Rule Two: No Sulphites

Paging Dr Liz

Over the last decade, in tandem with feeling really tired and gaining 12 kilos of unwanted weight, I've almost completely lost the ability to drink alcohol.

Up until I was forty, I drank roughly 50 units a week, and I'd have considered a gallon of beer a start on a good evening, to be followed by late night whisky and wine with friends.

This never seemed to do me any harm, apart from the odd mild hangover, in fact my best ergo scores (a rower's power measurement) were usually done after a skinful. Alcohol is a fuel, after all.

But around the age of forty, at roughly the same time as all the tiredness started, my hangovers started to get much worse. I started drinking less, I started drinking low-alcohol beer, it just got worse and worse. I started to dislike the taste of beer, which is usually a good sign that it's harming you.

The low point came when visiting a friend last summer. We went out drinking and I had seven pints of alcohol free Ghost Ship beer, and then we went to his house and I had a single glass of red wine.

I wobbled back home, feeling really drunk. And I then had the worst hangover of my entire life, raging headache and vomiting. For the next three days I felt terrible. In terms of alcohol I'd had less than the first time I ever tried it, at around the age of 13, which as I remember had no ill effects whatsoever.

I wondered if my liver was failing, but I didn’t have any of the other symptoms.

At this point I swore off drinking entirely.

As a middle-aged British man, this immediately lost me most of my friends. It wasn't that they were false friends, it's just that our common interest had always been drinking (and the joyful conversation that comes with it!). Without that shared project we didn't seem to have much in common.

And I replaced all those friends, and all that time, with new hobbies like chess.

In Cambridge there's a pub where people meet up to play chess. I usually drink coffee there (another substance which seems to have no effect on me but which is a powerful drug for most people).

One night they turned the coffee machine off at 9pm, not entirely unreasonably, so I had a lime-and-soda.

And the next morning I had a hangover. Quite a mild one, but unmistakeable.

My sister runs a pub, and next time I saw her I told her that my alcohol intolerance had now got so bad that I could get a hangover from lime and soda.

And she pulled the lime cordial bottle off her shelf, looked at the ingredients, and said:

"What you've got is a sulphite allergy."

I do not have a sulphite allergy. I know what allergic reactions are like and I was not having them.

But I had been wondering if there was something in beer that was hurting me, and I reckon Liz had hit the nail, if not squarely on the head.

So a simple test for this was to eat half a jar of maraschino cherries and see what happened.

What happened was two days of headache and nausea.

One should look into the dark, so test two was to drink a couple of vodkas (with some iced water on the side, actually quite nice). A familiar pleasant merriment ensued, and there was no hangover whatsoever.

Test three was to drink alcohol-free beer with a bit of hydrogen peroxide in it. I had seven, and slightly overdid it with the peroxide, and got a feeling I can only describe as "I've just drunk hydrogen peroxide". The next day I had the tiniest possible hangover, a sort of quantum hangover, which makes me think that enough hydrogen peroxide to make the beer taste peroxidy is not quite enough to neutralize all the sulphites.

Still, I'm convinced.

Medical "science", it seems, has investigated the question of 'Sulphite Intolerance' (Sulphite Allergy is well known, but very rare). Because the internet is literally black with people complaining that wine gives them terrible headaches.

And in their usual, cocksucking arrogant idiot way, they've decided that it doesn't exist and all these stupid people are making it up.

I am also an arrogant idiot, so:

Rule Two: No Sulphites.