One for the Road: The Quit Drinking Podcast

On this weeks episode of One For The Road I am joined by Sarah Chamberlain who is the founder of UnashamED, an organisation dedicated to tackling shame across education, personal development, and sober living. A former teacher, coach, and consultant, Sarah brings deep expertise in psychology and education to her mission of creating spaces where people feel seen, supported, and unashamed. While Una...

Dave is 18 months sober after nearly 40 years of social drinking, including a university run that hit 100 pints in a week. In this recovery story, the Showaddywaddy saxophonist walks through how he quit drinking — from his first pint with his dad at 15, to the solo holiday in Fuerteventura where he decided he didn't want to be that version of himself anymore. Dave opens up about the drinking cultu...

Sophie Hutton-Mills was 20, on a train platform with her dad, when he had a heart attack and died in front of her. She couldn't say the sentence out loud for four years. So she did what she'd learned to do at home: she put it in a box, put a blanket of alcohol over the top, and got on with pretending. Twenty-something years later she was a mum of two small girls, hiding bottles of wine in the cupb...

Olivia Taylor is two years sober after a decade of alcohol addiction that started with morning drinking at 18 and ended with a litre of vodka a day, crack cocaine binges, and six months lying in the bed she's now recording this sobriety story from. In this recovery story, she walks through how she got sober, how many times rehab didn't work, and the phone call that finally did. Olivia's earliest m...

Gary Mez was 14 the first time he drank a can of beer. By 19 he was drinking Foster's at half eight in the morning at university. By 33 he was alone in Granada, Spain, with a broken flip flop, no money on his phone, and not a single friend left who would return his call. That was the morning everything cracked open. Now eleven years sober, Gary tells Sober Dave the full story. The idyllic Cheshire...

Julie Ravitsky was 21, sitting cross-legged on her parents' dining room floor at 10am, drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes. Within hours she was in a psychiatric hospital being restrained and sedated. She would end up there twice before her 22nd birthday. The doctors called it drug-induced psychosis. Nobody asked what was actually happening in her life. Nobody asked about the London trading floo...

A nurse found Oliver Mason in a hospital bed eating Gillette shaving foam. He'd read the label. He knew there was ethanol in it. The staff had taken his vodka away and his body was screaming for the drug. That was the bottom. Before that came the panic attack on the Jubilee Line, sweating vodka through his pores, ducking into a corner shop phone booth to neck a bottle of Glen's. Before that came t...

In this episode, Sober Dave sits down with model, TV personality, and author Millie Macintosh to talk about her raw and honest journey from her first drink at 12 years old to getting alcohol free on August 25, 2022. Millie opens up about how bullying and unresolved trauma in her teens led to years of drinking to blackout, the shame spiral that came with it, and how her time on Made in Chelsea only...

Alison Calder is three years sober after a 15 year back and forth trying to moderate drinking that no other career made harder — she was a trained sommelier who went on to run her own wine company. In this recovery story, she walks through how she finally quit drinking after years of stopping and starting, champagne at breakfast for work, and daily wine drinking at home with two young children ups...

Lee Anderson grew up inside pubs. His mum was a barmaid who ran her own pubs, and by the time he was eight or nine he was already pouring himself spirits from the cabinet the way he'd seen adults do it. By 14 he was drinking on the bus to steady his nerves. By his twenties he was the life and soul, and nobody ever questioned it. What nobody could see was everything underneath: the responsibility o...

Abigail Burrows had her first sip of champagne at nine years old, at a concert at the Dorchester. She topped up her own glass when the teacher's back was turned. She has never, in her own words, been a healthy drinker. By 19 she was drinking herself into psychosis at the Royal College of Music and dropped out. By her mid-twenties she'd hit a rock bottom serious enough to make her stop. She didn't...

Beauty editor Donna Francis spent 30 years drinking white wine through her career, motherhood and perimenopause before quitting drinking last July. In this episode of One for the Road, she tells Sober Dave the story most mum-wine-culture women never say out loud. Donna grew up in an Islington family where pub culture was love, where pouring someone a drink was how you showed up. She married young,...

Christmas mornings used to start with a Bucks Fizz at 10am and a turkey carved with a few fingers missing from the bird. Not anymore. In this bonus Christmas special, Sober Dave is joined by William Porter, author of Alcohol Explained, for a proper survival guide to the festive season without booze. They cover how to handle Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, how to say no to a drink without over-exp...

Will Gordon was a teacher. He had a wife, a family that loved him, a job he was good at when he showed up. He also drank a 750ml bottle of vodka most days, hid it from his wife in water bottles around the apartment, and parked on a side street in the mornings pretending to drive Uber so he could drink alone in his car. By 36 his skin was yellow, his stomach was full of seven litres of fluid, and a...

Jo Preston Hart's dad was an alcoholic who died falling down the stairs drunk when she was 18. For years she told herself she was nothing like him. He drank every day, she thought. She only drank at weekends. Three months into sobriety, her mum sat her down and told her the truth: he didn't drink every day either. He was the life and soul of the party, just like her. He got violent, just like she...

She started drinking at 14 with peach schnapps and orange juice. At 51, her liver enzymes were 322. In between, Melissa McGovern was a Wisconsin theater kid turned New York actress turned mom of two, deep in mommy wine culture, grey area drinking her way through a pandemic and the death of her best friend T. Scott from alcohol-related liver failure. In this episode, Melissa tells Sober Dave the fu...

Todd Kinney is an attorney in Omaha, a husband, a dad of four. From the outside, his drinking was completely normal. The right job. The right house. Weekend drinking only. No mornings, no shakes, no real consequences anyone could point at. Inside it was a different story. He drank faster than everyone else. He had no off switch. He was hiding empty beer cans in different trash cans so his wife wou...

Phil Briggs was 54 years old, drinking three bottles of wine and two double gins a night, mostly alone, mostly in front of the television. He called it the party for one. His friends never saw the worst of it because by the time he got home from the pub he'd already mastered the art of looking normal in public. Then he'd open the second bottle. And the third. In the last week before he quit, he dr...

Carrie Anne Stephens was 19 when her mum died of alcohol addiction. Her mum was just 47. The earliest memory Carrie Anne can recall from childhood is hiding under a coat, aged four, while chaos played out at home. Outwardly, the family was well-kept. The house was perfect. The kids were always turned out properly. Inside, it was something else. In this episode, Carrie Anne tells Sober Dave the ful...

Anna Donahay spent 15 years in Soho ad agencies, falling in and out of bars from 6pm to 9pm every night, then stopping at Tesco's for a bottle of wine on the way home. She was the woman building campaigns that sold alcohol to women just like her. Then her youngest daughter looked across the kitchen during a family game and said, "Daddy, why is Mummy behaving so funny?" Coming up to four years sobe...

Kate Bailey was sweating alcohol on a bus, too shaky to take the tube home. She'd just spent her sister-in-law's 40th dancing drunk in a garden until 3 a.m. By morning, she felt like a ghost. That was her last day one. Eight years later, Kate is one of the leading voices in British sobriety. Co-founder of Love Sober, podcaster, author, and coach for midlife women rebuilding their lives without alc...

At 15 years old, Simon Maguire lost his mom and alcohol became how he coped. What started as relief slowly turned into years of drinking, weight gain, and hiding how bad things had become. By 38, everything was catching up and something had to change. Story-Based Episode Summary Simon’s story begins with loss. After his mother passed away, alcohol quickly became more than something social. It beca...

Lauren White had her first drink at 11. By 18, she was modelling for Abercrombie at a size zero, drinking, using MDMA and cocaine, throwing up after every meal, and hiding all of it behind makeup, university, and a "perfect" Hertfordshire upbringing. She walked into Charter House rehab in a belly top, ego intact, certain she didn't really belong there. Four months later, she walked out a different...

Dr. Brooke Scheller spent years collecting nutrition degrees, a bachelor's, a master's, and a doctorate, while privately drinking herself into anxiety, depression, and the kind of double life only a high-functioning health expert can pull off. The wellness conferences ended in bars. The shame ran underneath everything. Then in June 2021, she stopped. She's now coming up on 1,000 days sober. Brooke...

Barbara had two to three bottles of wine most nights by the end. Not in pubs, not at parties — at home, on the sofa, and then on a dark walk around the corner to the shop in her coat and flip-flops to buy another bottle before it closed. She wouldn't remember doing it in the morning. She grew up in Cambridge in a Jamaican family of five sisters, had her daughter at 17, and barely drank through her...