Sobriety can be sexy

But it needs a bit of a re-brand maybe

If you are anything like I used to be, the minute you see ‘sobriety’ in the title of an article you switch off. You see a person who rises at dawn, meditates, does a couple of sun salutations, and then milks a goat for her goat-milk matcha latte.

I always equated being sober with being boring. I grew up with all those images in the 90s with the ladettes lugging down pints of beer. Kate Moss hanging out of a backstage window laughing as someone held a fag to her lips. I based my after hours life on trying to be Kate Moss but because I worked in market research it was a highly damaging route to take. I couldn't moderate ten groups a week and pretend I was Kate Moss. It was too tiring. I soon ran out of stamina. By the time I got to my late thirties I realised that I was never going to be this woman. This is another story and is a sad one as I feel many women of my generation bought into the idea that we might be her one day.

Growing up and hedonism was everywhere. There were parties in Primrose Hill where Oasis hung out and apparently there were orgies. I bumped into a woman in a club once who swore that there were orgies and all the good-looking people of the day were invited. They didn’t just drink of course, they were doing lots of other things too. I never understood why I didn’t have this glam lifestyle too. I drank at The Walmer Castle. I lived in Westbourne Grove. How come I was writing powerpoint slides about rim blocks? How come my boyfriend laughed when I wore my copy-cat Vivienne Westwood pirate boots?

So this brings us to drinking, I found it joyful that I was always in the hub-bub of action when I was drunk. I was the centre of the action. I was saying inappropriate things. I once danced behind my boss and one of my colleagues singing ‘I see you baby KISSING THAT ASS!’ and then later pushed another female colleague under a hand dryer because she said something critical about my jumper dress. I took oranges from the bar and made the rind look like a pair of teeth and forced everyone to laugh at me. I left a bar and spent four hours looking for my coat before realising that I’d not come out with one.

It took me a long time to realise that I wasn’t much fun when I was drunk. I could be a real arsehole.

Time moved on. I had children. I grew larger. My face started to droop. I sat in a chair and sighed when I sat down and sighed again when I got up. I stopped following the things that Kate Moss was doing. I then stopped drinking.

I won’t go into it here but my father was an alcoholic and that definitely changed the way I felt about booze. It didn’t make me feel tipsy and bright put it that way. I could see something darker about my relationship with alcohol. How I’d chosen to try and blunt my brain. That I needed to turn my brain off.

Afterwards, it took me days to re-assemble my mind so I felt semi-normal. I realised that I was in my late forties and didn’t actually have the band width to do this ‘pick up and mend my mind’ thing every few days. I also had a sneaking suspicion that I was ready to move onto something new. The chapter where I wore kaftans and just wafted about. Not needing to drink. Not needing to blunt my brain anymore.

But I was worried that others would find me boring. I didn’t realise at this point that Kate Moss had also stopped drinking long ago. That Pete Doherty now mainly ate French cheese and baguette. Drunk people also look like they’re having fun. They are fun. They have raised voices. They look like they are in an ad for what happiness is supposed to look like. When you’re sober you’re back to being an acne-skinned teenager about to make a move on the hot stud muffin that has the Joy Division T-shirt and excellent mullet. It feels awkward. It’s not sexy.

Now if you’re sober you’ll be mad because you’ll say that you don’t look boring. That you look like ‘The Libertines,’ back in the day when Pete Doherty was going out with Kate Moss, and was photographed walking through Glastonbury festival…looking cool. Or maybe you’ll say you’re more like the late Jane Birkin looking all Gallic and gorgeous and casual and wearing just a touch of red lipstick and one of those Breton shirts (that always make me look like Kirsty Allsopp for some reason).

If you are one of these cool, confident sober people then I salute you. I am not. Alcohol used to make me less inhibited. I used to tell more stories when I was drunk. I would be more crude. More rude. Now the sober me likes to eat the nuts, count how many I’ve chewed on each side of my mouth, and plot how many minutes it is until I can leave. I am not hanging out of a window with my hair blowing breezily and cool, lean, indie men looking at me in awe. I am instead ruddy cheeked and wholesome and am growing beetroot that I’ll maybe boil for a few hours and then put into jars in case another strain of Covid comes and we’re put back into lockdown again.

Kirsty Allsopp in a Breton flossing my teeth. That’s me. The one who picks lint of your jumper and asks you if you want some water.

So what’s the answer? Well first up there is something to be said for changing your social life. So more meeting up in the day. More lunches. More things that don’t involve everyone being pissed. More navigating friendships and thinking about new friendships in terms of how we can happily hang out together. Then there are some affirmations that I have to recite to myself before I set off:

I am not boring.

I choose to be sober.

If Harry Styles had been born in 1973 then we would now be happily married with 4 children.

That kind of thing. We are educated to believe that exciting people are hedonistic people. They neck wine and make rude jokes. They hang out of window and smoke and don’t live lives writing powerpoint and trying to unblock toilets.

‘Why don’t you drink?’ people ask whenever I’m out.

They never ask me why are you not rollerskating right now? Or why you aren’t wearing a tweed blazer? Or why you don’t ride a bicycle to work each morning? It doesn’t need to be a big deal. It doesn’t need to feel so boring.

There’s a need to re-brand sobriety. Some slick advertising agency needs to get on that brief, and make an ad with lots of sober people sitting quietly in bars, chugging lemonade with a dash of lime, being interrogated by drunk people and then leaving early to get home to watch ‘Housewives of New York.’ It needs to show those nut-counting, early-leavers for the sexy motherfuckers that they really are.

And have you seen Pete Doherty these days? It catches up with you this hedonism malarky. It may be all the French cheese.