So not as raucous a night as I envisaged. Drinks plus dinner&drinks. Civilised and delightful. Me and two of the girls from work having a good gossip about everything girly for a fair few hours – and not just inoffensive stuff. Everything was covered: initially boyfriends, work, other people at work. Then on to more heavy stuff: marriage&babies, morning-after pills, abortions. All sorts. And, honestly, all made more frank with the addition of a couple of drams a piece.

Today is Thanksgiving. Six years ago I was at the Semanski household in Westport, CT having a genuine Thanksgiving dinner with my wonderful friend Kati and her family.

Today Gawker posted a recap of last year’s winner of The Worst Thanksgivings in History as it asked for submissions for this year’s contest. So many of them involve a drunk relative and I have to say I can empathise 100 per cent.  Maybe in some posts along the line I’ll recount the Christmases from 2004 up ’til now. If Gawker ran a competition for ruined Christmases I think I’d stand a good chance of at least an honourable mention. Drunk relatives and public holidays = I win.

I find it rather amusing/confounding that the person with the most disastrous, alcohol-soaked Thanksgiving wins, as their consolation, a full case of Stoli Vodka…

Gawker: Thanksgiving Horror Stories 2009.

That’s not the attitude taken by everyone, however, as evidenced by the man who stumbled into the road on the corner of Tooting Bec Road and Balham High Road this morning. He was trying to see whether the green man was on on the traffic light above him and lost his balance. Why didn’t he look straight ahead at the light on the opposite side of the road, you ask? Because that’s not what drunks do. “Logical option? Me? Naaaaaah.”

Unable to stand still at a traffic light, his hood was pulled down over his eyes and a loosely rolled suspicious cigarette hung from his mouth. He didn’t seem young – late 40s, early 50s maybe – but he could have been in is 30s, knowing how the effects of alcohol can affect a person.

He seemed to be a chronic drunk, not just someone still reeling from the effects of the night before. He’d probably been drinking since at least 6am – woke up and reached for the vodka or special brew or nail polish remover or whatever his circumstance allowed him. My guess is that he also had problems with other substances, and I’m thinking more chemical than herbal.

The thing that struck me is the people who glanced at him and walked on. Being nosy, unsubtle me, I took the red light to have a good stare, but it seemed that no-one descending into the tube station let their eyes rest on him, consciously or not. His behaviour, which one would presume would be attention-grabbing and conspicuous, was instead pushed out of sight in broad daylight. I’m as guilty as everyone else – I did stop to look at him, but as soon as the green man appeared I walked on . I felt a little sad, and thought about him on the rest of my walk to work, but I walked on. I wonder what he’s doing now.

And so it should be. There is no need to drink on a Wednesday unless there’s an event or outing planned or, you know, you’re feeling fat or ugly. And I’m almost always in on a Wednesday (sometimes feeling fat/ugly/menstrual too) because it’s one of the rare evenings I sit down and watch TV. First I download the episode of Glee that screened in the US on the Tuesday night and watch that. Then I settle in for my E4 marathon of Ugly Betty followed by Desperate Housewives. And that’s pretty much it for me, for the moment for TV. Don’t really watch much. (Although I am slowly working my way through 30 Rock on illegal down loads. Liz Lemon is my current personal idol. Suck it, nerds.)

Thankfully, tonight, in those three programmes there were no depictions of feigned drunkenness either. I hate that. Actors playing drunk or hungover. Almost always a cliche or stereotype and almost always making light of it too. It’s always played for laughs and that often stings quite a bit. All three of those shows have been guilty of it at some point or another but I forgive them their flaws because they’re, you know, lush.

I also realised that I couldn’t have drunk tonight anyway as my housemate and I finished off the only alcohol we had in the house last night with our JDs. I’m not counting the half a bottle of cheapo red wine by the stove that I bought for cooking and is so minging that it certainly can’t be used for drinking.

All change tomorrow night, though: work night out with the girls in Fulham. Paid for by the boss. My post tomorrow night may have a typo or two in it. If I do actually make it safely back across SW London. I’ll try for some pictorial evidence.

Now I am filling in an series of questionnaires for someone’s PhD thesis on the effects of parental alcoholism in children. After my father died I became involved with the National Association for Children of Alcoholics. It’s an incredible little charity run by three women based in Bristol. I cannot describe how much being involved with Nacoa helped with my grieving and development after he passed. I spent many Saturdays training with them in Bristol and now act as a media rep for them, speaking to journalists who need a case study or who just want to find out a bit more.

Nacoa send round frequent information requests from media outlets or students or seek volunteers to help represent them at events. They sent this email out to all volunteers from the PhD student asking for people to participate and I was, as ever, only too keen to take part. I’ll honestly do anything to help further research into the matter, to help other young people cope with similar experiences as mine. Simply spreading the message – letting other children of alcoholics know that there is somewhere for them to turn – is so, so important. I never found any charity that pulled me so strongly. It’s because of Nacoa that I took up running and, thorough last year’s Cardiff Half Marathon and this year’s Edinburgh Marathon, have raised more than £1,500 for them.

Usually most of what I do with them makes me cry at some point, but it’s a good kind of crying and makes me so thankful that they have been there for me.

How I hate it… but they say to write about what you know, and I know a lot about drink. I am the daughter of a tee-total mother and a father who drank himself to death. As a result I am obsessed with alcohol. I think about it many, many times a day. Like a lapsed Catholic I feel guilt towards everything about it: have I drunk too much? Has that man drunk too much? Is £6 too much to spend on a supermarket bottle of wine? If I had one glass of wine three nights in a row would that be indulgent? Will they judge me for having a cider with lunch? Single or Double? Pub or coffee shop?

I do not currently have a happy medium but that’s what I hope to find. One where I can ignore the irrational disapproval from my mum whenever she sees me with as much as a white wine spritzer. One where I don’t worry that ‘high spirited’ (in all senses of the words) nights out when I end up a little worse for wear, will send me on the same destructive path as my father. I believe the true strength lies in being able to drink moderately and, in terms of consumption, I have that. I can go for days without having a drink – often Mondays through to Thursdays – and appreciate the mild relief a stiff gin and tonic can bring to a fraught situation. I do, on certain occasional occasions, drink too much, but show me a 20-something (who isn’t a sworn tee-totaler) who doesn’t.

Mentally, however, I’m still in turmoil over alcohol. This blog will be a collection of my thoughts on booze, grog, hooch, the hardstuff. I’ll post relevant news stories and comment on them and anything else I find interesting an relevant. Some may be serious, some funny, and some in just the kind of dubious taste that my dear old dad would have found hilarious.

So a toast. To my new blog: may it last longer than the others. And to drink.

*I’m going to start each post from now on with a daily rundown of the alcohol I’ve consumed. Because this is the first post, however, I’ve saved it for after the exposition. So:

Monday, November 22: No alcohol. The last I had was on Friday night at a friend’s wedding. White wine – I’d say around a bottle of it over the course of around 7 hours, from hors d’oeuvres, through dinner, and on through the ceilidh – followed by one double vodka, lime and soda, bought for me by a rather odd fellow wedding guest, who swore blind that he had met me at a house party in Cricklewood in 2003. I had no idea who he was and I’m not going to blame that on the alcohol.