I started drinking and smoking at 14 and it was very much sort of binge drinking. That's what we did. We got into, you know, I could probably talk for hours on the reasons behind it, but it's, I think,

mainly cultural. And, but the whole point was the weekend would come and you would go out and get

drunk. You wouldn't go out and have one or two drinks or, you know, the goal of the evening was to go

out and get drunk. So that's kind of what started it off. And I don't think it's an uncommon thing, particularly in, you know, like Australia, UK, America. It seems to be kind of what we do.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it's almost seen as like the reward for your hard work during the week is to then get absolutely hammered at the week. Yeah, exactly.

So I was always a binge drinker. I never

drank daily, except when I had the opportunity to. So most of the time, being a lawyer,

one of the things was I had to use my brain to do my job and I couldn't do that when I was

hung over. So what I would do is drink lots at the weekend but then sober up and then going to work.

But what I found were the binges were getting more and more extreme, as happens with everyone,

the intake tends to increase.

And so it was kind of going more and more off the rails at the weekends in that,

you know, I'd start drinking Friday lunchtime and sneak out of work in the afternoon and

have another couple and then drink through the evening. Then I think one of the big changes

for me was having children as well because when you don't have children you can

wake up really hung over on a Saturday and just kind of slob around all day until you start to feel

a bit better and then start drinking again but when you've got young children you don't have that

luxury you have to get up and start moving around yeah for me it was very similar yeah it was

you have a consequence for the first time, don't you? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But my way of dealing with that was not to drink less, but to start drinking in the mornings because I found then I would, that would, like, pick me up enough to be able to start, like, get through the day. Yeah. So my weekend binge drinking, like, ended up literally in just constant drinking. So it was

becoming more and more extreme. And I think the other thing when you have kids is you don't get

enough sleep. So you never quite recover. So it was it was kind of going more and more off the rails.

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