During the following period, I have taken up exercising again, walking to work and on some days walking back, rewarding myself with a pint or two at the local pub when accomplished prior to arrival home. In the early part of the period, I tried to reinforce my talk and motivate myself on my morning walk to stay on the straight and narrow. I am still doing 8 to 10 cans of lager a day, the majority at home in the evening - but suffering so much less in the mornings! Most times, after the walk, nothing was felt at all!

But things change, and we moved offices. The morning and evening walks went to be replaced with the commute which ended in the evening right in the centre of pub country! Oh yes, it started as one or two before heading home to being 'last man standing' having one more (actually two or three more) for the road before heading to the buses. Very quickly, the old habits returned, I had stopped taking notice!

Eventually after another very heavy session, it was time for 'me' time again. I can't remember the details too well but I was not where everyone though I was. I was at my mother's - she was away - and I spent the day there. This time there was no recording being done but again the same mental beating, if not worse than the first, was handed out.

Yes, started to make the effort again and yes improvements were made. I realised that some things especially routines needed to be changed. I think that talk made me more receptive to a house move when the time came. It also made me realise that whilst I could not find the source of my unhappiness, I was not finding it in the booze. What I could do was think of me as a whole and try and manage those things that I needed to make me less stressed, unhappy and I intended to use this blog to do that.

A house change, joining a gym, spending meditation time made for changes that I took advantage of and brought me down to the 6 (frequent) to 8 drinks a night and some nights 4 drinks seemed adequate. Anything less than 4 though, tried on a number of occasions, and I cannot switch of my brain to get to sleep!

There have been extended periods of days when I have not reinforced my aim to bring my drinking under control but I always have slipped back to it because it was built into my routine. This post does not quite bring us up to date so we can take this blog on forward in the journey ahead.

There is a theme in this post and that is change. Change is the time when your guard must be up to avoid falling into the same traps but do present opportunities to even make bigger changes because more disruption is still disruption and there is unlikely to be too much resistance. If that makes sense.

May you find the balance.

[First published on my Talking2Myself blog on specified date]