It's not you, wine. It's me

Are we breaking up for good?

The menopause brings a raft of delights. Insomnia, achy joints, spots popping up like you’re 14 again. I had chronic anxiety to the point where my heart rate would accelerate alarmingly, as if a man had run at me with an axe - and someone had only flicked a light switch. Not to mention waves of incandescent rage that had me doing the vicky finger movements behind perfectly nice people’s backs. It can be a rather messy business.

A less dramatic, though no less horrible aspect is night sweats. For me, everything else has pretty much settled down - but those sweats persist. By day I probably seem quite normal. But at night I’m a slippery eel.

So I decide to conduct an experiment as to what’s causing them. Although I have my suspicions I demand evidence to prove that it isn’t what I think it is.

I want to know that IT ISN’T WINE. Tell me it can’t be wine!

The horror of the situation seems bizarre because there was once - unbelievably - a time when British people barely drank wine at all. In the seventies my mum quaffed Martini and gin, my dad beer, whisky and Drambuie (!). Meanwhile for me there were four options for teenage boozing:

1. Warm lager procured from the offy by some freakishly mature looking 16 year old.

2. Contraband alcohol from the parental drinks cabinet. Sploshes of Cinzano, Baileys, Advocaat etc - whatever they had - all mixed together in a Soda Stream bottle and smuggled out under my coat. Yum!

3. Snakebite and black - ie, rank beer and cider blend, the dash of blackcurrant doing nothing to mask its awfulness.

4. Pernod and black ordered in some glamorous pub in Kilmarnock that happily served under-agers.

Isn’t that weird - that it was normal to quaff a French aperitif (if that’s what Pernod is?) that tasted of liquified aniseed balls. Yet wine was considered far too intimidatingly continental for us to have anything to do with? Until my twenties, that is, and the discovery of a fruity concoction you could order in pubs which really blew your socks off.

Merrydown Wine came in fruity flavours. I can’t remember which fruit was abused in its manufacturing process. No matter because we guzzled this rocket fuel in Dundee pubs that were so fuggy with smoke, you could barely breathe, let alone taste anything.

The London years. Fuelled by beer with lime in it!

A move to London introduced me to the sophistication of pub wine which was basically ‘red’ or ‘white’. The red stained your lips black, the white could have stripped gloss paint off a door. No wonder the preferred bevvy was still lager - not from a can (unless it was Red Stripe) but a bottle with a wedge of lime squished in. All the better to accompany that sexy Tex-mex food with its various dollopings (sour ‘cream’ anyone?) churned out not in dusty southern Texas but a vast manufacturing plant near Wigan.

By my thirties, pregnancy saved me from bad, cheap booze. But those years of early motherhood coincided with the heyday of the addled mothers’ stampede to the Co op at 9.55 pm. Suddenly, everyone was at it. Drinking wine, that is. Without anyone noticing, we’d ditched the bottled beers and we’d no more drink Creamola Foam than anything with blackcurrant in it.

My forties? Same story really. How else was a parent suppose to scramble through school parents’ evenings and be expected to knock up Halloween costumes with not a smidgeon of dressmaking expertise?

Then along came my fifties - and everything changed and now something is making me hot in the night.

It’s the bedroom, I reckon. It’s too stuffy. It’s Jimmy’s fault for insisting it’s too cold to have the window open and for breathing hot air on me.

It’s my hormones. Climate change. My body’s on fire, and not in a good way!

Or maybe it’s my pyjamas? They’re meant to be cotton but I reckon some artificial fibres have snuck in (what d’you expect when you order such items on Amazon?). I switch to nighties made from the lightest of natural fabrics and still I sweat like a horse.

Is my hair making me hot? Should I get it cut?

I get up and check that the radiator isn’t on. It is freezing.

Okay, I need to know what’s going on so, aware that scientific experiments must be conducted in strict, controlled conditions, I take it very seriously.

Basically, I stop drinking wine for a bit. Instead, I drink mint tea in the evenings.

The night sweats stop instantly.

I am absolutely gutted.

It’s not our bedroom or Jimmy or climate change.

It’s bloody wine!!!!!!!

On the positive side I’m proud that my experiment has yielded such clear cut results. But, you know, I think I’ll get a second opinion.

Love,

Fiona xx

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NEWSY STUFF!

Keen to kick start writing your novel? I’m hosting a one day fiction writing workshop at Studio Pavilion, House for an Art Lover in Glasgow on Sunday October 15. It’ll be fun and informal and is for all levels including absolute beginners - and it’s just £20 for the full day! 20 places only. You can grab a place here!

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And you can buy my latest novel here!

xxx