You're listening to this naked mind with Annie Grace.

Hi, this is Annie Grace and welcome to this naked mind podcast. I'm here with John. Hi, John. How are you?

Hi, Annie. Really good. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for coming on. I'm so excited about it. So why don't you sort of take us back to the beginning in your relationship with alcohol? Where did it all start for you?

Oh, wow. Well, I'm half Irish. My dad's my dad's Irish and you know alcohol just kind of always been around.

Just always, always been around, you know, like from a very, very young age, I remember being in bars and clubs, you know, when it was still legal to smoke and you were kind of like just underneath the smoke kind of halo.

You could kind of see the smoke above and you know running around as a kid and everybody drinking seeming to be happy enjoying themselves, you know, partying.

And I spent a lot of my childhood in Ireland, you know, and absolutely loved everything about Ireland, everything about the Irish people, you know, everything about my family. I got a great family. I've got a really huge family got massive loads and loads of cousins.

But even at a young age, we used to go to Ireland and they used to have a teenage disco, which was actually in a nightclub. And that used to go on until like two in the morning.

And we would go there when you were like 12 and 13 and we would all kind of get the older boys to buy the alcohol, you know, like a couple of days beforehand.

We'd hide it somewhere like in a graveyard or something like that and we'd wait until you know the teenage disco was going to happen and then you know go down the graveyard, find our stash and get blind drunk before we went into this teenage disco that like literally it would sell just lemonade.

But everybody in there was completely drunk right because all the teenagers would all make sure that they had their alcohol stash before they before they kind of went out.

So that was kind of my first experience of alcohol was probably kind of, you know, maybe when I was like 12 13 and even when I was like a lever and I had a job in a working men's club picking up glasses.

So I was always kind of around alcohol and it's one of them weird things, you know, just it was just so normal back then, you know, to have kids going around picking up the glasses in a bar over here.

We have these things called working men's clubs. They're not so popular anymore, but they were kind of like, you know, you'll have to be members to be in them and the whole family would kind of go.

And it was that kind of environment. So, you know, alcohol was just around from a really, really young age and I suppose you kind of grow up thinking, wow, I want that like, you know, it's one of them things is like when you're 18 you're going to be able to do it and you're like, oh damn, I've got so many years to wait until I'm 18 until I can do that thing right.

Yeah, yeah, I know, you know, I was quite, I was quite a nervous child when I was young girls quite.

Quite nervous. I'm quite still quite a nervous grown up, right, but I held it. I had that better, but as I, you know, when I was younger, I was quite nervous about, you know, my sexuality and stuff like that as I was kind of growing up and even though I used to go, you know, I had loads of girlfriends and stuff when I was in my teens and when I was younger, there was always something that wasn't quite right.

And I remember, you know, when I got to about the age of 11, there was a campaign in the UK, right, this is like 1987 and there was this big massive public health campaign about AIDS, right.

And over here they had like this huge like gravestone and this gravestone fell down and it's like AIDS, it's killing people, you know, and around that time everyone was kind of, you know, it's gay, it's gay people that dive this.

And gay people just dive it, you know, and gay men having sex, men having sex with men is what makes you get AIDS, right. And that's what kills you.

So kind of at the age of 11 when I was kind of thinking there's something different about me, I was also thinking, well, you know, this is a really kind of, this would be a really scary thing to happen, you know, if you were to kind of think about being with boys, right.

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