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Good evening everybody, my name is Miranda and I'm now colleague.

I wish you could all unmute and I could hear you but hey there we go.

I thought long and hard about how to start this share and I must have practised it about 100 million times but my experience

having shared a number of times is that actually has to come from the heart and actually there's no good practicing anything.

So that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to tell you my story, my experience, my strength, my hope.

And if there are newcomers tonight I'd like to suggest that you actually listen to the similarities, not the differences.

You will find a lot of differences because my story is mine and it's not yours but there are things in common with all of us so I hope that you get something out of it.

Everybody starts with the beginning of their drinking history etc etc and I'm going to be doing the same but extremely briefly.

So I came from an ordinary normal family, absolutely nothing extraordinary happened.

My father was in the army, we moved around a lot.

I was born in England, we moved to Germany, we moved to Italy, we moved to England when I was about eight.

I stayed until I was about 18, I went to foreign schools, I ended up with a lot of languages, my life was perfectly normal.

I started, I had a girlfriend who who used to basically the two of us started drinking at the age of 14 and my drinking was not unreasonable.

It's like the occasional drink etc and then I left home at 18 and then when I left home at 18 all bets were off.

Nobody to supervise me because I've moved not just towns, not just countries but continents and I've moved to what was in those days called redisia and today it's called symbology.

I went to a holiday, took one look at the beautiful weather and decided that I didn't want to go back to England to my horrible job working in a tax office of an oil company and my relationship had fallen through yet.

...