A Personal View

Alcohol has been part of my life since childhood. I remember fondly the Christmas parties where my family would come together and as a treat I could have some of my Uncle Harry's home brew shandy. The wonderful happy times of eating pork pies and mushy peas on New Years Eve followed by a small sherry and orange to bring in the New Year.

Forward to my life at 13 when every 3 weeks or so me and my dad would go down to the incinerator in Huddersfield with several Fyfes banana boxes with the top covered by a sealed down Huddersfield Daily Examiner, a broadsheet evening paper. They rattled and one day I peeked inside to discover that my beloved father, successful businessman, ex Rugby League Player and Paratrooper was in fact drinking 3 bottles of Scotch or Vodka per night.

Forward to my University days and coming home and rowing with my mother who would not accept that my father had a serious alcohol problem and when he fell stark naked into the bath cracking his head wide open she refused to allow me to take him to hospital. She refused at the point of a carving knife threatening to run me through if I didn't stop trying to help him. I am ashamed to say it is the one and only time I have ever struck a woman purely in self defence. She was proud with an Irish Catholic background and this sort of thing didn't happen in our family...ever. My father's background is ironically Scottish Protestant.

Forward to the moment when I flew home from London after discovering that my mother had ovarian cancer to be met at the hospital by a man clearly seven sheets to the wind and me having to deal with that alongside comforting a woman who was destined to die 6 weeks later. The sixty thousand pound insurance payout well that was pissed up against a wall in 6 months.

Forward a few weeks when he moved South to 'be with me' and my family and the start of the cycle of rehab units, the Salvation Army, AA, Clouds. Thousands spent both privately and by the NHS to the finality of him signing out of Clouds House in East Knoyle on the day of my son's first birthday and turning up at my house paralytic.

And then the walk to the bus stop me telling him how much I loved him but if he turned up drunk he was not welcome.

And then the fifteen years of wondering what had happened to him, Well I knew of the incident of the refit of the QE2 where he had the contract and he was thrown off the the contract because of drunken antics. I knew he'd been back to his old haunts in Southampton, that he'd been deported from America and my greatest worry the rumour that he'd owed money to the wrong people and was propping up the M3 extension on the Winchester by pass.

And then the reunion, He had changed he had become the father that I loved again he had become the Grandfather I had hoped for my children but we had all paid the price.

He died a year later.

No amount of cost would have stopped him drinking, no amount of minimum price would have prevented the empty whisky bottles from stacking up. Money was never the issue.

I have spent the last 33 years of my life trying to understand why a man would put a bottle over his child and his grandchildren. I have become an International Expert in Alcohol. And still I do not have the answer. What I do know is that making it more expensive was never the answer, He would beg steal or borrow to get that next glass of whisky