Counter-Currents
2,023 words
Adrian Chiles
The Good Drinker: How I Learned to Love Drinking Less
London: Profile Books, 2022
See also: British TV & Cutting Down on Booze
Alcohol is a two-edged sword. On the one hand it makes life fun and turns strangers into intimate friends in the course of an evening; on the other, it makes a person dysfunctional. Very dysfunctional. Productive time is lost, relationships are damaged, and health is harmed.
I cannot say that I’ve “struggled” with alcohol in the truest sense. I’ve never been arrested for drunk driving, and I’ve had no serious relationship trouble from drinking. All of my drinking has been in an appropriate time and place — but one drink inevitably would lead to another. I’d wind up accidently drunk when I really wanted a light buzz. I also found that when the time came up when I’d be free to drink, I looked a bit too much forward to it.
My moment of truth came when I’d been day drinking after mowing the lawn and I was good and drunk before a social event when I didn’t mean to be in such a state. After getting a British TV streaming service, I became engrossed in a series of shows that described poverty-stricken English alcoholics and I realized I was on the same path that they were taking and might end up in the same pathetic place.
Through British TV streaming channels I discovered Adrian Chiles. Chiles is an ordinary Englishman who has made his living presenting sports and other news on TV, as well as writing columns about being an ordinary Englishman. Adrian Chiles also likes to drink. After getting fired from a TV show, he was able to get a BBC documentary about drinking produced called Drinkers Like Me. During that documentary, Chiles realized that he was putting way too much away and he decided to make a change.
The documentary isn’t about alcoholics hitting rock bottom; it’s about high-functioning drinkers. These drinkers are consuming well above the recommended limit of 14 units of alcohol per week. In the documentary, Chiles makes the case to be a moderating drinker. The goal of a moderating drinker is to enjoy every drink and not drink one drop past that level.
Chiles became a fan of alcohol at a family party when he was 13 years old. He drank a glass of hard cider and felt warm all over. Later, he went on an exchange program in Germany and was partnered with a kid with whom he had no common interests. The exchange program ended with a big lager which turned the dour event around. Chiles’ first real binge, which led to him vomiting in a friend’s house, was a turning point for Chiles. It was like crossing a threshold into adulthood.
Looking back on it, Chiles believes that he fully enjoyed nearly every drink until he got into his 30s. There are 3,652 days in a decade, and he doubts that he didn’t drink for even 100 of them during his 30s. Nonetheless, at the time he didn’t think alcohol was a problem. His workday ended at 1 PM and he didn’t find it unreasonable to start drinking then. He’d even take his young girls to the pub. When he mentioned all of this to his doctor, his doctor said nothing. In retrospect, though, Chiles felt he was dependent upon alcohol at this time. He figures that he didn’t enjoy 30% of what he drank.
Adrian Chiles is a practicing Catholic. During Lent he often abstained from drinking, and he found the sobriety refreshing. Then one day a friend of his said she found the world a beige place without alcohol. Chiles found this appalling, even though after Lent he’d go back to his old ways. Then Chiles ended up having hemorrhoids and went to the doctor to get the problem fixed. His doctor said they were due to excessive straining when using the toilet. Drinking makes one dehydrated and that leads to constipation.
This was the first time that a general practitioner had really brought home to Chiles the fact that he might be drinking too much. The hemorrhoids were but one symptom of Chiles’s drinking habits. The other symptoms were hypertension, heartburn, and anxiety and depression. Chiles realizes that some doctors haven’t been recommending cutting down on alcohol to their patients as much as they should have. He jokes that an alcoholic is a person who drinks more than their doctor. He advises:
- Doctors admit that they drink to their patients.
- Doctors should encourage patients to admit exactly how much they drink.
- Doctors should remind patients that an alcoholic might not be a guy passed out in an alleyway or sleeping on a bench.
- Emphasize that the safe level of drinking is 14 units per week.
- They should also remind successful middle-aged professionals that the biggest drinkers are in their demographic group. It is highly probable that their habits will lead to health problems and full-blown alcoholism.
I’ve personally found that unhelpful doctors are an issue across the Pond. When I first admitted to a doctor that I felt I might be drinking too much, he asked me how many cases of beer I went through a week. But I didn’t buy beer by the case; I purchased the good stuff from the high-end alcohol section in the supermarket. Thus, the case was closed in the examination room. While I was cleared for alcoholism, it didn’t feel right to me. I left the clinic feeling uncertain.
That sort of situation is part of the problem, and this issue flows into Chiles’ criticism of Alcoholics Anonymous. The idea of alcoholism as a disease leads problem drinkers to think they are in the clear because they don’t have it. A problem drinker who goes to an AA meeting can see that there are those much worse off and feel that he himself doesn’t have a problem. It’s like watching a TV show about hoarders and not feeling that the clutter in one’s own house is bad.
You can buy Michael Polignano’s book, Taking Our Own Side, here.
When Chiles was in his 40s, his career climbed to a great height. He was on several television shows. Just as he reached the top, he went through a divorce and was then fired from a morning talk show. His drinking went out of control afterwards. He figures he only enjoyed 60% of what he put away. This is when he started to figure out how to be a moderate drinker.
A professional gambler showed him the trick to winning at the races. It turns out that trick applied to managing alcohol consumption as well. The gambler only bet on a horse he was sure would win, and that meant not betting very often. Chiles then found that one drink was really all he needed to get the euphoria from alcohol without its terrible effects. Cutting back worked, and every drink he took was fully enjoyed. When he started to get hangovers again after light drinking, he knew that his tolerance was lessening and that he was on a successful path to being a moderate drinker.
Personally, I’ve decided to quit drinking entirely. I was a moderate drinker, but felt that booze was still in control of my life. I remember the exact drink which made me a problem drinker: An older fellow who missed the Vietnam War and regretted it bought me a beer at a bar in Denver just after I’d returned from a deployment. After that one drink — a Bud Light — my drinking got out of hand by my own standards. Several years ago, I recognized this and started to make changes. My goal was to eliminate even the desire to drink.
There were many false starts. I’d get high-quality whiskey from a family member and would feel compelled to drink it, although I then regretfully needed to throw away the piece of paper showing three months of tally marks indicating drink-free days. In the end, though, this was an excuse to drink, not a reason to do so.
What I found was the following:
- No doctor will really help you quit drinking. They have no worthwhile advice. You need to go elsewhere to find techniques that help a person quit.
- Get rid of the paper with the tally marks. Use an app, and then be totally honest with yourself when you record your drinks in it. You will get a good grasp of what your drinking pattern is. Plus, an app will show you which days you don’t drink. It is rewarding to see the drink-free days pile up.
- Determine what triggers one’s drinking. I found that slow afternoons, such as a long summer weekend, tended to get me drinking. I resolved not to allow myself to become bored on summer afternoons. I also tended to drink wine while cooking a complex dinner, so I made sure there was no wine around when I did it. I also made sure I had a cool, non-alcoholic drink available right after I mowed the lawn.
- All the gimmicks to avoid drinking, like tapping your wrist and saying a prayer when tempted, work. Chiles describes another helpful one: If tempted by a big, cool glass of pilsner, think about what that glass will look like after you’ve drunk it. The temptation will dissipate. The temptation to drink dissipated for me when I heard someone pour a glass of white wine. (White wine sounds different from red when poured and I can tell the difference without looking.) I immediately felt my body prepare for a wave of heartburn. I’d spread out times between drinking so much that the association with pouring wine and ill effects from drinking were cemented into my brain.
- Have a goal of some sort to help keep you sober. I discovered that once my oldest child started to drive, it became a bad idea to drink at all. There were too many panicked phone calls that went something like this:
Kid: Dad, the car won’t start.
Me: You turned the car off while it was still in drive. Move it to park, and it will start.
Should I have been drunk, such problems won’t get fixed. Not drinking got much easier after that epiphany.
I lost friends after I stopped drinking. Part of my quitting process was to stop “liking” social media posts in which a pal had a glass of whatever at a party, or who’d home-brewed a batch of ale and was proud of it. I got “unfriended” by more than one person after I started doing this. Perhaps this is unfair, but I need to take care of myself in my own way. What sort of friend keeps track of “likes,” anyway?
I’ve also fielded snide comments from social drinkers, but I figured out witty responses that kept everything light. It’s easy to come up with the right phrase if you practice it beforehand and you are sober while the other fellow is buzzed. The various phrases that I use are all self-directed. I don’t ever insult the other fellow. They are usually a variation on a theme to the effect that one drink will send me out of control and it will be bad for the others. I once told a fellow at a bar where I was meeting professional colleagues alongside my boss that if I had that drink with the umbrella in it, I’d end up vomiting on his shoes. It was delivered with perfect comedic timing, and was perfectly tied in to an earlier conversation about shoes, so it got the group chuckling.
I’ve even figured out where to stand at a party, when the drinks start getting poured from the keg or flaming punch bowl, so that I’m not the first guy offered a drink and thus need to reject the offer in front of everyone.
Since I quit, I feel much better. I sleep better and probably lost 20 pounds with little effort. The most important reason why I quit was the aforementioned parenting responsibility after the young ones started driving. The second is that my people are under threat of genocide. One cannot turn the Great Replacement around while drunk.
* * *
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26 comments
Excellent read. I’d say those friends you lost after you quit weren’t really your friends in the first place.
Probably best to stick with with the better known entheogens.
I wonder what a “unit” is? Could a case of vodka count as one unit? That’s ambiguous.
why have you guys been running these articles about alcoholism of late? I refer to the recent great R Oliver piece. Is one of our number or one of the “boys” they are after an alcoholic or something?
I drink in moderation. I use it as a tool to relax or for conviviality. Wine is a part of life as I see it.
”I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone”
I don’t understand people who have to drink to the point of blacking out. I take the middle road in all things, similar to Montaigne. The one time I had a bad experience, it was more a matter of inexperience, of not knowing the true strength of vodka! I did puke that night. Husband your enthusiasms, don’t get bored. What is that? I am never bored. The day were all too short. I bike ride, read, play chess online, or watch movies.
Dark Plato:
I’ve heard that the German Purity Laws for beer were a reaction to Jewish brewers using vile ingredients.
Conversely, every drink you take, makes a Moslem cry.
I didn’t want to be racial or anything.
I recommend Montaigne’s essay On Experience on this topic.
Where do you play chess online? That sounds fun (though it could get to be a bad habit for me).
Chess.com and li chess are the main sites. Highly addictive, hours wasted.
I’m frequently bored at work, but I cannot imagine being bored outside of work (other than being stuck waiting somewhere with a dead phone and no book). There is so much to do, esp if one is a reader! If my health and intellect reasonably hold up, I will greatly enjoy my retirement and old age.
Interesting review of what sounds like a valuable book.
Re this: “Chiles describes another helpful one: If tempted by a big, cool glass of pilsner, think about what that glass will look like after you’ve drunk it. The temptation will dissipate. ”
This reminds me of something I read by George Grimm. He was a German jurist around the turn of the last century who became a Buddhist and wrote an number of well-regarded books on Buddhist doctrine. Being a German jurist, they’re a bit hard going. But one passage had a memorable way of understanding “impermanence.” Objects of desire only seem such because of the illusion that only the present exists, and we are seeing only an infinitesimal slice of what is actually a long sequence of decay. This is the key to acquiring desirelessness. The beautiful woman is really decaying into a corpse (a la The Shining), the delicious looking glass of lager is well on the way to an empty glass in need of washing and disinfecting.
Interestingly, Christmas Humphreys was a British judge who became a Buddhist and wrote some well regarded, but easy to read, books on Buddhism. Also interestingly, I recently learned that he was the judge who tried to railroad Yockey’s associate, Arnold Leese, to prison after the war for “anti-Semitic” hate crimes.
“When I first admitted to a doctor that I felt I might be drinking too much, he asked me how many cases of beer I went through a week. But I didn’t buy beer by the case; I purchased the good stuff from the high-end alcohol section in the supermarket. Thus, the case was closed in the examination room.”
Ontario used to “control” alcohol by selling wine and liquor in government stores that were set up like the Dept. of Motor Vehicles, and you had to write out a form for each bottle, like a drug prescription. Beer, however, was sold at Beer Stores like giant big box stores way out on the outskirts of town, presumably to discourage consumption. Citizens simply resorted to buying huge amounts on each trip, so-called “suitcases” of 24 bottles each. Hence the cases of Molson in the background of the Bob and Doug Mackensie skits on SCTV, as symbolically Canadian as the broken down davenport and the back bacon on the hot plate.
They still have the LCBO.
In Manitoba, there’s the Liquor Mart that sells pretty much all alcohol that isn’t beer and then there are ‘vendors’, usually attached to hotels, that sell beer.
Alcohol is controlled by provinces, not nationally, so it reflects interesting local differences. Ontario’s Presbyterian heritage shows in its rather Puritanical attitudes (though not going so foolishly far as Prohibition). In my day, the same building would have a bar, which only men could enter, for hard drinking, whilst the other side would have a “family friendly” pub or restaurant. All such establishments had to have closed curtains, lest a passerby be scandalized by the sight of drinking. This was when Toronto was sarcastically known as “Toronto the Good” and before Canada became, first “hip” (Trudeau, Expo 67, etc.) and then Woke (Trudeau II).
Manitoba, which I was driven through once, I recall had drive-in windows so that you could drive up, buy a six pack or two, and get back on the road. I guess that’s “cowboy” style culture.
Interesting.
I didn’t know that about Manitoba, despite living here.
Much of our alcohol culture, especially in the south, was influenced by Mennonites.
Towns such as Steinbach (technically a small city) did not legalize the sale of it until 2008.
According to my Mennonite mother, it was nearly impossible to even ‘trick or treat’ because the fundamentalists thought Halloween was evil.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.995880
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailybonnet.com/mennonites-excited-as-halloween-is-cancelled-this-year/amp/
I’m struggling to find the value in this and I suspect it doesn’t matter that the book itself is not actually mentioned or reviewed in this article, unless I missed something. The article is reflecting on a past TV show on the same theme where it appears that the author seeks to mirror Chiles’ story, with life hacks and all.
Celebrities put their names to a lot of books every year from health, diet, fitness, lifestyle, cooking, menopause, everything – churned out through Jewish publishers and sold on the name of the celebrity. The formula is usually “how I was [fill in blank] and hated myself, and now I’ve turned my life around and love myself”.
Probably hardly any are written by the celebrity themselves.
It strains my mind to think how these books are sold at all and that there is a market for them (almost entirely of white middle class people), but I imagine 95% of them end up in landfill.
Perhaps this book would have been planned with the series ahead of time.
Loads of people including non-drinkers suffer from all the issues Chiles was diagnosed with, they are extremely common and doctors will see these things many times during the course of a day. But I think it’s interesting Chiles didn’t care about his own alcohol consumption until he thought (rightly or wrongly) it was the cause of his own discomfort.
Ok, I guess if all this helps someone struggling whatever fine, but in all cases people should take some basic responsibility for whatever drugs they are consuming including alcohol. But few people want to do that because that requires some effort and self reflection, which seems to be in increasingly short supply these days.
AH became adamantly opposed to alcohol and tobacco (and meat) after youthful shenanigans (though evidence shows he was a diplomatic drinker in Finland). I quit drinking over 2 years ago when I found myself not working and unable to see my European fiancé because of fake pandemics and faker recourse, so naturally I would wake up and drink all day. The first 3 months were difficult, but I learned the best way to kick a habit is to stick to a distracting schedule to keep you busy. Then once you have reached a threshold it becomes easier. I turned away so much more free alcohol in the first year than I’ve ever been offered. It was difficult, but I knew I wasn’t missing out on anything. I reserve the right to drink one weekend a year during Mardi Gras because it actually serves a purpose. But other than that alcohol is very bad for you if you don’t have the discipline to be able to live without it. People develop bad habits from boredom, stress, conformity, reward, indulgence and access. I don’t remember the exact date I stopped drinking uncontrollably and I’m glad because Alcoholics Anonymous just is the dry-drunk side of the equation. You are still letting it define you.
I watched “Drinkers Like Me” about a year ago and found it excellent. Another great documentary is “Risky Drinking”, which helped me personally set aside the notion that problem drinking exists as a park-bench-drunk/no-prob-at-all dichotomy.
This article’s already garnered a so-what question in the comments. I can answer that:
If you’re one of the drinkers in whom alcohol induces Jordan Peterson’s high response — increased heart rate, euphoria, higher alertness — then you are always at risk of escalation. It’s well known that alcohol affects the brain in such a way to reduce impulse control. This means that the more you drink the more you want to drink.
As a stimulant-response drinker who basically quits every week then drinks moderately on the weekends, I can absolutely testify to the undoubtable truth of this. On the first night of skipping beer, I can always feel my brain coming up with excuses as to why an exception, just this once, is warranted. That temptation can be about as strong on day 2 but sharply dissipates by day 3. And that Coors deuce my roommate offers me becomes a pure take-it-or-leave it proposition by day 4 or 5 of abstinence. Those periods of abstinence, along with the fact that many of the activities that comprise my life’s work are utterly impossible after even one beer, are what keep me in the driver’s seat.
But I’m weird, and that program won’t work for everyone.
My dad is not an alcoholic using the park-bench-drunk/no-problem test. But he’s clearly deep into the same territory Adrian Chiles used to roam. The article mentions that UMC professionals — I would include C-suite types here as well — are among the highest-risk group for problem drinking or high-functioning alcoholism.
So, here’s my answer to whoever might ask, “so what?” My dad and his group of friends, including a couple of my uncles, are all entrepreneurs and most were either high-functioning alcoholics or became full-blown alcoholics. The lesson I gleaned from this decades-long natural experiment is this: You can muscle, charm and think your way through escalating or pathological alcohol use throughout your 30s and maybe 40s. But if it continues to escalate or even plateaus at Adrian Chiles’ 70 drinks/wk level, it’s gonna get you.
One of the cohort I’m thinking of is dead, a direct consequence of alcoholism. Another is half dead and broke. This is an individual who in the mid ‘80s flew his own jet and was worth $30M. Others who were once high-flying playboys are now low-sprung .gov pensioners. Poor impulse control mediated by alcohol-damaged frontal lobes might not be the sole explanation. But it’s a prominent common denominator.
As an additional data point, one guy who was a full-blown drunk but quit is still rich. Another who drinks moderately is mega rich.
I also have a cousin who recently died of alcoholism in his 40s and who exhibited the typical escalation pattern with worsening life decisions and outcomes over decades.
Maybe this is just a rambling mirror talk to my own insecurities. But I would say if you have anything on the ball in life, and you’re either consuming more than the 12-14 recommended max units a week or you see your drinking escalate, especially if you have the stimulant response, it’s something to address.
Yeah, I don’t know, alcohol must simply be doing something for these other people that it’s not for me. I mean, it’s a nice buzz for a little while, in the proper context, but I like heavy intervals of sobriety. I think I get out of poetry and beauty what other people get from alcohol.
I have a good helping of Italian blood, and I understand that Mediterranean populations such as Italians and Jews are more resistant to alcoholism than barbarian peoples because we have been living with wine for many more centuries. People who were genetically susceptible to alcohol were selected out of our populations that quickly! Shows how powerful it must be. I thank the dago in me!
I’ve read that, and it comports with experience.
As you might have guessed, I’m half Irish.
Uh oh, the most susceptible group. But a beautiful people.
Interesting comment. I had a long term acquaintance (never a real friend, but a good friend of a friend) who died last year in his early 50s from alcoholism. He got super-belligerent the closer to his end. He simply would not be helped (as I was told the story), rejecting people, fighting with the paramedics frequently called to help him, etc. I find this arc of behavior literally impossible to fathom. I was very social in my 20s-early 40s (80s-early 00s), and did drink a lot on occasion (but never by myself). I found it hard to stop drinking after about the third drink, and when I was hanging with people for an entire night (we might have something pre-dinner; then with dinner; then after dinner at bars or clubs; then latenight at someone’s ‘pad’). Generally, though, I had the self-control to stop about 3am, so that I could at least somewhat sober up by the time I would drive home usu. around 7am.
Eventually, I reached a point where I wasn’t enjoying the wasted next day (wasted as much from irregular and inadequate sleep as any hangover), and stopped doing the latenight thing. Then I realized, around age 42/3, that I just didn’t like partying anymore. It got boring, esp as many of my friends were getting married and changing their social routines, and the singles dregs I was left socializing with were the more ‘hardcore’ types (including among the females), whom I found less interesting.
Once I quit socializing in a ‘party’ vein, I completely lost interest in alcohol. In fact, now I hate it, mainly because I’m always busy dealing with work or medical or homeowner problems, and yet I do need a certain degree of intellectual (not mere “cognitive”) stimulation, so that when I can relax, I usually want to read, or at least watch a movie – and I cannot read with profit, or even all that much enjoy a movie, with much more than a single drink in me. In fact, I have not had any alcohol since pre-pandemic. This was not intended, but simply a result of my lack of socializing combined with a complete lack of interest in drinking except in the presence of others.
It also helped to reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption for me that I won’t touch hard liquor (I never liked it that much; I don’t want to lose personal control in my “blue” city in these dangerously woke times – which where I live go back at least to the Obama election; I worry about getting drunk and then getting behind the wheel), nor beer (due to caloric concerns). So I really only drink wine, and I find that very easy to control (as I only really like it with dinner).
Very glad to see this at C-C. And timely too, for personal reasons.
The poor Irish have demonstrated that you can drink your way to song, but you cannot drink your way to national liberation.
I don’t want to beat a dead mule, but looking back I would suppose that a lot of the bad behavior and poor decisions that came from good faith actors in the Alt Right was at least partly the result of drinking and drug use.
Williams S Burroughs was a degenerate POS but he did have some insights into addiction as a means of social control. Has anyone ever examined these ideas in relation to addiction as an explicitly Jewish control practice?
12-step programs are not for everyone. Neither is Evola. But if I had to choose, I would aim for the median experience, and would rather have our people living by the Big Book or something like it than trying to live by some Continental big brain that hardly anyone understands and many only pretend to read.
Young white women are developing cirrhosis at higher and higher rates. This was happening before Trump, before Covid, before this war and our present economic decline. There are many reasons for this, and I am sure that more than a few are related to the anti-white programming that they have been subject to.
Finally, since many young people seem to be attracted to the 1980s, maybe it is time to take another look at straight edge culture.
“Drinking makes one dehydrated and that leads to constipation.”
Not in my case and not in millions of others, I would imagine. In fact drinking normally leads to the opposite. Charles Bukowski, an authority on everything to do with drunkenness, said “At least when you’re a drunk you don’t have to worry about constipation” (it might be apocryphal; my friend told me he read it, I never did, but it has his ring to it). The Whiskey Rebel aka Phil Irwin, of the rock group Rancid Vat and also an authority on drinking, wrote in his book Jobjumper that alcoholics can’t hold it in and “wait” until an appropriate place later, they have to go immediately when the urge hits. Doesn’t sound like drunken constipation to me. I don’t mean to dwell on this ugly subject except that I deeply distrust Adrian Chiles’ and/or his doctor’s expertise on the effects of drinking after they dropped such a load of…
“The other symptoms [of excessive drinking] were hypertension, heartburn, and anxiety and depression.”
Again, some of this is wrong. Anxiety and depression are not symptoms of drinking. Drinking comes after anxiety and depression. It’s done to mask or temporarily get rid of anxiety and depression. Chiles, from this review, is untrustworthy for anyone who wants to know about heavy drinking and alcoholism.
If you are addicted to downers, your body will manufacture anxiety in order to get you to take another drink or pill to calm it. So with an addiction, symptoms can superficially come “before” their cause, but the cause is actually the underlying addiction, and your next drink or pill is as much an effect of the addiction as the depression and anxiety the addiction generates.
Withdrawal is phyical-dependence-induced hyperstimulation of the nervous system, which is a good definition of anxiety. The DTs are an extreme form of anxiety.
Any craving for alcohol is an indicator of physical dependence even if subclinical. Therefore, alcohol directly causes anxiety. Similar arguments obtain wrt depression.
And anyone who seriously doubts this has probably never experienced both abstinence and prolonged heavy use. Alcohol use certainly raises your anxiety levels through nervous excitation. Quelling it is the reason drunks continue to drink despite clear harm.
Sorty to pile on here, but this book seems at least as unsatisfactory and at least as infuriating as Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life, if the reader is a real heavy drinker/alcoholic who wants to moderate his drinking. Hamill’s book was about Hamill, not his drinking. It’s good as an autobiography, but absolutely fails to live up to its title. The last section of the book is an insult to its presumed audience: Hamill casually gives up drinking and only mildly “suffers” from sugar withdrawal, so he eats a lot of Lifesavers and lollipops. That’s it, that’s his cure.
Thank you for this column, and good for you on controlling your drinking. By the way, Ivan Denisovich’s 10 years in gulag equalled to 3,653 days. Poor guy’s sentence straddled three leap years, not two.
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