Oh, the kettle's boiled. Excellent timing. I'll just make myself a quick cupper, take a deep breath and pretend I know exactly what I'm doing. Right, let's get started.

Have you ever woken up on a Sunday morning with massive anxiety and said to yourself, I'm never drinking again,

only to find yourself waving 50 bucks at a barman by happy hour. Do you ever wonder why everyone

else can stop at one while you end up at a dodgy after party holding hands with a weird bloke

called Disco Dave? If so, it might be time to take a closer look at your reliable social crutch alcohol.

On this podcast, I investigate my own deeply dysfunctional dealings with booze and find out what

it's really like navigating this alcohol-drenched world, one fizzy water at a time.

I'm going to open up a shame shed of humiliating drinking stories to help you understand why

waking up with one eyebrow missing and a kebab sticking out of your top pocket might actually

be negatively impacting your health. So what happens when you put down those cheeky pints and

finally let go of those rewarding mummy wines? I guess we're just going to have to wait and see.

I'm Victoria Vanstone and this is sober awkward. No, you could just leave it by the door, mate. Yep. Thank

you. Okay, right, here I am in my son's bedroom with chaos surrounding me.

I'll describe the scene.

There's a Pac-Man game to my right, a Spider-Man coloring kit, there's headphones everywhere,

there's pictures, there's a giant dinosaur, a tennis racket on the floor.

I mean, I am literally surrounded by chaos,

so not all the chaos disappears when you give up drinking, just most of it, but just in other

ways. Before I get my mate recovery Jimmy in today, I need to set the tone properly. Today's

episode is about maturity, or more accurately, the absolute absence of

it when I was drinking. The only things I cared about were where the next drink was coming from,

if anyone had backstage passes for a gig, for a rave or even for a wake in my local area.

...