I am sober curious – but a little alcohol is still valuable to me | Emma Beddington

I could easily give up. But should I? It isn't necessarily an easy question to answer, writes Emma Beddington

The sun is out, the football is on, beer gardens are packed and sunset-pink shots of condensation-frosted palomas (the new negroni) are plastered across Instagram, but I bet someone in your life has given up drinking. Maybe more than one person. I know lots (if you count parasocial knowing", and I don't get out much, so I do). Sobriety is everywhere; I downed two long reads on the subject just last week. Reporting spans personal reckonings, generational nuances and shifting advice (Ireland has adopted tobacco-style warnings on alcohol). Sobriety is chic, too: it made a list of new status symbols" in Grazia (though so did orange wine; they contain multitudes).

Never an early adopter, I am finally experiencing sober curiosity. I don't have a problematic relationship with alcohol: we are more than Facebook friends, but hardly Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. In my formative drinking years, I took antidepressants that made my hangovers so frighteningly dark I was turned off drinking for a decade. I enjoy a dirty martini or a margarita now (both vehicles for the one substance I really have a problem with: salt), but remain relatively take it or leave it. I'll have a drink if I go out (so, almost never) and my husband and I have one most Friday and Saturday nights, but I don't miss it when it doesn't happen.