If wine is being freely poured, fill your glass with water once you’ve drunk the wine. Don’t drink any more wine until you’ve finished the water.” 6. Consider alcohol-free drinks I am completely in the same headspace as in that I enjoy drinking and if I can do it moderately then why give up the habit of a lifetime. Since the new year my drinking diary says I have averaged 15.78 units/week so not quite to the government's safe drinking guide level yet but close. If you’re the kind of drinker who struggles to stop drinking once you start, consider making your first couple of drinks alcohol-free.” 7. Give alcohol less credit for how you feel

Whilst I'm sure for a lot of people abstinence is the only way, cutting down and being more thoughtful about my drinking of wine works for me. But then, conscious of how much he was drinking, he focused on himself for a 2018 BBC documentary Drinkers Like Me to test how his regular drinking affected his health. He discovered he was drinking up to 100 units a week and a doctor told him he had signs of liver damage.

Customer reviews

First book of the year as I wasn't entirely sure where to start but this stood out to me. As someone who enjoyed Chiles' 2018 documentary Dry January after a rather Wet December has been the sort of moderate conversation I've always really wanted to have with someone. When broadcaster Adrian Chiles started to investigate his drinking, he was in for a rude awakening. Poor Siegfried looked every inch the school chess player. He wore the kind of glasses that make your eyes look bigger. I too wore glasses, being shortsighted, so I suppose we did have specs in common, but that was it.

Having had Allan Carr's The Easy Way to Control Alcohol for a few years and never had the inclination to get round to reading it, I thought I would give this a go as it seemed a bit more likely and a bit more achievable for me. Have to say, this was a really well written and easy to follow read on Chiles' life with alcohol and how he kept it in his life without losing the ability to have it altogether.

Moderating your drinking during the festive season

I’ve occasionally been asked why it is that I need to go for a drink before watching the Albion play. I’ve always answered with something lame, along the lines of, “You wanna try watching us sober”… where does this urge come from? I’ve raced off to games hours early to give me a chance to drink a lot of beer in a relatively short time … the craic is good, usually. Sometimes it isn’t, Occasionally it’s all rather boring. But I always make the effort. Why? Well..’

If it’s somewhere where there’s wine flowing, I’ll have a glass of wine but when I’ve finished that I wouldn’t drink any more wine until I’d filled that same glass with water and finished that. That’s reducing the volume and stops you being dehydrated.” It felt so good. At that moment, the last few days we had left on the exchange went from feeling like an eternity to something wispy and insignificant and even possibly enjoyable. I laughed and joked with my friends and even fancied I spotted a girl called Claudia looking at me. And I became overwhelmed with sorrow for poor Siegfried, who couldn’t face more than a mouthful of beer but, with unbearable sweetness, was plainly delighted to see me smiling. The popular broadcaster and columnist sets out to discover the unsung pleasures of drinking in moderation. I have scant memory of any of the excursions our exchange group were taken on, bar one. In the second week we went on a tour of Leonberg’s brewery. I moped around, disliking the smell, looking on without interest as we were shown how beer was made. At the conclusion of the tour, we were sat down at long tables and given what was probably rather strong lager to drink. I didn’t much enjoy it but, within a matter of minutes of it coursing through my veins, I was going through some kind of emotional transformation. The prose is quite chatty, but that is to be expected for what is effectively someone's memoir of their relationship with alcohol. I was almost averse to labelling this an autobiography, but there are some allusions to the slightly tougher parts of his life, both on and off the screen. Chiles tends to avoid the potential of it being self-indulgent and distracting from what is a rather consistent and well-constructed argument for moderation.I've occasionally been asked why it is that I need to go for a drink before watching the Albion play. I've always answered with something lame, along the lines of, "You wanna try watching us sober" ...where does this urge come from? I've raced off to games hours early to give me a chance to drink a lot of beer in a relatively short time...the craic is good, usually. Sometimes it isn't, Occasionally it's all rather boring. But I always make the effort. Why? Well....' Adrian never talks down to the reader and is very open about his shift in perspective when faced by medical advice to cut down (after being sure he wasn't doing much harm with his weekly units each week).

Forty years later, having put petrol-tanker quantities of alcohol through my system, I see the significance of that first drink. And, more importantly, the significance of the first drink on any given occasion. The first one is the only one that matters; it’s the only one that brings about a wondrous change in your emotional state. All subsequent drinks are increasingly fruitless attempts to recreate that initial feeling. Grasping this truth is the surest route to drinking less. Relish the first drink, and perhaps a second if you must, but don’t bother with the rest. Consider it a bit of a win, an achievement, a marginal gain, if you end up drinking any less than what you’ve predicted.” 2. Work out if you really need it Just as everyone’s got a different idea of what constitutes moderate drinking, there’s plenty of disagreement as to what heavy drinking looks like. My own view is as follows. Based on no scientific expertise but plenty of reading, and discussions with countless medics and drinkers (and some drinking medics), if you’re dropping much more than 35 units a week – around fifteen drinks – you’re a heavy drinker. Books telling us to give up drinking are 10 a penny, but how about something for those of us who like a social drink but are occasionally worried that two turn into four rather too easily? That’s where Adrian Chiles’s likable and highly readable memoir of his relationship with booze comes in. He writes that “the vast majority of drinkers like me believe they are not problem drinkers”. He details his experiences in cutting down, to comic and insightful effect, and skilfully but never preachingly, offers suggestions for others, too. The Little Blue FlamesThe thought of never drinking alcohol frightens me as there are so many social and cultural influences around us to drink alcohol and similarly to Adrian, the happy times of my life have been about socialising and drinking with friends. It is certainly easier to be at an event where you know no one to have a glass of wine in hand. However, the glass of wine after a hard day at work (oh poor me working in a book shop) I can generally do without, they've become a habit and the "hard day at work" is just an excuse. Without wishing to come across as ‘un-Christmassy’, I think there should be a special place in hell for anyone who says anything to you along the lines of, “C’mon, it’s Christmas, have another one! What do you mean you’re not drinking? Scrooge!’” 4. Use Dry January wisely The broadcaster, who grew up in Hagley, in Worcestershire, and is famous for his love of West Bromwich Albion, was enjoying career success, having had high-profile TV jobs on The Apprentice: You’re Fired!, The One Show, Daybreak and football coverage on ITV Sport as well as numerous radio gigs including Radio 5 Live.