Modern mothers' RUIN: Women reveal their VERY embarrassing gin stories > 자유게시판

• 목록
• 답변
• 글쓰기
• 게시판 리스트 옵션
  • 수정
  • 삭제

Whenever Lucy Griffiths thinks about gin, VeeloBooster recension her cheeks redden and her toes curl with embarrassment as she recalls one office Christmas party she would far rather forget.

It ended with her slumped on a ballroom chair beside the dancefloor in such a deep, drunken stupor that mischievous colleagues were able to put a long, knotted red wig on her head, smear lipstick around her mouth and surround her with huge pot plants, so that when she eventually woke she actually thought she was alone in a jungle.

Too inebriated to make sense of what was happening on the night — and, luckily for her, accompanied home by a flatmate — it was the following morning, when her boss sent a photograph to Lucy's phone, capturing the scene, before she realised she had been the drunken butt of her colleagues' japes.

‘Thankfully, my boss was amused rather than angry, but I was utterly mortified that I'd made such a complete show of myself — and he felt bad enough for me that he deleted it,' says Lucy, 42, a media trainer.





Lucy Griffiths, from London, got so drunk on gin at a works Christmas party that she fell asleep on a chair and was photographed by her colleagues

‘I blame it on the gin. I drank heaven knows how many on a near empty stomach. There was no proper food, only nibbles.

‘As I discovered to my cost, while one G&T may be fine as an aperitif, it is an incredibly potent drink which goes down way too easily, because it tastes so refreshing.

‘I was so horrifically hungover the following day that I had to cancel a visit to see friends in Nottingham because I just couldn't face the journey.

‘I never touch gin now. The mere mention of it makes me shudder with embarrassment.'

Lucy, who lives in North London with husband Tim, 49, a banker, is far from the only woman falling prey to the potency of gin, not least because it is being pushed specifically at women in multiple sophisticated marketing campaigns.

There are pink gins, gin in beautiful artisan bottles and those flavoured with honey, rhubarb, mangoes and strawberries. When mixed into a cocktail with tonic water or lemonade, some hardly taste alcoholic at all, making their hidden strength lethal.

This week, it was revealed that UK gin sales have soared by an astonishing 254 per cent over the past decade. The spirit was officially named Britain's favourite last year when a record 47 million bottles were sold, an increase of seven million on 2016.

Sales rocketed in value from £630 million in 2011 to £1.2 billion last year, according to the Wine and Spirit Trade Association.

To keep up with demand, the number of UK gin distilleries has more than doubled, from 152 in 2013 to 315 today. And, it seems, even when we're not drinking the stuff we're thinking about it, with a surge in gin-related products ranging from candles, lip balm, fudge, T-shirts, exfoliating scrubs and bath oils.

And there is no end of Christmas-related gin gifts on sale this year. From gin and tonic stockings to advent calendars and even cards where traditional festive slogans are given a twist, such as ‘Gin-gle bells', ‘Merry Gin-mas!' and ‘Oh, Come let us adore Gin.'




The now-sophisticated tipple used to be known as Mother's Ruin in the 18th Century

The drink with a base of juniper berries has come a very long way since the 1700s when it was considered the bane of English society and given the damning soubriquet ‘Mother's Ruin', due to its popularity with impoverished women desperate to escape the harsh reality of their lives.

But as manufacturers go all out to appeal to the female market, alcohol awareness campaigners warn that there is one crucial difference between wine and the juniper berry. While fizzy wine typically contains around 11 per cent alcohol, gin is a far more potent 40 per cent-plus.

This is particularly worrying given that two-thirds of the alcohol consumed in Britain is now drunk at home where there are no optics or pub measures to limit intake.

‘A unit of spirits is 25ml and even a single pub measure tends to be 35ml, the equivalent of 1.4 units,' says Katherine Brown, chief executive of the Institute of Alcohol Studies. ‘However, when people are free pouring at home they are unlikely to stick to measurements and can therefore easily exceed the recommended intake without realising.

‘Few understand the link between alcohol and cancer, especially breast cancer in women, so we would like to see companies make that association clear on bottles, as they do on cigarette packets.

‘The weekly low-risk drinking guidelines were revised in 2016 and if people want to keep their health risks low, they should try not to regularly drink more than 14 units a week.'

Given that a 750ml bottle of wine contains around ten units while a one litre bottle of gin is made up of 40 units, the risk of overdoing it is undoubtedly greater.

And while Katherine Brown recognises that manufacturers have women firmly in their sights, advertising their colourful, sweet gins in glossy magazines and during ad breaks around ‘female-friendly programmes', she warns that this is also the group most at risk.

‘Women can tolerate lower levels of alcohol because we have less water and more fat than men, so it is more highly concentrated in our bloodstreams,' she says.

‘We also have slightly smaller livers to detoxify the alcohol, so get drunker quicker.'

Lucy Griffiths is all too toe-curlingly aware of this fact, having drastically cut down on her alcohol intake following what she calls her ‘shameful drunkeness' at that fateful office party seven years ago.

Indeed, since becoming a mum to son Ben three years ago she is almost teetotal.

Laura Downing, 32, is also unlikely to ever forget the night she fell foul of gin's potency, as she still bears the scars.