It all adds up...

I didn't drink for 12 years...and then I turned 13. It was a slogan on a T-shirt that made both me and my Dad chuckle. Maybe it would be funnier if it wasn't so true.

Being a teenager in the 1990s was to be immersed in a time when drinking was de riguer: lad(ette) culture, football, clubland and Cool Britannia. Booze was cheap and plentiful. The alcopop and £1 pint meant you go on a weekend sesh funded by Saturday job wages. Binge drinking was an accepted rites of passage and getting served was relatively easy. By 15, I went to the pub at least once a week. A switch of local was needed when the landlord of my regular for about six months saw me in Our Price whilst I was dressed in my school uniform (I still had the audacity to return the next Friday to be turned away with a You know why).

By 17, I was clubbing every Friday or Saturday night without fail. By 18, I smoked nearly 20 a day, drank red wine and held my own on boozy lunches whilst working in the city.

Now being in my forties, I am slightly horrified by the thought of my younger self pretending to be an adult. But I doubt my early alcohol trajectory is unusual for someone of my age.

Let's do the maths - and I'm being conservative in my estimates - as well as omitting Christmas, birthdays and holidays.

One session drinking five pints or glasses of wine twice a week = 30 units

• 1 year = 1,560 units

• 10 years = 15,600 units

• 20 years = 31,200 units

I'm also excluding the exponential increase between the ages of 29 - 31 when I drank every day - let's call this 500 bottles of wine and 1000 cans of lager to be on the safe side.

You can see where I'm going with this. The damaging effect of all that alcohol aside, what about the multiplication of all those mornings after? One day a week on the lash over the span of a decade means that you spend nearly one and a half years hungover, which for me was mainly languishing on the sofa with a takeaway. I won't even try to fathom the amount of money spent or calories consumed either. However, I don't see the wasted years as a waste. It was a blast until it wasn't - and maybe I held on a bit too long - but I wouldn't be where I am today without if it wasn't for those days.