CANDIDA CREWE: My whole life has been a Dry January. When people ask why I don't drink, I tell them I don't like the taste. But the truth is far more harrowing...
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For the whole of my life, I have only ever occasionally sipped, but never drunk, alcohol. At 60, bar the odd G&T, I have pretty much been teetotal. As people prepare with various levels of enthusiasm for Dry January, they often ask me my secret. I tell them I never liked the taste as a teenager.
![[The head-on crash she was in as a passenger in a car driven by a boy 'drunk on a melée of cider, beer, vodka and impatience' changed Candida Crewe's attitude to alcohol for life]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/01/19/93653671-14242175-image-m-28_1735761273450.jpg)
Yet I came to like leeks and avocado and all the other things I hated as a child. Why not booze?. The truth is, ever since a near-tragic accident when I was 15, I have forever had, at best, an ambivalence towards it. Being at the mercy of someone else's drunken lack of control made me vow never to offer myself up to such hopelessness and potential peril ever again.
![[The young think they are invincible - so surely drinking and driving is no problem, they arrogantly assume]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/01/20/93653679-14242175-image-a-29_1735761620838.jpg)
It happened half a lifetime ago, when my friend Joanna and I were travelling in the back of her friend David's car. Drunk on a melée of cider, beer, cheap white wine, vodka and impatience, he was going at 90mph on an a road near Shaftesbury in Dorset.
David had brought along two other 17-year-old boys, who also appeared to find the speed exhilarating. I didn't. To me, it spelt doom. Only minutes into the journey, we had narrowly missed a huge lorry ahead of us, braking inches from its bumper, all five of us lurching forward as if to be violently sick. David laughed and whooped.
He began revving the engine with a frustration fused with f-words. His friends, also plastered, were swigging from bottles and cans, their free arms hanging out of the open windows holding cigarettes and a spliff; warm air billowing across their skin. A cassette tape was playing loudly.
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