My Basketful of Happiness

This book is about my Dad. It's a true story, his life story, or at least the part of his life that revolved around his relationship with alcohol. That is, to say, almost his entire life revolved around alcohol, until three years ago, in 2018, when he stopped drinking altogether.I'm certainly no expert on the subject of drinking - I can barely hold the stuff myself - but I spent all my life watching my Dad show me just how good he was at drinking. It lead his life to places for which...
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This book is about my Dad. It's a true story, his life story, or at least the part of his life that revolved around his relationship with alcohol. That is, to say, almost his entire life revolved around alcohol, until three years ago, in 2018, when he stopped drinking altogether.I'm certainly no expert on the subject of drinking - I can barely hold the stuff myself - but I spent all my life watching my Dad show me just how good he was at drinking. It lead his life to places for which he is thankful, such as meeting his life partner, making friends and enjoying times he otherwise wouldn't without booze, but it also pushed his life to terrifying limits, limits to which our family were dragged along, also. This book chronicles Andrew Dickin's life from his misspent adolescence, as he gazed upon the locals in the pubs with envy while they enjoyed a drink or two, through to the day of his realisation that alcohol had been the number one source of his hardships. Hardships that increased in severity the older he got, as he began to stare down dangers to his wellbeing. When facing a life without drink, something my Dad and the rest of us never thought he would achieve, he started to see how much higher his quality of life could be without it. Financial stability, weight loss, more energy... The list is endless. Having spent his entire adult existence under the influence, there was no way he could know these things until that element was removed. This is my Dad's book. He couldn't write it himself - he wouldn't know where to start - so we worked on it together. We would discuss the contents of each chapter and then I would sit down and put his story into words. But there was one thing we wanted to make clear from the get-go: THIS IS NOT AN ANTI-DRINKING BOOK. At no point will this book tell you that you shouldn't drink; those books exist and prove beneficial to hundreds and thousands of people worldwide, but what we hope to achieve through this real-life story is to show both sides of the coin; of someone who lived with alcohol in his daily bloodstream before experiencing life without it. It's simply my Dad's story of how alcohol played a part in his life and how the removal of said part changed his life in ways he could never have imagined.