Who's the Daddy: Counting the cost of a drink

Drinking’s hilarious in your teens, a buzz in your 20s, a necessity in your 30s, dangerous in your 40s and deadly in your 50s.
Who is the DaddyWho is the Daddy
Who is the Daddy

When you’re young, hangovers are things that happen to other people. It’s when you hit middle-age and they last from Sunday all the way through to Tuesday that you’ve got a problem.

Many of us have relied on the sauce to get us through the long winter nights of Lockdown 2, and to be fair, the light, bright evenings of Lockdown 1, too. But enough’s enough. The near-fatal hangover after Trump’s cathartic defeat lasted waaaaaay longer than it had any right to, the waste of a precious day off spent moping around, bumping into furniture like a bad actor, was nature’s barman’s way of saying, “I think you’ve had enough, sir” and the booze, for the foreseeable future, has been kicked into touch. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some great times while drunk. It’s just that I can’t remember any of them.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

YouTube is filled with battalions of ex-boozers, telling their stories of how the drink had a terrible effect on their health, relationships, work and bank balance.

I know, I’ve spent hours watching them. And when you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. How many lives, marriages and careers have been wrecked by the drink?

Well, not mine, yet, and during Lockdowns it certainly hasn’t been for the want of trying. I dread to think how much I’ve spent on alcohol since the vino started to flow at college in the late 1980s. Okay then, a conservative estimate (£15 a night twice a week) would be somewhere in the region of £50,000. It’s an extreme example, but imagine what that £50,000 would be worth today if it had been saved and invested.

At a pretty moderate six per cent growth rate, around £125,000. And at a slightly more ambitious seven per cent, that’s £152,137.15. Pretty much I-can-do-whatever-I-feel-like money. So it turns out there’s more than one reason why non-drinkers have that glow about them, and it isn’t just their beaming skin, twinkly eyes, trim waists, clear heads and eight hours of undisturbed sleep every night.

Related topics:

Comment Guidelines

National World encourages reader discussion on our stories. User feedback, insights and back-and-forth exchanges add a rich layer of context to reporting. Please review our Community Guidelines before commenting.