Stu, never say never, mate. The problem is not drinking, it's using booze as a crutch. Trust me, I've been there. Going "cold turkey" because you made a bit of a twat of yourself will just put a different type of pressure on you.
You're changing your drinking habits for your kids, your wife, your extended family, and maybe your friends too, and your health, obviously, which impacts on all the other reasons because you'll probably end up dying before your time and depriving your kids of their dad, etc. You've got to want to do it, for everyone else first, not just you.
The amount I used to drink would probably scare the shit out of even you.
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon/lol.gif)
How about drinking all through a three-hour lunchtime (Guinness, and brandies) then going straight out after work and ending up drinking "Limp Dicks" which was a cocktail I invented consisting of a large brandy mixed with a large scotch. Many many times I failed to work out how I got home from London.
Or how about not being able to go out after work because I had to get home in time to either work in or actually run my local pub for the night, followed by a lock-in until about three a.m? Sometimes I even only just got home in time to get ready for work, go to work still pissed, get a hangover around lunchtime, and hit the pub again to drink it away. These weren't isolated incidents, it was a lifestyle. It was made worse, probably, because I was a "sprits" man. Three pints and I was done and on the shorts for the rest of the session.
Marriage probably, eventually - she put up with me for much longer than I deserved - saved my life. I missed quite a bit of the first ten years of my marriage because I was too pissed to appreciate it, or remember it, and there's no getting that back.
As I think I've said before, when she passed away I promised myself I wouldn't go back to it and try to lose my pain in a bottle, which would have been far too easy, but would have felt like a betrayal. I don't even fancy a drink these days, and she'll have been gone 4 years in September. Mind you, a lot of that is self-preservation. The few times I've had a drink I woke up feeling like death the morning after.
Right, I think that's quite enough self-flagellation and "
confessions of a drunk," for now
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon/mrgreen.gif)