Surely if there's one time when we really deserve a drink or two at the end of the day, it's a global pandemic? After all, we can't see our friends, go to the pub or out for dinner. How else can we celebrate getting to the end of a difficult day of Zoom meetings and home schooling? So long as it doesn't become a problem... But how do you know if it's a problem or not? I, like many people, used to think the answer to that question was black and white. The world, we are told, is divided into 'normal drinkers' and 'alcoholics.' Alcoholics, I assumed, were people who poured vodka onto th ..read more

Like millions of people around the globe, I feel like I'm living in an unfamiliar, and unwelcome, parallel universe.  The TV I watch, books I read and vivid dreams I have show people hugging, kissing, travelling, partying and working in offices. My diary is filled with festivals, concerts and theatre trips, parties and a few holidays - events that will never happen.  Instead, we are all living in a world of isolation and fear. Even if we are lucky enough to be healthy, we worry for our friends and family, for our livelihoods, for the world. At a time like this, it's easy to thi ..read more

Welcome to Mummy was a Secret Drinker. If you've found this page because you're looking for help quitting drinking then WELCOME! All the information and support you need is in this blog. There are hundreds of posts, all free to read and share.  Click here for a good place to start! You can also find daily advice and inspiration on the SoberMummy Facebook page. If you're looking for more information about me and what I've been up to recently, plus my recent blog posts, you can find me at www.clarepooley.com I can't believe it's nearly five years since I started writing this blog ..read more

Did your family give you a present on Mother’s Day this year? Breakfast in bed maybe? Flowers? A home-made card? In the days BS (Before Sober), my three children always knew what to give me as a present, because they knew what Mummy’s favourite hobby was: drinking wine.  So, they’d buy me a corkscrew. A bottle stopper (ironic, since there was never anything left in a bottle of wine once I’d opened it). A giant wine glass with ‘Mummy’s glass’ etched onto it. You get the picture.               Thi ..read more

I'm really not exaggerating when I say that blogging saved my life. I'd tried to quit drinking many times before, and I'd kept it up for a week or two, sometimes whole months, but eventually I'd end up back where I started. Usually worse than where I'd started. I'm often asked what made the difference this time, and the answer is simple: blogging. Here's why: Community In Johann Hari's amazing TED talk titled 'Everything you thought you knew about addiction is wrong' he says that the opposite of addiction is connection. It's finding a group of people who understand what you're going thro ..read more

I've been asked to speak at The Rising Festival in Cambridge, in celebration of International Women's Day. Here is the transcript of my speech. I do hope you enjoy it. Three things I learned from the worst year of my life. My name is Clare Pooley, and I’m going to tell you the story of the worst year of my life. I realise that doesn’t sound particularly uplifting. Bear with me. The worst year of my life was 2015. I was totally stuck in a rut. I was depressed, a terrible insomniac, two stone overweight, anxious all the time, and self-medicating with a bottle of wine a day.  In March ..read more

My name's Clare, and I'm a sugaraholic. When I was drinking (a lot), I wasn't that interested in sugar. I felt quite smug about my lack of sweet tooth. I could inhale a packet of crisps (that's chips for my American friends) from twenty paces, but chocolate? I could take or leave it. Then, I quit drinking, and hot chocolate and cake became my lifeline. I have to confess, that over the last few years, that craving for sugar hasn't really diminished. In fact, it's got worse. In our house, we have cupcake Friday. I don't actually bake the suckers. I'm really not that kind of mother, sadly. Bu ..read more

It's been three years since I finished my treatment for breast cancer, and yesterday I had a meeting with my oncologist to discuss my latest blood tests. I have, he told me, 'a perfect set of bloods.' I don't have a perfect set of boobs any longer, obviously, but you can't have everything. This, my friends, means that I am, as far as we can tell, still cancer free. I swore, when I was first diagnosed, that if I was lucky enough to survive this, I would never, ever become one of those irritating people who said that cancer was the best thing that happened to them. I still stand by that. C ..read more

I used to hate January. It's cold and dark. The bathroom scales are the harbingers of doom and you dare not even peek at your bank balance. It's miserable. But now, it's one of my favourite months of the year. Because if you don't drink, you feel like a bit of an outlier for most months of the year, but not, my friends, in January. Right now, we sober people are surfing the zeitgeist and feeling positively fashionable. I was even in the Sunday Times Style Magazine last weekend. Whoop whoop. Another New Year bonus is that I get thousands of new visitors to this blog, and if you are one of ..read more

I can't quite believe that it's exactly a year since The Sober Diaries was published. I wrote this book because I remembered how alone I felt when I was struggling with my drinking. I thought that, in a world where everyone drank, and where my social media feed was filled with wine memes, I was the only person who couldn't handle it. Somewhere along the line, I'd gone from being someone who controlled her booze, to someone who was being controlled by it. I read a huge number of books, looking for someone just like me. Most of the - often brilliant - memoirs I read focussed on the horrors ..read more