Like water into wine

I've hit a new low. Or possibly hit on an ingenious new diet tip. TKF and I have taken to drinking water from wine glasses with our dinner. Much like those people who use the plastic replacement cigarettes from Nicroette, we are treating our penchant for wine at night as a psychological issue – that it's habitual rather than a real desire. And yes, just like those people sucking back on plastic toy cigarettes, we look completely ridiculous.

I'm blaming TKF. Her sister-in-law back home in the Kiwi motherland lost 12kg in some miracle amount of time this way. She cut out the booze, tricked herself into thinking she was relaxing with a glass of vino, continued to eat pineapple lumps and other NZ delicacies and the weight just melted off.

Neither TFK or I want to lose weight, we're just in the grip of ' two alcohol-free days a week guilt'. That is, we tend not to have them. (The other reason we've stopped drinking is neither of us is prepared to take off our chic home ensemble of house cardie, house trousers and le Ugh boots to go out and buy a damn bottle). There's no shame in the fact that I like to enjoy a glass of wine with my dinner, it's the best way to enjoy wine. The issue for me has been not being able to enjoy dinner without the wine. Le sigh.

So we sit up at the table of an evening, the finest in home cuisine prepared by moi served with a perfectly chilled glass of tap water from the Warrangamba Dam region. We make lame teatotal jokes that we could 'be wild and have the whole bottle!', and when we feel like a 'red', we pour it straight from the tap rather than have it chilled from the fridge. As I said, we've hit a new low.

But I've had three alcohol-free days in a row this week (possibly a personal record) but I can't say I feel any better or worse for it. However, this could be because I have a vested interest in this experiment failing miserably given aforementioned interest in wine (yes, I may once have escaped from the Golden Door Health Retreat in a covert operation to go buy wine and cheese). But I have saved myself from un-tolled empty calories and that, my friends, is the point (kind of).