I've been sober for three years but terribly miss drinking at Christmas time. Then I remind myself of the profound idea that's changed my life: There's no such thing as 'just a glass': CLOVER STROUD
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Sometimes I urgently miss drinking. It's the week before Christmas and a few years ago, I'd have been feeling all warm and a bit drunk right now. Every year brings hard and beautiful new feelings with it, and until I gave up three years ago, alcohol was always the way to celebrate or forget them.
![['I am really pleased my kids don't see me drunk. I don't think that anything positive comes from being drunk, or heavily hung over, around your kids.' Pictured: Clover with her children]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/20/10/93349279-14213511-image-a-4_1734691999134.jpg)
If I was much younger, say in my late twenties, I might have been going to see The Pogues play in London, since in my memory they always had a gig at this moment in December. My friend Patrick always seemed to have spare tickets, so we'd see them while consuming lots of lovely cheap wine and quite a few chemicals too.
![['Because I don't drink, I am now totally liberated from drinkers' remorse. There is no fuzziness, no regret, no sense of anxiety about what I may or may not have done']](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/20/10/93349287-14213511-image-a-2_1734691981420.jpg)
More recently, in my early thirties, I'd probably have been cooking a large piece of smoked meat at home in Oxford with my sister, Nell, while we cheerily sloshed bottles of red into a saucepan bobbing with a clove-studded orange to make mulled wine. It was pretty disgusting but got us wonderfully drunk.
Even as little as a few years ago, I'd have maybe been meeting my husband Pete for dinner somewhere delicious and drinking quite expensive champagne - loads of it. Tonight, though, I'm lighting some incense while trying to get excited about a hot shower. Incense helps me get into the 'other' state I'm craving, but we don't have a proper bath in our house in America and I definitely feel deprived of missing the liquid Valium effects of an exceptionally hot soak.
I don't even live in England any more and Nell is dead. Look, life is hard, even when it's good. And while I am evangelical about sobriety and the good it's brought into my life, if I'm really honest (I am actually incapable of being anything but really honest) there are certain times I really do miss getting drunk.
