How I drank all day like a Boomer (and what it really did to my body)

One of the results of the survey was that people 85-plus who drank two glasses a day were less likely to have dementia, or cognitive impairment than people who didn’t drink. But when you analyse the group they were relatively well off, with good nutrition, quite keen on health, so basically there were lots of other factors. But it was significant that this group did well. And so presumably, Nigel Lawson was in this group where drinking steadily, not excessively, enables you to function well.”

But before I celebrate too much, he hits me with the bad news. “Alcohol is a poison. And one of the many functions of the liver is to detoxify poison. So if you take too much of it for too long, then obviously the liver can’t cope and ends up failing, or scarring, or you get fatty liver. The other big danger is that it seems to encourage irregularity of the heart. But of course, alcohol and its relationship with an individual is very individual.”

As a rule of thumb, he explains, most people will metabolise about one unit an hour of alcohol, bearing in mind that these days a medium glass of wine contains two units. And a large bottle of wine (nine units) will take 10 hours to get rid of. So it’s probably better to be a slow and steady drinker than bingeing once a week, although experts say giving your liver a total break from alcohol from time to time is also a good idea.

Perma drinkers never get hangovers, of course. Unless something has gone very wrong. But Dr Akhil Anand, an addiction psychiatrist with the Cleveland Clinic, admits he is alert to red flags. Why would a man like Lord Lawson need to drink so much? “Drinking in the morning is always a red flag. Looking forward to those drinks could be craves. People who drink every day may not look tipsy because their bodies have become tolerant of their alcohol content. But even one drink can be a lot for older people. Your liver and kidneys slow down, you have different blood plasma levels.”