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'You have to call them before four o'clock otherwise they're trash'

Yes, I'm still fine! Haven't had a drop since January and secretly I'm thinking about adding it for the rest of the year if I've achieved my personal challenge (first hundred days 2023 not a drop). As I wrote in my first blog, I have had cancer twice and luckily recovered from it. My health is therefore a big stick behind the door, because we all know that alcohol can cause cancer.

Now I belong to the group of pensioners and in several articles I have read that this category of people is a risk group. They grew up in a period, as I described in my first blog, when alcohol flowed freely in many situations. Alcohol is so established in this group that you have to come from a good background to 'take' this from them.

After years of buffalo and counting down the years, you are finally free to do whatever you want. You have the opportunity to have a good drink on weekdays, because the work no longer waits for you the next day. That stick behind the door, to get up the next day without a hangover, has completely fallen away. Many people long for their retirement, but without having thought about how they will actually fill in this 'third phase'. If you haven't thought of that in advance, there is a chance to fall into an indefinable black hole. People have built up a professional identity during their working lives and suddenly you are 'nothing' anymore. Moreover, it can also take some getting used to when men/women are home together all day again. Arguments, boredom, feelings of dissatisfaction and uselessness can arise after the first weeks of euphoria. Reason enough to fill the days with anesthesia or to join the other winter pensioners in the sunny south where the 'happy hours' last all afternoon and evening. My poor mother had also once joined a group of pensioners in sunny Spain. At 12 o'clock in the afternoon they met on a terrace where they started with coffee and a cognac. Then the group moved forward with walkers to a restaurant where they ate with the necessary wine. From 4 pm there was 'happy hour' in a bar next to the restaurant: two drinks for the price of one. At one point my mother was sitting with five bubbles of wine in front of her when I called her. There was no way to sail with her and she was barely understandable. When I complained about this to my friend, whose parents were also somewhere in the south, she said, "You have to call pensioners before four o'clock or they'll be a mess."