Now, you're probably wondering what I'm doing here on a lovely Thursday morning.

Well, it's Vic here with your Thursday retrospective episode of Sober Awkward.

You might be thinking, hang on, haven't I heard this before?

And the answer is yes, yes, you have.

But like all good drinking stories and bad toilet humour,

they both get better with age, or at least less embarrassing the more times we tell them.

On Thursdays, we dust off our favourite episodes from the archives,

something you might have missed, loved or listened to at the start of your sober life.

Think of it as a journey back in time, or a jolly leftover, a bit like lasagna that tastes even

better on day two. So sit back, relax and enjoy this vintage slice of awkwardness. A retrospective

episode reheated and served right to your ears.

When did you first start noticing these red flags pick? I keep imagining a mini airport

ground worker following me around and waving two little red flags at me, Hamish, desperately

trying to jump in my path and tell me to slow down. little red flags at me, Hamish, desperately trying to jump in

my path and tell me to slow down. But I always turned away just as he came into eyeline. Anyway,

personally, I had millions that I ignored and four that I could not yet. So my first one was

the terrible alcohol-induced anxiety. I mean, I say I couldn't ignore it, but I did try and keep drinking even though I had that. I was going to say, how long were you drinking with that anxiety? There was four years of me having terrible anxiety every time I drank, but me desperate not to give it up because I thought I couldn't live without it. Okay, so this is an interesting point. So one red flag probably isn't enough to give up. Yeah. You probably need a few stacked on top of each other to finally give up. Yeah, that's the point, is that we ignore them for a certain amount of time, but there comes a point where you can't ignore them anymore. And this podcast is really for people to tune into them earlier than we did or I did. Yeah. Okay. So anxiety four years before

you gave up. What about the next one? Not wanting to socialise anymore. I couldn't believe it

when I read that. Yeah. What? When did you stop wanting to socialise? Well, it got to the point that

my anxiety was so bad that I didn't trust myself around alcohol anymore. So I refused to go out

because I knew my behaviour so well. How ridiculous is

it that I thought I couldn't control it? I thought it was like a somebody else controlling me like a

...