Surviving Teetotal February

More about our Alcohol-Ban....

At the initiation of the Ban, I had made some silent rules. I call the rules "silent" because these rules should never have to come into play should everything go well. These are not so much rules, but penalties, in the event that either of us decided to break the Ban.

I thought up many variations of penalties, most of them based around Ban extensions. My first thought was to extend the Ban by a day, for every day we broke the Ban. However, there was a serious flaw in this penalty system, as it meant that we could drink everyday and be perpetually in a Banned state! Besides, breaking such a huge Ban requires heavier punishments. I then thought of various compositions, such as an extension of one week, or one month, for every day broken.

I finally settled on an extension of one day, for every single unit of alcohol consumed. This system seemed fair and apt. Having just one beer or just one glass of champagne should not carry the same penalty as having a whole bottle of wine! Besides, should we decide to break the Ban, having a blanket penalty system would only drive us to go all out since we were paying the price anyway!

Last weekend, Azrael and I took a quick jaunt to Geneva. More about the trip later, I just wanted to touch on the Ban in this post.

It was a chilly but bright and sunny Saturday afternoon when we arrived. It was the perfect day to sit by the lake and enjoy a glass of wine! We were clearly asking for it.... being on a weekend break in a beautiful pseudo-French city! Within an hour of our arrival in Geneva, we started negotiating with each other as to what the rules and penalties of the Ban were! We must have spent at least an hour discussing these! Finally, we settled that the rules and penalties would remain and agreed that it would not be soooooooo bad if we were to have just one drink, perhaps for apéro.

As we walked around the city, we passed by wine bar after wine bar. It was lunch time and everyone was having wine with their lunch. It all started to get a little bit too much when we walked into a tapas bar looking for food, only to find that it was a wine bar serving some tiny little tapas, like bread and olives to accompany the wine! By this time, we were absolutely convinced that the Ban would be broken by the end of the evening.

Miraculously, we got through the afternoon, and the all-important 6pm apéro hour unscathed! This was strongly aided by a visit to a French tea house after lunch, and a visit to a Chinese tea house for z'vieri.

Dinner time was not at all a problem as we had dinner in a Singaporean restaurant and certainly did not feel the need for wine as an accompaniment to the meal.

One would think that the most difficult part would be after dinner, when we headed off to a jazz bar. Au contraire, it did not pose much of a challenge. It started off with us ordering a couple of mocktails, which were followed by some Cola and San Bitter.

It is actually only the physical act of ordering a non-alcoholic drink that is challenging. I am of the opinion that once the drink is in hand, the actual drink itself makes very little difference.

So here we are, and I am very proud to announce that as of today, the 18th, we are still tee-total and going strong!

P/s: We dined with a group of 10 other people tonight and were very successful in graciously declining their offer of wine.