My diabetes avoidance a blog

Sheryl Gim, another Word Press blogger has reminded me to clarify that I don’t drink. I wrote a blog about my notebook pile this morning, and she commented on it. I thought I’d reciprocate and went to her site to read, as I’m taking a break from editing today.

I was reading her recent blog today all about how she doesn’t enjoy exercise and enjoys sweet treats, but walks for health, and I remembered that I don’t drink. I do know that I don’t drink, it’s just not something that I think about, probably because I rarely go out so it doesn’t come up in conversation often. Coffee shops are where I’ve spent my past ten writing years. I love the ambience. Especially Cafe Nero’s ambient music.

I enjoy writing this blog, because I like the way I deviate to other things; it’s like a conversation. I hope you enjoy today’s effort.

I was talking about alcohol and went off on a tangent. I gave up alcohol in 2008 when I began divorce proceedings. I realised that year (actually a few years before that), since I’d started a degree and needed my brain cells for that too, that I had gotten into the habit of drinking a glass of wine with my meal again, something I used to do once I’d raised all my children to teenagers.

In the late eighties when I retired temporarily from a career and became a full-time mum it was well known that alcohol was bad for pregnant mothers, and I gave up before I became pregnant.

Prior to that I’d been teetotal from the age of eighteen to twenty seven anyway, as I have up alcohol when I became drunk at a party and realised I couldn’t remember a thing. I was once so drunk at sixteen that a friend had to walk me round the block so that I breathed in a lungful of air and threw-up. After that I stuck to cocktails as I realised that certain mixtures of alcohol were bad combinations. Cocktails had the benefit of lots of juice, which was refreshing, but probably high in sugar, something I didn’t realise at the time.

For me alcohol was always a social thing. My mother and father never drank so I wasn’t really nurtured into it. Perhaps this is why I don’t miss it. We didn’t have the luxury of myriad coffee shops in the eighties. In Kingston-upon-Thames, for example, there was just cafe Mozart, where I worked, aged 16 yrs, and one or two other Italian patisseries, Patisserie Valerie was another. Now of course, cafés are ubiquitous in England and Ireland. But not Wales, and I’ve still not visited Scotland.

Perhaps we should do away with pubs and come up with a healthier alternative for socialising. A few years ago my daughter, who grew up practising ballet weekly, said she wanted to dance. I think teenagers would benefit from open air dance venues.

You don’t sing at dance venues. Perhaps, until we eradicate Covid, it’s not such a bad idea.