Liquid Asset

This fact will blow your mind, I know it did mine. The average drinker will spend roughly £100,000 on alcohol in their lifetime. Let me just repeat that as it is a bit of an eye opener. ‘The average drinker will spend one hundred thousand pounds on alcohol in their lifetime .’ That’s a lot of money. Sometimes in my private consultations drinkers will say to me that they are not worried about the money, but why aren’t we worried? Drug addicts of any kind constantly delude themselves. We can even fool ourselves into thinking that we have saved money on alcohol. For example, when you buy duty-free alcohol, you always think, ‘What a result, I’ve saved thirty quid.’ We are always talking about a saving and never an expense. How on earth have you saved money when you have just spent £30? It is still £30 more than a non-drinker spends. This is only an average figure; for some it will be a lot more.

I used to get through sixteen pints of lager a day at one stage; I was actually spending more on alcohol per day than I was being paid to work at the time. I would always wake up broke on a Monday morning. I would then have to sub some of my wages to pay for the next fix of my drug. I never saw it this way at the time; I was just a young lad who liked a beer and what was wrong with that? My wages at the end of the week were always pretty thin, as I had already drunk most of them the

week before but when the weekend arrived it was always time to let my hair down and have a drink.

The situation changed slightly when I got a more professional job. I had more responsibilities so I had no choice but to control my intake. I was never really in control but felt as though I was. I wasn’t spending more than my wages on alcohol any more (a major achievement ) and was now a ‘normal’ drinker. I was spending as ‘little’ as everybody else. However, I never realised just how much drinkers have to pay in real terms to get their drug.

There is the direct financial cost that I mentioned, of course, but what about all the additional expense nobody ever thinks about that accompanies a dependency on alcohol? First there are the taxi fares. One of the biggest joys of being free is being able to drive my car whenever I choose; to go anywhere without having to worry about how or when I will arrive home. I used to pay good money every month for my car, yet during my leisure time I couldn’t drive it because I was hooked on alcohol. I think back now on all those cold nights standing outside pubs and clubs drunkenly waiting for a cab. It would cost me a fortune to get home and the crazy thing was that I was paying for a car to sit my house. What about the times too when a cab driver refuses to take you home because you might be sick in his car and leaves you stranded? The average drinker will spend roughly £18,000, yes, eighteen thousand pounds, on taxis in their lifetime as a direct result of drinking.

Even before you get into the taxi, you may have the additional expense of buying food, or stuff that they tell you is food. As we all know, alcohol came first and kebabs second. The only reason that I would seek out a curry or kebab house with a restaurant at the back was simply to obtain more alcohol after hours. Again, the food is an additional expense. Next, you have the expense of losing money in your drunken state, possibly down the back of the seat in the taxi. You wake up in the morning with your head pounding away as blood is trying to pump through your dehydrated brain so you have to buy some more drugs to counter the effect of the drug alcohol; yet more expense. In addition, occasionally there is the cost of the flowers and cards to apologise for behaving like a complete idiot. Then you have the major expense of losing time at work. In the UK there are now eight to fourteen million working days lost each year as a direct result of alcohol. For some, there are repair bills either to their home where they have punched holes in doors and smashed things in the house or for damage to other’s property. For some, it’s the cost of losing their licence, not to mention the possibility of prison, or the fines for being drunk and disorderly. Many others suffer the huge financial cost of losing their jobs due to alcohol. The reality is that the financial cost seen in black and white is quite phenomenal.

I never really thought about the money because alcohol was my liquid asset and worth every penny, or so I thought. However, it was never an asset. Far from it, in fact. I was paying good money to be mentally and

physically abused by a product that, in real terms, did absolutely nothing for me. It was all just a clever confidence trick. Just because millions of people are paying through the nose for something they believe to be genuinely beneficial, doesn’t mean it is. Some 99 per cent of the population once believed the world was flat – were they wrong? Were they lying to other people by telling them that the world was flat? The answer is no. The world does appear to be flat. Even when you are flying around it your perception is still that you are flying in a straight line, isn’t it? I have never been into space to check for myself that the earth is round but we now know for certain that it, is but doesn’t this go completely against our own perception? In order to see the truth we have to move our minds beyond the appearance of something. Once almost everyone thought the earth was flat, except for one or two people. Christopher Columbus announced he was going to sail around the world and everybody thought he was insane. How can you possibly sail around something that is flat? Could he not see for himself the line in the distance that was the edge of the earth? Everybody else could easily see it, why couldn’t he? People like Columbus and Galileo moved beyond the accepted thinking and opened their minds. As a result they got to explore and literally expand their horizons. They viewed things from a different perspective. The flat earth was just an illusion.

This book is all about changing your perceptions so you can see the truth. Alcohol does absolutely nothing for you at all. It only appears to give courage, happiness,

confidence, relaxation and stress relief. But it’s all an illusion. Those who open their minds and see it clearly can really explore who they are and expand their horizons . Columbus experienced a life that many were too frightened to pursue as they were afraid of falling off the edge. The only thing stopping those people was their false perception.

Even our government tells us that alcohol is good for us. Why do they keep perpetuating this blatant lie? Maybe it is because they are one of the biggest drug dealers in this country, if not the biggest! They are always talking about waging war on the drug pushers, yet not only do they allow alcohol to be advertised but they make a £8.5 billion profit (HMRC 2009) every year from a drug which is known to kill 9,000 people each year in the UK alone. I once watched a documentary which stated that half a million pounds is spent on alcohol each Saturday night in Newcastle alone. That really is something else!

As I’ve already mentioned, there are some people who are so brainwashed that they will spend hundreds or sometimes thousands of pounds on a bottle of wine. What plonkers (pun intended)! Sometimes I would justify the amount I spent on drink because I believed the biggest lie of all about alcohol which is that …