ve only ever been to a very small selection of them. Over the last few months I’ve been set in my routine of going to the same four evening meetings, on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. It would be easy enough for me to explore other meetings without risking becoming an AA groupie. There are worse fates than that, of course.

Tanya and I had an argument and I pretended that when I fed the neighbours’s cats next door I had been tempted to have a swig of the drink while I was round there. That was a terrible thing to say, a lie and pure emotional blackmail, and I apologised later.

Thursday August 18, 2006

Tanya is going on a business trip for a fortnight from Saturday so I am organising an anti-isolating itinerary for myself. On Sunday and Monday I will be making a rare foray outside London to stay with relations in Norfolk. On Tuesday I am seeing the counsellor again. For the middle weekend a friend is coming to stay. And of course there are always the meetings. But I have reached the point where I need to be doing something other than recovery, recovery, recovery. I mustn’t be only a recovering alcoholic for the rest of my life. That won’t work.

Friday August 19, 2006

Today I had a good old-fashioned bad day, or at least a bad few hours. I let myself off doing some of the last instalments of my Step 4 because I felt so bad. This has happened to me a few times in recovery. I don’t help my cause by isolating and by not eating properly. But emotional turbulence is to be expected: I’ve had a lot of years of habitual and then alcoholic drinking against only 418 days of sobriety. Fortunately, I can now draw on having discussed these passages with the counsellor. I can get out of the house and go swimming. I can call someone in AA. I can say to myself ‘this too shall pass’.

And it does pass. In the supermarket I saw a man buying three bottles of wine for ten pounds exactly as I used to. He didn’t look like an alcoholic, but I said ‘but for the grace of god’. I said it as a matter of course, but felt an extraordinary lightness afterwards. I wouldn’t mind some more of that. Don’t leave before the miracle happens, as they say.

Saturday Augsut 20, 2006

Tanya left this morning, the start of her fortnight away. I wrote some of the last parts of my Step 4. There really is very little left to do on it. I spoke to my parents, and my Dad passed on good wishes from a friend of his who is a ‘fellow recoverer’.

I managed the basics of self-care on the first day of Tanya’s absence. I ate properly. I went swimming. I went to my usual Saturday night meeting, and I shared about my ‘but for the grace of god’ moment yesterday. I can always go to more meetings over the next fortnight. The am regime is all very well but it is a solitary pursuit, keeping my illness to myself.

Sunday August 21, 2006

Tanya has gone half way across the world. I have come to Norfolk, ninety minutes on the train from London. Her trip is all in a fortnight’s work for her; mine is a relatively big adventure for me, only my second night away from my London tram lines this year. I threw in a few serenity prayers on the train but of course there is nothing to fear here.

My aunt and uncle and my cousins are very welcoming. ‘So, no booze, then?’ my uncle asks me. ‘Not today, no’. On a walk, one of my cousins applauds me for re-appraising my life in a way she reckons few people have to. But I’ve had no choice.

Before I left this morning, I did a double dose of my morning regime to last me today and tomorrow: two daily reflections, two sections from the Big Book, and two poems.

Monday August 22, 2006

I returned to London and more or less immediately bumped into one of the people who has helped me most in AA. I called him after 70 sober days and told him I thought I was going mad. He managed to persuade me I was going sane. So I entered his details as ‘Mark 70 days’ on my phone. The same thing happened after thirty weeks, so after his reassurance this time I updated him to ‘Mark 210 days’. After bumping into him today I can update him to ‘Mark 422’ days. I don’t know him at all well and I probably never will but there will always be that bond.

I didn’t go to my Monday meeting tonight. The trains were running late so I would have been late so I turned round and came home. I think it’s the first Monday I have missed in my sixty weeks of sobriety. Dropping commitments and missing meetings are bad moves but then again my trip out of London was fine so it will always be a question of balance.

Tuesday August 23, 2006

I saw the counsellor again this afternoon. My trip to Norfolk gave us plenty to talk about: family relations, the past, me now. I spent a lot of my early sessions with the counsellor speaking what I ought to say and not what I felt. He thinks we can sometimes be too full of AA pieties for our own good. Now, over a year in, he gets more of a chance to get at my devilry, my anger and my sadness. We get at how drinking compounded fears and anxieties. We often end up saying how untrue to myself I was in my drinking. Unto thine own self be true: the crock of gold of recovery. But we’re not going to get me from passive-aggressive to assertive overnight.

My sister told me that one of her sons much prefers me now I’m ‘not a pisshead any more’. I could happily use that phrase and worse about myself with the counsellor or in a meeting but I took this very badly, bridled and retaliated. I remember an addict in the treatment centre breaking into tears when he told the group of his son having called him ‘a junkie’. The same man once asked me who invented dogs. I can remember the exact spot where he said to me: ‘you can’t go back to drinking, Maurice’. I take all recovery praise from my family very badly, gracelessly. But I am happy to wolf down any crumbs or hefty chunks of encouragement and affirmation from fellow-recoverers. I’m not the King of recovery but I want the coronation.

Wednesday 24 August 2006

This is what happens you see: I hadn’t been to a meeting since Saturday until I went to one at 6 this evening. I shouldn’t have just skipped my Monday night meeting, and said missing one in a while is all right. It doesn’t work like that. I felt bad and mad today until I knew the time of the meeting was approaching. Then I arrived and there are some friendly faces, the usual routine, and I am restored to sanity, if chastened. I have to guard against finding ways and means of not to go to meetings.

Thursday 25 August 2006

I had a great day today, in and out of AA. I met a friend for lunch. I’d not seen him since his wedding two and half years ago because he works abroad. I was best man at the wedding, during my active alcoholism, but that was one of the occasions when I got away with drinking a huge amount, openly and secretly, without disaster. Whenever we meet, we are straight back into our patter of many years standing, but because he’s been abroad so much he’s more or less missed out – been spared – my alcoholism. I’ve known him for twenty years but he doesn’t know I was in a treatment centre, he doesn’t know I go to AA. I was wondering if I would tell him today, but this didn’t seem to be the day for it. Other friends of mine do know all about it. There again, one ex-colleague arrived here with a bottle of wine a couple of months ago. I don’t have to have an official policy on it.

The meeting tonight did me some more good. The speaker had been through personal tragedy but stayed sober. My fourteen months of sobriety have been on a very level playing field. Starting recovery has been more or less all I’ve had to deal with, but that has meant bringing to an end about a quarter of a century of alcohol abuse. I shared quite a lot tonight: my reaction to my weekend trip, my reaction to the ‘pisshead’ remark, my bad move in skipping the Monday meeting, my relief at getting to the meeting yesterday. One man with a lot of sober years under his belt said that he dared to be himself now. That’s the direction the counsellor edges me in.

Friday 26 August 26, 2006

I took very little action about my alcoholism today, apart from the am regime. I bumped into a fellow member and exchanged a smile. In my early days when this happened it would have been a furtive nod. I called another member to congratulate them on reaching a year sober. A year and a day in fact so we could laugh about it being the day that counts.

As usual, I saw people buying drink in the supermarket, drinks that I used to like. Sometimes I have to activate Step 1 on this: ‘we admitted we were powerless over alcohol; that our lives had become unmanageable’. Most of the group sessions in the treatment centre were called ‘Step 1’ groups. We had to write down and then discuss ‘SEPUs’: Specific Examples of Powerless and Unmanageability. I had plenty of incidents but I wasn’t interested in recovering then, I wasn’t going to do the Steps. In a session when the other addicts – drugs and alcohol – had to evaluate me, most of them said that I hadn’t accepted my powerless and unmanageability, in other words that I hadn’t got Step 1. And they were right. There is no absolute guarantee against drinking again but tomorrow I head to my sponsor’s at nine in the morning with my Step 4 almost complete.

Saturday 27 August 2006

I reached the end of my Step 4 with my sponsor this morning. We have gone through my fearless and searching moral inventory and looked at my part in all of it from the earliest things I can remember to now. At the end he said ‘you’ve done your Step 5’. I had anticipated that we would have to do that separately but in fact I have been admitting the exact nature of my wrongs to myself, to God and to another human being all through this summer in the Step 4 sessions. Now that he has seen the worst of my behaviour and reactions, I asked him what he thought my most marked defects were. He said I was typical of so many of us alcoholics, undone by an ‘excess of self’. And he pointed out that we were lucky – blessed and graced – to be in recovery, not still suffering in active alcoholism. We hugged. I felt very good about getting this far, but there was no flash of light as I walked home through the park. There doesn’t have to be though. My spirit has a chance if I’m not drinking and trying to work my way through the Steps. I put on a version of ‘Amazing Grace’ when I got home. I shared some of this in the Saturday night meeting but felt very self-conscious.

Sunday 28 August 2006

A friend has come to stay for a couple of nights. He knows about my alcoholism so I can give him updates on the recovery trail. I can joke with him about some of it. We drank some ‘Heaven’, a non-alcoholic ‘celebratory’ drink from champagne flutes. My parents tried to get me drinking things like that during my active alcoholism. Today it felt fine to be doing that. Given how much my sponsor knows about me, I try to let my friend in on some things about me, as if I can square my story with everyone who knows me.

I had some big nights on the drink with this friend over several years, but ruined one visit he made here by collapsing drunk. I remember writing to him from the treatment centre about having had a few accidents with bottles of brandy, not saying I was an alcoholic, and telling him that I was there in the hope of getting ‘rid of some of the glums and most of the drink’. In other words, I hadn’t thrown in the towel.

Monday 29 August 2006

I am quite comfortable telling this friend how I am getting on with recovery, perhaps to the point of boring him. There was no awkwardness in me going off to AA this evening, calling it recovery night school and so on. I also felt fine tonight sharing in the meeting about my inconsistencies: my other friend not being in on my alcoholism, my sponsor knowing so much about me. Perhaps I was too bumptious tonight. In my early days someone came up to me and kindly asked me if I was enjoying the meetings. I thought she was insane, but why not? I am just realising how fortunate I have been to land on the right sponsor at the right time to get me through Steps 4 and 5. For that relief much thanks.

Tuesday 30 August 2006

I haven’t taken enough action about my alcoholism today. I rested on the laurels of having completed Steps 4 and 5 and the mild afterglow of enjoying the meeting last night. I am going to re-read the stuff about Steps 4 and 5 in the Big Book and in the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous. I told my sponsor everything so there is no call for nagging doubts. I did and thought some bad things but there is no reason to drink on them. It’s none of my business but there’s nothing in anyone’s Steps 4 and 5 to justify drinking again. I keep thinking about Bob Dylan’s song about Lenny Bruce: ‘never robbed any churches, or cut off any baby’s heads’.

Wednesday 31 August 2006

I had a choice tonight: board the oncoming bus home or go to a meeting. I went to the meeting, which was just as well. I had been feeling physically tense, the sort of tension a drink – a few drinks, then lots of drinks – used to take away. It’s all very well having done Steps 4 and 5 but there is always Step 1. There are the basic golden rules of AA: don’t drink and go to meetings.

Tanya is back tomorrow so I have got through the time of her trip abroad. I have got thorugh the whole of August without a drink, to add to my other thirteen months. Part of me is saying all this time going by and nothing achieved. But that misses the point of achieving some level of ongoing sobriety: ‘the miracle of abstinence’ as one of the counsellors at the treatment centre used to put it.

Thurday 1 September 2006

I had a good, big day of recovery today. I saw the counsellor again so I could report the completion of my Steps 4 and 5, and my reaction to it, very positive but not euphoric. One of the things he’s done from the start is to say ‘well done’ at small victories and breakthroughs: getting to a month sober, a few months, getting through Christmas, getting to a year. So it was good to be able to tell him that I’ve got this far on the Steps, and to realise how lucky I’ve been in the last few months with sponsorship. That is a mighty good card I have been dealt in recovery this summer, and it’s important to acknowledge that.

I’d not been eating much in the last couple of days. But after the counselling session my appetite was back. This has happened quite a few times this year. We’d talked me better. We’re trying to stretch the sessions to fortnighly again from now on.

Then there was the Thurday night meeting. The speaker talked about drinking out of fear. My awareness of that has only come in sobriety. Another member spoke about being sick and tired of being an alcoholic, twenty months into his recovery. I know what he means: we make it exhausting for ourselves because we give ourselves so few breaks. A couple of months ago, after an emergency session when I was feeling unhinged, the counsellor suggested that I asked myself if I had given myself a break at the end of each day.

Friday 2 September 2006

I couldn’t find my house keys for hours today so I got that completely out of proportion: losing a sense of perspective is a big enemy of mine in recovery. I texted my friend from last night’s meeting who was fed up with being a recovering alcoholic to see how he was getting on today. He was back in fine form but I felt like he did yesterday. I wondered if I’d caught that feeling from him. That is something I can ask my sponsor and the counsellor about: not feeling obliged to be dragged down unnecessarily.

I re-read the passages in the Big Book and the 12 Steps and 12 traditions on Steps 4 and 5. It confirmed to me how conscientious my sponsor has been with me through this process. I tested Tanya on what she thought I had been up to in Steps 4 and 5: she knew that 4 involved ‘a fearless and searching moral inventory’, but she thought that in 5 I had admitted my powerlessness over alcohol. Eventually, when she got to the fact that I had admitted the exact nature of my wrongs, she knew that I had admitted my wrongs to myself and to another human being, but she missed out God. That would be no way to go about it.

Saturday 3 September 2006

I was on at myself today about whether I was born an alcoholic or became one. I don’t think about this all that much any more. I know that I am one but it took a lot of years for alcohol to bring me down. Then again, at the meeting tonight I suddenly remembered a time when a friend and I drank to collapse on his parents’ gin when we were seventeen. So it was abuse of alcohol all the way along even if the result wasn’t always disastrous from the start.

I need to make an effort to go to more meetings, rather than this ration of four evenings a week. There is nothing to stop me from taking that extra insurance. The counsellor is very pragmatic about this: if you’ve got loads of spots apply lots of cream was his analogy.

62 weeks sober tomorrow. I should think about how far I’ve come rather than keep wondering when serenity will find me.

Sunday 4 September 2006

I went to a Sunday lunchtime meeting for the first time. A slightly different format from some of the others I attend but the same message and lots of familiar faces. Bumping into people again after a little while is one of the big pluses of recovery: knowing you’re both still around, still going strong.

It’s good that I went but I am awkward leaving. Did I say my goodbyes and look after yourselves properly?

Monday 5 September 2006

I spent the day with Tanya today, testing her on the contents of the first five Steps of recovery as we got the bus home. Perhaps I should spend more time practising them rather than droning on to her about them.

I felt very different at the Monday night meeting tonight from last week. I didn’t speak and I didn’t bring much to the meeting. The ten per cent friend was there and I moaned to him that I was fed up with all this, tired of being a recovering alcoholic. There was a lot of self-pity and acting up in that. I could easily have just said ‘another day done, not my best day, but another day sober’.

I spoke to my friend who has the relapses. He’d been on the drink over the weekend but had stopped again today. I told him that tomorrow neither of us would have a drink and we’d chat again at the end of the day, both less full of self-pity.

Tuesday 6 September 2006

There was no avoiding speaking at the meeting I went to tonight because I’d been asked to do the chair. So I spent the whole day feeling nervous, imagining what I was going to say, and counting the hours. Of course, like every time, I just spoke about how it’s been for me through my drinking and through these fourteen months of sobriety and it was fine. Listening to myself speak at length, for half an hour or so, I can feel and hear how I’ve changed: much, much calmer, much less air-brushing of my story as well. At the end of the meeting, before the serenity prayer, I said that I laughed tonight, and that there had been no laughter at all in the last few years of my drinking. So it was a good meeting for me and showed – again – that I am in the right place in AA.

I called the relapse friend as I’d promised. He’d not had a drink today and we were both less full of self-pity.

Wednesday 7 September 2006

For the first time since the start of this journal, I had a drink dream last night. I dreamt that my sister found me hunched over a large tumbler of brandy which I had concealed in a cupboard. Not too far removed from an incident at her house a couple of years ago. These drink dreams recurred a lot in my early days. They come round much less often now, but this won’t be the last.

I had another quick scamper across some of the bridge to normal living today, spending the day out of London with my friend from schooldays. I had all the goodwill from last night’s meeting to sustain me and make me smile inwardly. My friend joined me in a soft drink at the end of our day. I wonder if he felt like a beer. He has been a normal social drinker all the time I’ve been an alcoholic. Kindly, he’s not had a drink in my presence since I’ve been sober. I remember telling him once – about three years ago - that I was having trouble sleeping. He replied: ‘you’re not going to like this but I think it’s all the alcohol’. I didn’t and it was. What more could he have said at the time? Nothing, certainly nothing to stop me drinking.

So it was the bare minimum on my alcoholism today, just the am regime before I left for my day out, and a text exchange with an AA friend, the one who was fed up with his alcoholism last Thursday but is now on the up again. But that was enough for today.

Thursday 8 September 2006

We were few but strong at the Thursday meeting tonight. I walked home with an Irishman who’s been sober for years and years. This happens once every six weeks or so. I always try to get his sobriety date out of him but he always gives me the same answer: ‘oh, it’s been a good few years now’. Still, he was kind enough to tell me that I was ‘looking awfully well’. ‘Clean living’ is my comeback on that one these days.

Friday 9 September 2006

I went for coffee and a walk around town with the friend I give ten per cent of my days to. We agreed that maybe that’s too big a premium. He said he’d take one and a half per cent from now on. Even in an hour’s walk in central London we saw two of our number who go to some of the same meetings as us. And after I’d left the ten per center I bumped into two more recoverers.

I don’t think me and the ten per center can count our encounters as AA meetings. We tend to make jokes about going off on the rampage to give us more material for our Step 4s: he reckons that would be ‘programme-related’. Deep into my active alcoholism I remember whimpering to my parents that I didn’t have any friends. Recovery has changed that.

Saturday 10 September 2006

There was something in one of the newspapers today about a celebrity who was an alcoholic who had joined AA but still had a drink every now and then. I get quite angry about this sort of thing: good old x, back on the hard stuff ho-ho-ho.

Tanya wasn’t very well today so I looked after her. We were talking about the times when she had to look after me because of my drinking. She could name at least two occasions when I collapsed in the street before we even got to a social event. And there were plenty more incidents. Yes, they did really happen.

Quite a few regulars from the Saturday night meeting were away at an AA convention. I can’t see myself ever going to one of those but then I never envisaged I’d be spending my Saturday nights at an AA meeting.

I had some absurd projections for my professional future tonight, partly set off by the speaker’s story at the meeting. Not very realistic, but time to show the courage to change the things I can.

Sunday 11 September 2006

No cause to rant at the newspapers today. Another minor celebrity featured and was impressively matter of fact about having gone to AA and followed the 12 Steps in his long-term sobriety.

We had to go to get Tanya some emergency anti-biotics today. Back to very near the hospital where she took me once when I was in a bad way generally but still unable to see myself as an alcoholic. I lied to the doctor about how much I was drinking, when I was drinking it and how long I’d been drinking it for. The amount I told him was alarming enough but not the full story. So I began again after a week or so of other medications.

No meeting today for me; and absolutely no excuse for not going tomorrow.

Monday 12 September 2006

The speaker tonight was the woman who asked me if I was enjoying the meetings in my early days. So I shared that memory with her in tonight’s meeting. Through all my months of sobriety I had only ever met her at a Wednesday meeting, so I told her that I thought she only existed on Wednesdays. My sponsor was at the meeting so we arranged to meet again on Saturday. I will look at the literature on Step 6 in the Big Book and in the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions of AA. Step 6 reads that ‘we were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character’. But it doesn’t have to be a route march through the Steps with my sponsor. In fact, I’m looking forward to seeing him and chatting to him about everything, especially now we are through Steps 4 and 5.

Tuesday 13 September 2006

I saw the counsellor again today. It was quite a relaxed session. I may be wrong, but I don’t think he has to work as hard on me or with me as in my early sessions, when mostly it was a question of getting through the week or the fortnight sober. I may stop going eventually, but at the moment it works because he knows so much about me and so much about recovery.

I told Tanya about some of the things I talk about with the counsellor. She said that ‘he should mind his own business’. I thought that was very funny but forgot to tell him. Next time.

Wednesday 14 September 2006

The am regime has brought me back round to the start of the Big Book. Today I read the forewords to the various editions, including statistics on the hundreds of thousands of members in AA worldwide, of which I am one, even if I still don’t quite believe it.

I called a woman today to speak informally about a job I had been thinking of applying for. I had made all sorts of plans for the interview, for how I should square my cv with my alcoholism, but of course it never went that far. She advised me, not unkindly, not to waste time applying because there would definitely be other more suitable candidates. So that was a good bursting of my ego.

I didn’t have any contact with other alcoholics today, unless the woman on the phone is one of us. She didn’t sound like it, but then neither did I to her. It’s a good job I’ve got a commitment for the meeting tomorrow.

Thursday 15 September 2006

I read the section called ‘The Doctor’s Opinion’ in the Big Book today, where it states that we ‘allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all’ and that ‘entire abstinence’ is the only way for us. It certainly took me long enough to learn that nought units a week was my maximum.

There was quite a lot of grim talk at the meeting tonight about what happens when people relapse: hospitals, asylums, deaths. In one of my first sessions with him the counsellor said to me that he’d ‘been to too many funerals’. But we were all sober at the meeting tonight, sober just for today. I felt fearful before the meeting, but full of energy afterwards. There were ten of us and I had met every one at least once before.

Tanya is still not very well. I try to tell her to look after herself, perhaps a bit much coming from me with my track record on that score.

Friday 16 September 2006

Tanya is still quite ill. I am getting great support on the phone from my sponsor and from my parents and my sister, and from Tanya’s parents.

In fact, the situation lead to a breakthough of sorts, as I told my Mum that I am fine and in the hands of my higher power. Normally, I would bolt her out from that kind of thing. Thank God I am not drinking, and thank God for AA, a line in the reading at last night’s meeting.

Saturday 17 September 2006

Tanya is getting better now, but I managed to convince myself that I was contracting her virus, and to start to prepare excuses for not going to the meeting tonight. In the end I did go, but left early to come back and see how she was getting on. My updates to her parents represent a bit of a role reversal from the times when I was ill, before and after we all came to know that I was an alcoholic.

I had a bit of a twinge for a drink coming home, maybe because of all the Saturday night drinkers on the bus. Part of me still doesn’t accept that I couldn’t be a normal drinker. All of me needs to remember what my last drink was like.

Sunday 18 September 2006

I keep discovering, time and again, what a typical alcoholic I am. After last night’s twinges and delusions about normal drinking, this morning I re-read chapter 3 of the Big Book and immediately came across these sentences: ‘The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing’. So I am not the world’s first ever alcoholic.

My sponsor came round to watch a football match. As I wasn’t taking any further action about my alcoholism today, I asked him if his visit counted as a meeting. He wasn’t having any of that.

I texted the ten per center to ask him if he still loved me now that I’m 64: 64 weeks sober today. He said he would even if it was only 63.

Monday 19 September 2006

I saw my friend from schooldays again today. We were laughing about the delusions of teachers and pupils when it came to our possible futures, imagining the staff telling me I could be a recovering alcoholic by now. It was another breakthrough of sorts for me to use the phrase ‘recovering alcoholic’ in his company.

There is a bit of hypochondria in there with my alcoholism. I had a busy, active day but this morning I was trying to tell myself I had flu, and then this evening I almost managed to tell myself that I was too tired for the meeting. But I got there. Day 450 tomorrow.

Tuesday 20 September 2006

This afternoon I bumped into one of the regulars of a meeting I used to go to in the first six months of my sobriety. His words at a meeting – on the need for ‘honesty, open mindedness and willingness’ - led me directly to my first sponsor. I’d not seen him since January. Neither of us has had a drink since then. We exchanged verbatim extracts from the Big Book before going on our separate ways. ‘Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path’ was the line I remember him repeating time after time. I was in a position to quote that to him as I’d re-read it only this morning. He was a great one for expressing gratitude for the simple things: a roof over his head, a bed to sleep in and so on. But on the day that he said he was grateful for running water I came home to find that ours had been cut off.

I found white wine on the list of ingredients of the supermarket meal I was going to cook tonight. So that had to be shelved. There was a brief spasm of self-pity about how nice it would be to be able to drink a glass of white wine, before the sanity of just the none took over again. I doubt that wine cooked in a sauce would create a craving but I’m not taking any risks.

Wednesday 21 September 2006

I went out for a meal with Tanya tonight. When I was newly out of the treatment centre I would take occasional sips out of Tanya’s glass of wine when we were at restaurants, not even behind her back. Even at the treatment centre my mother asked one of the counsellors if it would be all right for me to have the occasional glass of wine in future. That was how ignorant we were of addiction and its workings.

A collaborative project I’ve been involved in is nearly ready. One of my colleagues sent me the results today and of course there are things I dislike about what has happened to my work. This is a very good test of my sobriety. It is a chance to under-react, to remember that I was an active alcoholic for much of the time I was working on the project, so that my work was sometimes sketchy, late or postponed. I can try to walk in my colleagues’ shoes, see how the collaboration benefited my work, and acknowledge that I was fortunate to be working on the project. And I can ask how much my precious reservations really matter. I can be grateful if that is all there is to test my sobriety at the moment.

Thursday 22 September 2006

I needed to get a sense of proportion today and the best place for that is always an AA meeting. So it proved tonight. I shared about my nagging misgivings over the collaborative project, in other words about my pettiness, pride and self-centredness. It is a good job I have some sobriety and some understanding of the 12 Steps under my belt. That gives me an opportunity to keep things in some sort of perspective, if I choose to do so.

Friday 23 September 2006

I spent the day with Tanya. We had a good quiet relaxing day together. Funnily enough, I was reading the chapter ‘To Wives’ in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous this morning. Tanya came to a few AA meetings with me in April last year, when I was still drinking on and off, but she has never been to Al-Anon. She says she’ll read the ‘To Wives’ chapter. Fifteen months in, she can be pretty sure that I am not drinking on a daily basis, but now there are other things for us to address together, partly put at the bottom of the agenda by the selfishness of my drinking. That wasted a lot of time and caused many crises, but I also have to accept it as a thing I cannot change.

I had a good chat with my parents tonight. I told them that I would be ‘at my meeting’ tomorrow night so they know another sober day beckons for me tomorrow.

Saturday 24 September 2006

Before the meeting tonight I was talking to a fellow member who has been sober for more or less the same time as me. There was a good sense of a shared journey in that.

The speaker talked about having made amends to his mother recently. That’s still to come for me, but I felt better for sharing at the meeting that I’m now 15 months sober. I need to start looking properly at Step 6, and become ready to have God remove my defects of character. My sponsor was away this weekend but I need to have a one-to-one with him soon.

I am going to have to challenge myself to go a week without mentioning my recovery to Tanya. I wouldn’t find that at all easy because I seek credit a lot of the time. In the very early days I would be forever asking her ‘how do you think I’m doing in my attempt to recover from alcoholism?’, as if I was asking her how she rated my chicken curry.

Sunday 25 September 2006

I went to the zoo with Tanya today. I texted the ten per center and he reminded me that they were God’s creatures that I was looking at.

It was a good day with Tanya. I imposed the restraint order and managed not to make any mention of recovery, of my days and weeks and months sober. But several times I found myself on the point of saying ‘day 455 in the solution’, or ’65 weeks sober’, just as a conversation-filler. So she was spared that today but I don’t know if she noticed.

Monday 26 September 2006

Tanya found me half-slumped over the end of the bed this morning. It was momentarily alarming for her but I was just saying the serenity prayer.

I was back in my Monday evening routine tonight of swimming followed by the meeting. I didn’t have a drink today and I felt alive, alive in the world and alive in AA.

Tuesday 27 September 2006

I read about Step 6 today in the Big Book and in the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions. There is reassurance in there that we cannot adhere perfectly to the Steps, apart from Step 1 of never taking a drink. It is a process and a journey but that doesn’t mean there won’t be moments of magic.

I have been looking at some old teenage diaries of mine. Plenty of drinking going on, and plenty of alcoholism in there regardless of the drinks taken, and even the claim that I was avoiding the object of my teenage crush ‘like a dried out alcoholic avoids a double whisky’. But there is also plenty to laught about with my friend from school when I see him again tomorrow.

I spoke to my mum tonight. I am feeling some guilt about what I put my family through in active alcoholism. I made my alcoholic bed but they loved me too much to let me lie in it.

Wednesday 28 September 2006

My schoolfriend and I were reminiscing about some of the teenage years today. Unprompted by me, or any talk of recovery, he said that we hadn’t accepted our powerlessness over events at that age. Of course, there is a lot in the 12 Steps which is useful to non-addicts.

458 days sober today, and still managing not to mention the statistic to Tanya. I’ll ask her at the end of the week if she’s noticed.

Thursday 29 September 2006

I saw the counsellor again today. I could report another fortnight or so of sobriety, the time and the reflections with my schoolfriend and the state of my relationship with Tanya. One of the good things about the sessions is that he manages to point to some of my selfishness – particularly with Tanya - without seeming to be critical of me. We also talked about crying. He told me that he didn’t get to have a good cry until about three years into recovery. I’ve felt a bit weepy a few times in my fifteen months but not cried properly yet. And we talked about how I have added the word ‘Perspective’ to my daily commands since I last saw him. For instance, my feelings on the collaboration from a week ago now look like a ludicrous over-reaction.

I was feeling unwell before the meeting tonight and thought I might have to call a fellow member to say I couldn’t make it. But of course as soon as I arrived and started talking to a man on his very first day of sobriety I was fine again. I was as pleased to see him as he said he was relieved to see me. It almost felt like a golden thread from the counsellor to me to this newcomer. So it was a very positive day and a very positive meeting.

Friday 30 September 2006

I didn’t do much about my alcoholism today. I exchanged a couple of friendly texts with fellow members. I played a phone message from my sponsor twice because it was good to hear his voice for the first time for a week or so.

We drove to Tanya’s parents this evening for a weekend in the countryside. This was my second trip there in sobriety, so still quite new ground. When we arrived Tanya’s Dad showed me a bottle of fizz in the fridge, ‘pretending to be champagne’ in his words. At first I thought he meant it was special non-alcoholic fizz, but it turned out to be proper sparkling wine. That gave this recovering alcoholic some mileage for good-natured outrage.

Saturday 1 October 2006

There is a photograph up here of me and Tanya on holiday three years ago, by which time I was drinking very heavily and often secretly, but just before I became a major cause for concern. In the photo on board a boat I look just about presentable but a bit sickly, and not from sea sickness. I can remember an incident from that day very well. Tanya and I agreed to go our separate ways and each have a walk around the town before meeting up in a pub for a drink at an acceptable time. But of course I went straight to the pub, drank a couple of large brandies, then made out that I had just arrived there when I met up with Tanya. We went up to the bar and the barmaid asked me ‘same again then, sir?’

I went for a walk on my own in the afternoon around the village here. Today it was a genuine walk and nothing else. But on previous visits it would have included stopping off at the shop or the pub to get myself extra drinks to add to the many I would have had at Tanya’s parents. That memory must have triggered Tanya asking me if I had my wallet on me before I set off, and her momentary ‘has he had a drink?’ look when I got back. I had not.

Sunday 2 October 2006

We drove back to London this afternoon. We wondered idly about moving to one of the villages on the route home. I imagined going to AA at the local church. I think AA would be difficult for me outside London for the moment.

I hope Tanya’s parents enjoyed having a sober guest. I asked Tanya if she had noticed my not mentioning my sobriety record for a week, and she said yes but only now I came to mention it. Maybe that’s more to do with couples than alcoholism.

So for the first time since the start of this journal I have gone three full days without a meeting or a session with the counsellor. It has gone well, but I was in other people’s company the whole time.

Monday 3 October 2006

I was job searching again today. But I wasn’t very sane about it, dreaming far too high and then ordering an application form for something completely inappropriate, and all the time wondering where my alcoholism fits into all this. The counsellor recommends counselling as a possible future for me. Well, if there’s one thing we come to know, it’s alcoholism and recovery.

I got it all horribly out of perspective, trying to sort my life out at a stroke, so I was thankful to get to my Monday meeting tonight. It was a good strong meeting. I could have got even more out of it with a bit less self-absorption. It is a big day in my sobriety tomorrow as my parents are visiting us for the first time since I stopped drinking. Tuesday 4 October 2006

So my parents came to stay for the night and we have had a good day with them. They and Tanya had the worst of my active alcoholism. Less than two years ago my mother had to sit by me as I lay comatose in a hospital bed. That and other incidents were real events in my life. But here we all were enjoying ourselves with me restored to some kind of sanity. The fact that I wasn’t drinking barely felt like an issue. So today feels like a huge breakthrough in recovery, to remember and to report to my sponsor and to the counsellor. Day 464 in the solution was one of the best yet.

Wednesday 5 October 2006

My parents went home, on the same train journey I made drunkenly on numerous occasions during active alcoholism. They saw me last Christmas when I was six months sober, and now again after a year and three months. My mother told Tanya that she could hear me starting to get well in phone conversations.

Tanya and I went to the theatre tonight. I felt a surprising inner calm getting the bus in to the hustle of the West End. I so rarely go to any gatherings other than AA meetings that I look at all the other members of the audience as recovering alcoholics.

What steps did I take about my alcoholism today? Only the AM regime, and a text exchange with a fellow member around an incident in a meeting six months ago. So we could conclude that was another year of sobriety we had racked up between us.

Thursday 6 October 2006

The speaker at the meeting tonight had been sober for over twenty years. Even though I knew it already, it still jolted me to hear him say that most alcoholics drink, that only a few are in recovery. I shared about how well my parents visit had gone, and that sometimes in recovery massive rewards seem to come our way when we may not be expecting them. Again I came alive at the meeting having been inert, listless – and isolated – all day long. The lesson is there but it will take a lifetime to live and learn it.

I had one of my long conversations with my relapse friend when I got home. He’d had a single bottle of beer tonight. We know that it wouldn’t be like that for me. ‘Have faith’, as the twenty-year man said tonight.

Friday 7 October 2006

I went into central London today on an errand. It would have been easy to take in a new meeting but I didn’t. I must go to some more meetings while I have this opportunity. It really couldn’t do me any harm. It’s not as if I’m unused to introducing myself as an alcoholic.

While I was out I bumped into an old acquaintance. We had a brief chat. I was waiting for her to say how healthy I looked but of course she didn’t. Why should see? Why should my recovery be anywhere on her priorities?

I did tomorrow’s am regime tonight because I’m seeing my sponsor first thing tomorrow morning.

Saturday 8 October 2006

I met up with my sponsor for our first proper one-to-one for six weeks, since the day I finished Step 5. It went well. I had a minor professional boost this week so we inflated that into the start of good things for me. We talked about steps 6 and 7, where we become ready to have God remove our defects of character and then humbly ask him for their removal. My sponsor admitted that he hadn’t looked at them for a while.

My sister and her family are staying tonight. She and my brother-in-law went out to a party and I felt a slight twinge about not being able to go out and enjoy myself. I have put so much into my recovery in the last 15 months that I have rarely considered the idea of social events. At the few I’ve been to the main issue has been keeping off the drink, then thinking afterwards well I got through that. Perhaps I’m getting towards a stage of being able to enjoy things more. Again, it’s not as if the end of my drinking was enjoyable.

Sunday 9 October 2006

What would my sister’s visit have been like if I was still drinking? At best, I would have been nervous company, sneaking drinks the whole time, my moods swinging. At worst, as happened once, I would have passed out at home so they had to wake up the neighbours to get back in.

I delayed my am regime until after the guests had left. That was all I did about my alcoholism today. So I have only been to two meetings this week, not enough. But I can draw on the meetings I have been to, and all the sessions with the counsellor and my sponsor. That amounts to quite a lot of archive footage.

I felt some autumnal melancholy this evening. But plenty of non-alcoholics may have felt the same.

Monday 10 October 2006

Of course, I was wrong to think that I can keep drawing on the archive footage. I felt very turbulent and emotionally disturbed today, and I’m sure it was partly because I have had two successive weeks of only going to two meetings. I didn’t feel near having a drink, but by the middle of the afternoon I was grateful for the prospect of this evening’s meeting, and telling myself ‘more meetings’. I could share all this – and the visits from my parents and my sister – at the meeting and feel restored to some kind of sanity. Now I have to heed my ‘more meetings’ instruction.

Tuesday 11 October 2006

I still felt turbulent through most of today. This has happened several times before. I suppose I hoped that doing Steps 4 and 5 might make me immune. My sister says I have got a lot calmer between June and now, in other words from before I’d done Steps 4 and 5 and after.

I went to an extra meeting tonight and shared that I was on good terms with my family, but that I wouldn’t be if I was drinking, and that if I didn’t go to AA I would be drinking. And I shared about how going to too few meetings recently had done me no good at all. This meeting has been one of my emergencies at least twice before: I can remember going to it in March and in June feeling much the same. And I can go to another one tomorrow if need be. Today was definitely a day when my alcoholism was on me. I have to remember that good days follow the turbulence.

Wednesday 12 October 2006

The turbulence carried on today, right from the moment I woke up, then on and off but generally easing slightly. I took action by going to a lunchtime meeting I’d never been to before. That was definitely a good move. There were lots of friendly faces there, some new, some familiar. It was in a nice room in a nice church. Just being there calmed me down.

I felt a lot better afterwards but still feel tender, raw and exposed. Way back in the treatment centre one of the counsellors told me that it would be an emotional journey. It certainly feels like that at the moment, very up and down in the space of a few minutes. I even almost managed a good cry. I spoke to my sponsor and he said it was natural for me to feel exposed at the moment, and that I can keep safe by going to a meeting every day if necessary. There was bound to be a reaction after all the family gatherings, even though – perhaps especially – as they went so well. That was another thing I could have done, called my sponsor sooner. I’ll be seeing him again on Saturday.

Thurday 13 October 2006

I went to another lunchtime meeting today, then really started to feel a whole lot better afterwards. I treated myself to a hearty lunch in a café. Then this evening I was back in my swimming and evening meeting routine. I had an interesting conversation with a fellow member before the meeting, not only about recovery, so that felt like a restoration to sanity.

The turbulence is definitely different from self-pity, or having a moan and a grumble. It is a feeling of being unhinged, mind racing, being fearful, getting through the day without really being there. All very hard to express. I will have to try to explain it to the counsellor when I see him on Monday. I’m hoping it continues to ease off.

Friday 14 October 2006

Yes, the turbulence eased considerably today. I suppose I fear what my reactions will be when the true tests of my sobriety come along.

I went to a lunchtime meeting again today. Today it felt like taking out a little extra insurance rather than a necessity. It amazes me now how few meetings I went to in my earliest days of recovery. Tanya is going on another trip away next month so I have arranged to visit my sister for some of that time. At today’s meeting I bought a book with details of all the meetings in Britain in readiness for that. In other words, I took action.

Tanya and I made a brief appearance at a friend’s birthday party in a pub tonight. That was a very unusual situation for me to be in these days, all the chat, laughter and drinks knocking around. It was very much a scene from the old days for me, before the drink really started to get me. It was strange to be gulping down my cranberry juice, but hardly an acid test of my sobriety, which wouldn’t be up to much if I’d sneaked a drink there. Not after 474 days.

Saturday 15 October 2006

I woke up feeling turbulent again so it was a relief to go round for coffee at my sponsor’s. Talking to him helped me a lot. He suggested that I continued to show faith in the recovery process. After all, having a God got me this far. He pointed out that people inside and outside AA care about me.

I was back at my regular Saturday night meeting tonight after missing the last two weeks. Before the meeting I spoke to someone I knew from a while ago who had been drinking again until two days ago. He’d done well to make it back to the meetings. It was a bit of a ‘pass the razor blades’ meeting tonight, as someone described it to me afterwards. But the speaker said something important: that the best cure for excessive self-absorption is to extend a helping hand to another alcoholic.

Sunday 16 October 2006

I was the speaker at a rough and ready meeting in central London tonight. It felt quite normal for me to be doing this, I hardly felt nervous or self-conscious at all. Perhaps I would have spoken better with a few nerves. A fellow member thought my name was Maurice. This has happened before, giving me my name for this journal. My sponsor suggested I wrote gratitude lists for a while. They would be headed by Tanya, though we had a big row tonight. Unusually, she referred to the time when I was a ‘raving alcoholic’, a card she rarely plays. I’ll be seeing the counsellor tomorrow, not before time. I’ll be able to tell him about the good week of family meetings, then all the turbulence this week. So I’ve been to a meeting every day this week. They were there, and I needed them. Monday 17 October 2006

I saw the counsellor and we talked about the ups and downs of the last two and half weeks, the family meetings and then the turbulence. A few sessions ago the counsellor and I agreed that I was quite a ‘steady eddie’ for an alcoholic. For the last week or so it hasn’t felt like that. Again, we are still waiting for the first big cry of my recovery. I was quite needy in this session and there was a lot to talk about. Two and a half weeks had seemed like a long time, so I’ll be seeing him again in exactly a fortnight. I need to accept that I need the counselling rather than think I am striving towards a time when I won’t need it. I need to accept that I am in recovery with all that it entails.

The speaker at the meeting tonight is a woman I have come to know quite well in recovery. I admire the courage to change the things she can she has shown in her recovery. So I told her just that.

Tuesday 18 October 2006

Procrastination was one of the big character defects to emerge from my Step 4. Today, I finally hung up some pictures around the house, a job I have been putting off for months. So I felt a lot better for that small but tangible achievement, and for being able to strike it off my list of ‘to be dones’.

After 8 successive days of meetings, regular and emergency, I gave AA a miss today. That felt fine, I felt restored to sanity with Tanya and my brother-in-law tonight. There was a split second today when I stopped in my tracks and thought yes recovery is working for me. So the turbulence has passed, not never to return, but lived through and to be learned from. Alcoholism is a very strange business.

Wednesday 19 October 2006

I managed to transform a slight change in Tanya’s arrangements into an excuse for me not to go to a meeting this evening. But I did call my sponsor for a chat. I told him about a small act of petulance from my drinking days and he said that it was ‘pathetic’. He’s right of course and I have to take this kind of thing to get well. I tried out a new soft drink today but it was disgusting, like melted ice lolly.

Thursday 20 October 2006

I met up with a non AA friend before going to the meeting tonight. We were on the lime and soda in a pub where we used to go drinking together. I always resolve not to bore him with tales of my recovery but we always ending up talking about it a fair bit. I told him what I’ve been doing to stay sober and he said it sounded like a full-time job.

Since Monday I have been feeling a lot of relief at my acceptance that I am in recovery full time, that if I need to go to a meeting every day that’s fine, and if I need extra sessions with the counsellor that’s fine too. I tried to share this at the meeting but couldn’t explain it very well.

Friday 21 October 2006

The ten per center got to two years sober today so I texted him congratulations and thanked him for having me in his slip stream, for showing me the way. Firing off a few texts and the am regime was about all I did about my alcoholism today. It has been a much steadier week than last week.

My non AA friend, definitely not an alcoholic, was saying last night that he’d been out recently and just had soft drinks and had been fine with that, even felt more alive throughout the evening. Life tastes better neat is one of the sayings that does the rounds in the meetings I go to. But I still suffer the occasional delusion that I’m being denied drinks rather than given sobriety.

The relapse friend has asked me to call him every evening so he can report a sober day to me. That’s been going on for three days now. So far, so good.

Saturday 22 October 2006

I went to a pub theatre with Tanya this afternoon. So that’s three pubs I’ve been to in the last eight days. I used to love pubs so there are obvious dangers of delusions and nostalgia about drinking in them.

I left my evening meeting early to join Tanya and some friends who had been having dinner together. That didn’t really work very well. I hadn’t seen these friends for a while so I was hoping they would say how well I was looking these days. But why should they? After all, neither did they mention the last time I was round at their house, just before I went to the treatment centre last year, when I just slugged all their drink down my throat to the point of collapse.

No answer from the relapse friend tonight.

Sunday 23 October 2006

Or tonight, so that experiment hasn’t gone very well.

I did the bare minimum about my alcoholism today, just the am regime. I suppose an even barer minimum would be just not to have a drink. I half-hoped to bump into another recovering alcoholic but that didn’t happen.

A year ago today I went to a wedding with Tanya. That was an early test of my sobriety at a social occasion. The few people I knew in AA at that stage advised me to think about what I could contribute to the occasion. I remember reporting the event to the counsellor. I think we saw it as a small step in my return to the human race. But on last night’s evidence I am not sure if I find social occasions any easier a year later. AA is my natural habitat at the moment.

Monday 24 October 2006

I tried to talk myself out of going to the meeting tonight but I’m glad I didn’t. It was a really good meeting for me even though I didn’t say anything. Several people shared about how bad they feel when they stop going to enough meetings. That’s happened to me several times. The ten per center gave me a lift home afterwards. I felt full of energy, elated almost, when I got home. AA is not always like that but it worked wonders for me tonight so I am very fortunate to have become a regular at that meeting. There was a lot of loneliness in my drinking, and I still do a lot of isolating. AA can bring me some relief from that, if I let it.

I caught up with the relapse friend tonight. He had been drinking the last couple of days, now he has stopped again. In fact, he’s not an alcoholic. Sometimes he drinks, sometimes he doesn’t. But I’m glad to have met him and have him to speak to.

Tuesday 25 October 2006

I wasn’t active enough today, about my alcoholism or anything else. I had a good long chat with my Dad. As far as my parents are concerned, there is no rush for me to do anything other than to carry on recovering. But I must avoid exploiting that.

I spoke to my sponsor tonight. We agreed that it was time for me to press on with the 12 Steps. Two months have passed since I completed my Step 5. So I’m going to read the Step 6 literature over the next ten days or so with a view to doing Step 7 with him a week on Saturday. Day 485 of sobriety today so only two weeks left of this journal.

Wednesday 26 October 2006

A rather strange incident happened at the lunchtime meeting I went to today. I thought I recognised someone I knew from a long while ago. I remember meeting her at a wedding a few years back when she explained to me that she was on the soft drinks because she was a recovering alcoholic. I think even then – at least five years ago - part of me thought that might be coming my way too. Anyway, I approached her today at the end of the meeting and said hello but she gave a different name. Maybe she has an AA double; people have said that I have an AA double. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said hello. I felt foolish and mystified afterwards.

I read the sections on Steps 6 and 7 in the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous this evening. There is a bit in there about turning to God only in moments of emergency. That hits home with me. I’ll have to talk carefully to my sponsor about these two Steps.

Thursday 27 October 2006

My prospects are improving on the work front. Already I am wondering how my sobriety will stand up to potential new situations where there may be alcohol. ‘I don’t drink thanks’ I imagine myself saying; or ‘just an orange juice thanks’; or ‘I’m off the drink thanks’. I don’t think I’ll be able to introduce myself as a recovering alcoholic to complete strangers, not outside of AA. Of course, I’ll be better at the work for not drinking.

It was an excellent meeting tonight. I’ve heard the speaker a couple of times before. He’s still young but has quite a few years of sobriety under his belt. He was very clear and inspiring about what his drinking was like, and how recovery and the Steps have been for him. He’d suffered a major bereavement recently but didn’t even mention the thought of a drink in that context. That was inspiring. He also reminded us that it was a daily programme. I think I have been working the programme daily, but perhaps somewhere in there is the delusion is that I’ll be able to take time off from it. As so often, this particular meeting enlivened me.

Friday 28 October 2006

I had to speak at another meeting tonight, only for ten minutes. Tanya told me not to worry about it and reminded me that I was there to help people. I spoke about acceptance, acceptance of being an alcoholic and acceptance of being in recovery. It was a big meeting but I didn’t feel nervous speaking there. Sixteen months of sobriety has stopped me from being a nervous wreck. Before the serenity prayer at the end I shared that I couldn’t believe how at ease I felt in that situation.

Saturday 29 October 2006

I went to a big football match at lunchtime today. I was at a ground where I’ve watched numerous matches through a haze of drink, near lots of pubs I used to drink in, but I didn’t feel the slightest inclination or twinge today, though of course there was plenty of drink knocking around.

At the meeting tonight some people were selling tickets for an AA disco next weekend. I’m not sure if I’m ready for that.

The clocks went back tonight. At the start of British Summertime I remember saying that there was a free hour’s sobriety when the clocks went forward. So now everyone in recovery has to re-pay that with an extra hour. Or is it another hour of sobriety to savour?

Sunday 30 October 2006

I spent the day with Tanya. I didn’t go to a meeting but I saw a few recoverers having lunch at the same place as us, so exchanged a wave with them.

If I’d still been drinking I would have sneaked drinks before we set off on our day out, agitated for drinks as soon as we got anywhere, then crashed out during the film we watched tonight.

I’ll be seeing the counsellor tomorrow, for the last time in the duration of this journal. I’ll be able to report a much steadier fortnight.

Monday 31 October 2006

I was definitely less needy than last time in today’s session with the counsellor. He had injured his leg so we were joking about that affecting his counselling. We talked a lot about my relationship with Tanya now that I am this far into recovery. In particular, we talked about how I should avoid going on about it to her so much. There is no cause for that. I shouldn’t be after constant congratulations from her.

The speaker at the meeting tonight was 15 years sober. As he said, that was no boast on his part; it was inspirational. He passed on the message of his sponsor at the start of his recovery: ‘If I can do it, you can’. I walked home with the Irishman who won’t tell me his years sober. I think he enjoys the game though.

Tuesday 1 November 2006

I felt some quite severe regret for lost opportunities today. But I have to remember that I am a recovering alcoholic, how far I’ve come. For instance, two years ago all I could think about was alcohol, not what I could or couldn’t do in life. I wasn’t even manageable, let alone interested in accomplishments and endeavours. A year ago it was still early days in my recovery, now I am over sixteen months sober. But I suppose First Things First always applies.

I had a good long chat with the relapse friend tonight. He was in a good mood and reminded me how lucky I am, without telling me that too sanctimoniously.

Wednesday 2 November 2006

When I spoke to the relapse friend last night he seemed to be in the best mental state in all the time I’ve known him. He’d been busy decorating, so I heeded the lesson today by painting the kitchen at home. So the am regime was the only direct action I took about my alcoholism today. I got a nice text from an AA friend to say she had landed safely in her new local AA meetings since moving out of London last week.

Well I’ll be trying some non-London meetings next week when I am at my sister’s house. Tanya is leaving on another ten day business trip tomorrow, so it is a good job I have made the arrangement to go away myself. Thoughts of missed opportunities were still gnawing at me today. I have to trust that other doors will open.

Thursday 3 November 2006

Again, I came to life in the Thursday meeting tonight. The speaker spoke a lot about living in the day, not regretting yesterday or dreading tomorrow. Although I write ‘One Day at a Time’ on my daily instructions to myself, I don’t really live by it. I do think about yesterdays and tomorrows too much, although I am succeeding in not drinking on a daily basis. It was cold and windy tonight as I walked to the meeting but as I have a commitment there I have to go. Once I am there I am fine, at ease with the others and cracking jokes. So the commitments have been essential for me.

Friday 4 November 2006

I went on an errand for an old employer today. The familiar journey across London reminded me of hangovers: no danger of that today. Again, as Tanya flies half way across the world I exist in my minute but manageable world. I was angry with Tanya for not informing me that she had arrived safely. That was a taste of my own medicine from when I would travel around drunk, then arrive late having caused great concern for everyone.

I’ll be seeing my sponsor first thing tomorrow morning, so that will be his last appearance in these 100 days. I’m not sure if we are going to my Step 7 together. God will decide.

Saturday 5 November 2006

We didn’t do Steps 6 and 7 this morning, postponing them for a fortnight. We decided we would both read about these steps again before doing them. But we had a good long update about how it was going. My sponsor worries about not being a good sponsor but of course he has been a great sponsor for me through these last few months. Despite our doubts, it has worked and is working.

I felt lonely today. I tried to share about this in the evening meeting. I was lonely at the end of my drinking but perhaps didn’t realise it, and there are times when I’ve been lonely in sobriety. There again, the relapse friend made for a good companion on the phone when I got in.

I’m off to the north tomorrow so the last four days of this journal will come from my sister’s house.

Sunday 6 November 2006

I’ve made the journey to my sister’s house, three hours on the train from London. I made this journey in an unmanageable state a couple of years ago. My sister suggested AA to me then but I wasn’t ready. I did quite a bit of active alcoholism here, robbing their drinks, hiding my own secret supply, going to the shops on errands to get more supplies in. But now I am trusted here. My sister showed me some photographs she had taken of me and Tanya when she was in London last month. She said there were a whole lot better than they would have been two years ago.

There was no need to feel apprehensive about the journey. It is over sixteen months since I had a drink, after all. I enjoyed a few text exchanges with other recoverers to pass some of the time on the train.

Monday 7 November 2006

I found a text message saved in my phone sent to me by the ten per center exactly a year ago. In it he told me to have faith in my God, he was a loving God. So I texted it back to the ten per center to give him a surprise today. He texted back to say that message still applied. And neither of us has had a drink in all that time.

My sister drove me to a local meeting this evening. Not quite the same format as the London ones I go to but exactly the same message. It wasn’t a revelation but I’m glad I found out it was on and that I went. That may be the last meeting I go to in these one hundred days.

Tuesday 8 November 2006

I felt glad today that I’d found gone to the meeting last night. That was definitely the right move.

My parents have joined us today. My mother asked me if I felt I was ‘getting on well’. Otherwise, there is no mention – direct or indirect - of my alcoholism. There is no question or sense any more that I am going to sneak off for a drink. How I look and act is living proof of that.

Day 499 today so in an hour or so I will be 500 days sober. If I was on Step 9 by now, I would be able to make direct amends to my parents and my sister tomorrow. That would make for a neat ending to these one hundred days. But alcoholism is not a neat business.

Wednesday 9 November 2006

I brought up my five hundred days of sobriety with an enormous tumbler of gin and tonic. It was a cruel day for a drink dream. In fact I’ve not had a drink today, these hundred days, these five hundred days.

I passed a pleasant, uneventful day with my sister and my parents. I texted the counsellor to tell him I was on day 500. After prompting, Tanya texted me her congratulations. I wasn’t sick; I wasn’t in blackout; I wasn’t heading for a treatment centre. I’ll be back in London tomorrow in time for my Thursday night meeting.