The Cruise texts Vol 8 You don’t know what you don’t know!

Last year I was asked to write a series of blogs for publication. As ever, they disappeared down a rabbit hole, having just uncovered them, they are I feel ripe for release so here they are. Written whilst on a cruise around the North Sea and the North Atlantic on the P&O Cruises cruise ship Aurora organised by Laura Childs of Pure Travel. Hence Cruise Texts.

I met my wife Gillian. She tolerated my rantings, but it was becoming an issue then too. I would drink, cause great upset, to her and my son. I have a very strong conscience, what I call my ‘raging conscience’. When I would come to, sometime later and realise what I had done I would turn that in on myself and self-pity would take over.

I was on a downward spiral.

After one extreme event, I knew I had to stop drinking. The problem is that knowing you’ve got to stop is not the same as wanting to stop.

That transformation took four years. I am still amazed Gillian stuck in for that time.

What really sealed the deal though was my son telling me why he wouldn’t have more than one beer when we had been walking the South Downs Way, A weeks’ worth of hiking.

‘Dad I never knew what you might do when you were drinking and I had to be sober enough to manage it.’

Bang, that was a real smacker, the deal was almost done right there.

It was a little while later though when I actually made the decision. One of my granddaughters was born on a Sunday morning, we had been drinking the night before, I had made myself seriously unpopular again and was rolling in self-pity and neither of us (Gilian and I) were in a state to drive. We got to the hospital I held Ivie in my arms and stopped drinking that day.

I didn’t touch a drop for two years.

Most of my demons, or problems went away with that decision.

The symptoms I described earlier were still there, but I became properly happy in my own skin. For the first time in years.

I watched Gillian, my wife by then begin to relax around me.

That was happiness such as I hadn’t known in years.

I still didn’t know that what I had been managing all this time though was anxiety.

Simon Pollard July 2024