What would the festive season be without sloshed snogs under the mistletoe at your favourite bar, your boss doing the Macarena with the head of HR at the work Christmas party and Aunt Kate getting wasted on brandy and falling asleep at the Christmas dinner table, eh? Christmas. It’s a time for socialising, a time for fun... a time for everyone to get totally trollied, right? Wrong. This year, maybe spare a thought for those of us whose relationship with booze is a little darker. If your colleague isn’t chugging down the free champers with abandon, there might be a reason why – and she might not appreciate you pushing the issue.
I tried my first sip of alcohol one Christmas, aged seven. Little did I know the kind of thrall that ruby nectar (and its other ethanolbased siren sisters) would grow to hold me in. Christmasses got drunker as I entered my midteens, as they would for many people that age, but then so did the rest of the year. Waking up the day after my 16th birthday, I told myself firmly that there was a problem with how much I was drinking. Wine temporarily took the edge off the dreadful depression I’d been fighting for the past couple of years: a depression intensified by bad homophobic bullying at school. But it also created messes, dramas, confusions. I realised, with creeping dread, that it was making my depression temporarily better and permanently worse.