Cobra

Last night was a bit of a test of the new more mature relationship with alcohol. Running club curry. Actually, I wasn't bothered about not drinking at all, and I decided to take the car over rather than drinking and relying on buses or taxis to get me back home. I wasn't sitting there wanting a drink, I was more than happy with the water. So that was good.

The real eye opener was realising how much I would have drunk. The slowest drinker on my table got through four pints of cobra, and I'm sure that I'd have matched her given the opportunity. Not only would that have doubled the price of my curry (the food worked out at £10 each, and the cobras were £2.60 a pop), but I had quite a shock when I worked out how many calories I'd have drunk my way through.

I was already feeling a little guilty about the amount of food I'd eaten. I don't go out for a curry too often, and everyone else was having starters so... lets just say that with popadoms, starters, a main and rice it was rather more than I usually eat in an evening. I enjoyed it, and it wasn't a huge falling off the wagon moment, but I couldn't do it every week. But if I'd had those four pints then a little blip would have turned into a rather bigger blip I fear. I don't know exactly how many calories are in a pint of that stuff, but if I go for a figure of 200 that's 800 extra empty calories just from the alcohol, on a night when I was already splurging and going over what I normally eat. Eek.

There's nothing new here. It's not like I didn't know any of this before, but somehow sitting there enjoying my sparkling water watching them drink really hit home how little value there is in that stuff. I don't particularly like the taste, I don't particularly like being drunk, I don't particularly like having to rely on public transport late at night, and I don't particularly like trying to drag myself to the gym the morning after. And yet I'd have been perfectly willing to load 800 empty calories into my system in addition to the curry just because it was a curry night and everyone else was drinking. Now there's logic for you.

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The news on my dad isn't great. He's OK, and he's been discharged, but the problem is that the injury/illness is something which is aggravated by diving, and the main reason he's better today is because he hasn't dived. This is a slight problem when you're a diving instructor, and that's the family business. So even though it's possible for him to be perfectly healthy on land (or so we hope), as far as I can tell there's a huge question mark over whether he'll be able to go back to working any time soon. Which isn't good news at all. Fingers crossed it's not what they think it is.