I struggle to cope with the demands of middle age. You sleep the half-sleep of the 49-year-old, get up feeling hungover even if you didn’t drink the night before, and then plunge into the new “rush hour of life”: the forties have become the decade when child-rearing and career peak coincide. Our duties would be tough even if our bodies weren’t decaying. (Productivity declines from about age 50, as corporate human resources departments know very well.) But I have found a new way of coping: I have radically cut down my drinking from moderate to almost nothing. So far, it’s working. I’d almost call it an elixir of youth.
I had been drinking about 10 glasses of wine a week, the maximum recommended by health authorities in both France (where I live) and the UK. But in recent years I’ve realised that just a couple of drinks of an evening make me tired and sluggish the next day.
With age, your liver and stomach shrink, and become less good at removing alcohol from your system. Also, an older body carries less fluid to break down alcohol. The logical response to these changes would be to drink less. Yet Britons aged 45 to 64 are more likely to be drinkers than any other age group, says the UK’s Office for National Statistics. We are stuck in a vicious circle: because our peers drink, we experience constant peer pressure to drink too. And we come to assume that our peer group’s level of drinking is normal.