I am happy to report that I am still a non smoker (cue claps, cheers and general all round pats on back). Whilst I am now free of nicotine, my addictive personality has found a new friend to play with. Enter cabernet merlot – the perfect anecdote for cigarette withdrawals. One not needlessly suffer, or so I told myself, as I stared down the bottle of yet again another merlot. However, after throwing another empty bottle in my recycling bin (and hearing it clang on all the others), I fear that my smoke free existence, may be turning me into a rampant alcoholic!

You see, I’m your classic all or nothing, and as such I don’t naturally gravitate towards the middle ground. If I look back over my life, I can see a clear pattern of things that I’ve been completely obsessed with, that I either over did or got sick of, and then couldn’t stand the sight of.

When I fell in love with John Farnham (disclaimer – I was 11), I stuck posters of him all over my walls (in manner of wall paper) and when I ran out of room, I was caught stapling pictures of him onto my roof. I knew all the words to his songs, had his birthday written in my Dinky Diary, was a member of his fan club, owned his auto biography, went to his concert (he winked at me, I swear he did) and spray and wiped the block mounted picture I was given for my birthday on a weekly basis (the spray and wipe is another story in itself – lets just say no surface was safe), but then when I went to high school, I dropped him like a dirty rag and moved onto Vanilla Ice. Alright, stop, collaborate and listen ….

I took high school crushes to a new level. Some may remember my recording Jonathon Shinnick’s class time table in my diary as cause for concern (teachers may well have written potential stalking tendencies on my school report), but I called it dedication. Not only did I get off the bus 5 blocks before my stop, so that I could meet his bus and follow him to school in the morning (whilst bum sucking a cigarette trying to look cool), I would make sure I was walking down the same hallway he was in between classes. Five minutes before the bell rang, I would check my diary to see where his next class was, put on my bonne bell lip gloss, re tease my fringe (yes it was the early 90s) and pack my bag, so that I could run to where he would be and then casually walk past him, hoping and praying he would notice me. I listened to the Top 40 on the radio every night, and imagined that he was singing the songs to me (I’d tell you what the songs were, but then we just had that Vanilla Ice moment back there, and I’m not sure I liked the way you laughed at me).

After months of pining over the unrequited love that was Jonathon Shinnick, and thinking I would die unless he asked me if we could “go out together” (90s high school speak for will you be my girlfriend?), I cried into a tub of ice cream and the next thing I knew, I was scribbling someone elses name on my school file.

Whilst a couple of high school crushes and a few too many Smash Hits posters don’t seem like such a big deal (then again, tell that to my friends who hid my Pearl Jam tape from me because they couldn’t bare to listen to “Go, Animal, Daughter” one more time on holiday), it’s a different story when it comes to overdoing it and indulging in things we shouldn’t. So even though I’ve grown up, and no longer in possession of such questionable musical taste, it seems that my all or nothing nature has stuck with me. Whilst it does strike me as a coincidence that I’m a Libran (the sign in the zodiac for balance – those bloody scales!), I am more inclined to think that it’s an inherent predisposition, rather than astrological. It seems that I am constitutionally wired for addiction and burn out.

So being the woman of wisdom that I am, I have decided that rather than drown one addiction out with another, I’m going to have a week off drinking. Despite the fact that I once went a number of years without drinking (that would be the nothing part of my all or nothing nature), the young boy whose wages I have been sustaining at the liquor store, will be pleased to know that I have no plans to abstain from the vino for good. Rather, I am going to be nice to my liver, and detox in the name of balance for a week.