For Sandra Parker, going for after-work drinks was practically part of her job. Working in investment banking in London, the culture was “work hard, play hard”. After qualifying as a chartered accountant in Scotland, Parker moved to the capital in her mid-twenties and worked in finance at Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and BP.
“The markets move quickly, and you’re expected to be on top of it, and it’s high pressure, lots of deadlines and high stakes,” she says. “At the end of the day, we’d pile out of the door to the pub – that was how we connected with each other. People were earning a lot of money, but there was a lot of stress. It was very much, ‘We can’t wait to go for a drink tonight.’ I’d come out from work, my mind buzzing, and having a drink felt like the perfect way to quieten all that down and begin to switch off.”
But it was rarely just one, or even three, drinks. At times, Parker was drinking the equivalent of two bottles of wine in an evening. “I’d wake up and wouldn’t have been able to tell you how much I’d had to drink,” she says, “and there’d be parts of the night I couldn’t remember. I’d never go out planning to get drunk, yet so much of the time I’d wake up the next morning and be like, ‘Have I got my phone? How did I get home? How drunk was everyone else? What did I say?'”
