Yorky Pud

At some point in their life every man will reach a point where they are essentially at a crossroads, where they have to make a decision or a number of decisions in order to carry on down the path they want to head down. I, ladies and gentleman, have reached that point, those crossroads and it could be by biggest challenge yet.

Today I downloaded a book to my trusty Kindle (great little gadget that) by Allen Carr called “How To Control Your Drinking.” Carr wrote a number of best selling books, all of them self-help, with the most famous being The EasyWay To Stop Smoking that he wrote after quitting a hundred-a-day smoking habit that spanned 33 years. Ironically he died of lung cancer in November 2006.

A friend of mine, Lee Davy, has already read this particular book so I already know there is a little twist in there that will inform me that you cannot control your drinking, you simply have to stop. This to me, like many others, is a completely alien concept and something I have struggled and am struggling to get my head around and judging by the number of “WTF” type responses to a tweet I sent about it this morning so are many of my friends.

This may sound sad but alcohol has always been and is a significant part of my life. My parents drink, though not heavily, I have worked in the pub and club trade for a number of years, lived in a pub for a couple of years and have always been around parties and people going out drinking so I guess you could say drinking and alcohol is in my blood, so to speak.

The problem is I am quite a greedy person and have one of those mentalities where it is all or nothing. I have little self-control when it comes to a large number of things. When I started smoking I smoked like a chimney and whenever I took drugs I was popping pills and sticking powders up my nose like they were going out of fashion. But one thing I always said was once the bad times outweigh the good then it is time to call it a day. I feel that time may have come for my drinking days.

I stopped smoking the day or two day's after my sister's wedding and have been clean in that respect for around 18 months. I quit the evil herb simply because I wanted to. It is expensive, smells awful and I don't want my kids to grow up and become smokers so it seemed logical to quit and quit I and the Mrs did. Taking drugs suffered the same fate too. To cut a long story short they were causing me all sorts of mental problems which were spilling into everyday life and I had to quit. That was more than four years ago.

So why am I almost certainly going to quit drinking? There are a number of reasons and I plan to go through them all so get comfortable, make a cuppa and settle down!

The first and possibly most important is how I feel when I DON'T drink. As readers of this blog you know that I often travel around Europe on the World Poker Tour and European Poker Tour as a live blogger. Although I love the job you are forced to work long hours and it is one of the worst jobs in the world when you are tired and hungover. On recent tours I have had spells of three or four days where I have not had a single drink and I have felt like a completely new man. I have ideas for articles and projects coming out of my ears, I managed to plough through work like nobody's business and I feel much more creative. Usually I go and spoil it all and get wasted on at least one night and feel like death but although there is the feeling of wanting to cut my own head off and put it in the freezer there is also a feeling of guilt when I feel rough, and the overwhelming feeling that I have let myself down. It's not a nice feeling.

Then there's the fact I have no self control. I was speaking to the Mrs about it this morning in that I cannot remember a time when I bought a bottle of wine and had just the one glass, it always ends up being the entire bottle. Or like last night when I went for a curry with friends and had a couple of pints I finished up going to Asda and buying some cider despite the fact I didn't need it, or really want it for that matter, and knew I'd feel crap this morning (I did BTW) but I still did it. It's like there is another Yorkshire Pudding inside me who comes out to play when he's been in contact with alcohol and he's a bit of a controlling knob head to be honest.

Let's keep this going. Another reason is I want to be a better dad to my kids and partner to the Mrs. Waking up feeling rubbish, tired and not at all refreshed whilst you have young kids around the house is a recipe for disaster. I know I am sometimes snappy and not nearly as patient as I should be or even motivated to be a parent. It's not t he kids fault. Likewise being a better partner for the Mrs. She's stopped drinking because she's a bit nuts (!!) so it's not fair that I'm drinking in front of her and it's not fair when I do drink and stay up until the early hours on the Xbox or I'm snappy with her. I can honestly say that hand on heart, and this almost certainly goes for ex-girlfriends too, that the only time I have ever had an argument with the Mrs is when one or both of us have been drinking or the day after when feeling sorry for ourselves.

Then there is the health aspects to it all. For the past few weeks I've been suffering from some strange dizzy spells that I am going to the doctor's about but I tested my blood pressure with my dad's monitor and it was high enough for me to worry about. I'm 30-years old not 60 so want to drop some weight and get my blood pressure down and sooner rather than later. Stopping the booze seems like a good place to start.

I'm sat here not thinking that this makes me sound like a raging alcoholic and although I do not think that is the case I guess I do have a problem with alcohol and it's not the case that I have two hands and just one mouth! I can't limit myself once I have been drinking, I don't like the person I am when I have been drinking and I still have many aspirations and goals in both poker and writing that I will only ever achieve if I have a clear head and what better way to have a clear head than to rid it of something that causes me severe cloudiness.

It's going to be a difficult challenge, I know that, and I still haven't a clue how I am going to do it. In fact I am quite anxious about the whole affair, but I know that after a week or two I am going to be a completely different person, a happier person and that will shine through on those around me. Wish me luck!

Seeing how this is a poker blog I better mention something about the horrible game! I've hardly played this month because I have been catching up with work and the like but I have managed to fit in four tournaments, each with 2k+ runners, and got nowhere near the money and played a session of 1,231 hands and lost 1.5BI and that's about it really. I'm not sure if I'll get to play next week either because I am flying to Copenhagen on Sunday for ET Copenhagen which will take up most of my time and I'm not sure of the legality of online poker there.

Until next time good luck at the tables and stay away from the bar!