Now, at 38, I am pregnant again and, happily for all involved, completely sober. 

Today, at four months gone – and obviously with a three-year-old in tow, too – I’m successfully dodging the middle-class wine o’clock mum cliche that had me in its grip for years.

But not thanks to willpower. Instead, my drinking problem has completely disappeared because of a chronically under-prescribed pill I took last year.

Yes, I drank during my first pregnancy – a taboo few will admit to. I didn’t consume huge amounts, but enough to prove, in hindsight, that I was a problem drinker.

 I quite liked sushi, too, but that was easy to eschew for nine months. Wine, on the other hand? Much trickier to abstain from. So I’d have just a glass here and there. On special occasions. At social gatherings. While travelling...

When my husband Julius and I landed in the Maldives four years ago for me to review a resort for a newspaper, the manager congratulated me on my pregnancy, which the PR team had informed her about, and earnestly informed me that the restaurant would be ensuring there was no alcohol in any of my dishes, even the sauces. 

Considerate, I thought, but also absurd, as I ordered that glass of champagne to celebrate our arrival. I only drank one, but it was obvious I was being judged for it.

It wasn’t my first pregnancy. It’s possible that I miscarried my previous one because of my drinking. That baby was unplanned and conceived in the early stages of my relationship with my now husband.

I had no idea I was pregnant and I was drinking heavily back then – it was during Covid, I was home alone a lot, where I did most of my wine guzzling, and I was sinking a bottle a night after finishing work.

At the weekend, I’d start in the afternoon and sometimes open a second bottle too. It was a pattern I’d been falling in and out of since my early 20s.

A study published by Vanderbilt University Medical Centre right around the time I lost that baby, about eight weeks into the pregnancy, found an incremental 8 per cent increase in the risk of miscarriage week by week in women who consumed alcohol in those critical early stages. 

I’ll never know, of course, what caused me to miscarry, but I can’t rule my drinking out as a cause and it weighed heavily on me.

As a result, when I was knowingly and joyfully pregnant the following year with my son Jasper, I took no risks in the first trimester and didn’t drink a drop – despite the very real and persistent cravings. 

I found social engagements particularly difficult, as a chronic introvert, and largely avoided them as a result.

Once we’d cleared that initial three-month danger zone, however, I found reasons to partake in a periodic glass of my treasured wine again. 

The first was that flute of champagne in the Maldives. I ignored the side glances, suppressed the guilt and enjoyed it thoroughly, though it was hard not to order another.

After all, with the express clearance of her doctor in the late 1980s, my mother had enjoyed her habit of two glasses of red wine with dinner in the evening, which was then the limit for pregnant women. 

Her GP had told her ‘it was more important to have a relaxed expectant mother than an anxious teetotal one’.

My grandmother, in turn, had been prescribed Guinness for its high iron content when she was pregnant with my mother, as was customary at the time. I seldom take advice from my elders when it’s ‘sensible’, I should point out, but these particular anecdotes suited me and so I ran with them.

I’d seen friends and acquaintances have a glass of wine here and there, too, while pregnant, albeit generally in a hush-hush manner. 

Several celebrities have been busted for doing the same over the years, like Rachel Weisz, who once told fans it was ‘fine’ to partake in a glass of wine after the first trimester. Even the pillar of health herself, Gwyneth Paltrow, was spotted sipping a Guinness while expecting in 2006.

Travelling long-haul was a particular weak spot for me. When I was younger, I had a horrible fear of flying and could only do it half-cut. I made a point of conquering the fear, but not the drinking at high altitude and – until I took my magic pill – very rarely flew sober.

While pregnant, as well as my Maldives jaunt, I went on a vineyard tour in South Africa – yes, I know – and a trip to visit my father in Australia. I drank on the plane every time.

It was especially hard to stay sober in Oz. My father and I have always bonded over copious amounts of wine and whisky, and while I dutifully stayed off the hard liquor during this stay, it was torturous to nurse that piddly single glass of merlot.

Incidentally, I doubt he’d have flinched if I’d consumed more alcohol than I did, on account of his very British roots. 

According to the National Library of Medicine, the UK has one of the highest rates of drinking during pregnancy, with between 41 and 75 per cent of women thought to consume at least some alcohol while pregnant.

I’ve lived both in England and the US and have definitely noticed the difference – in America even a sip of wine would be seriously frowned upon, but in my circles at home, not so much.

No one I knew so much as batted an eyelid, except my German husband, a very restrained drinker who raised concerns that I shrugged off.

Today, the NHS states that there is no ‘safe’ amount of alcohol while pregnant and it should thus be avoided altogether. This brings it in line with most other governmental health bodies in the Western world, but it’s a recent change for Britons.

Only in 2016 did the UK chief medical officer revise its existing advice (until then, up to two units twice a week was the limit), and it’s a hard rule that has yet to be widely embraced here.

On one side of the debate, an oft-quoted study from Denmark published in the 2012 BJOG International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, found that up to eight drinks per week had no effect on the intelligence, behaviour and attention scores in children. 

And anecdotally, until very recently, moderate alcohol consumption during pregnancy has been the norm, and most of us have turned out relatively normal.

However, according to biologist and author Rebecca Fett, who has extensively analysed all the latest data and whose book It Starts With The Egg I credit with helping me conceive my second baby, mums-to-be should avoid any alcohol consumption at all. Even one drink per week, she notes, has been associated with behavioural problems in later childhood.

My son, Jasper, was born healthy and has since hit all his milestones. And then, not long into motherhood, thank goodness, I found a drug – naltrexone – that brought my drinking problem under control for good.

I knew deep down, given my past, that while I had largely got away with the excessive amounts of alcohol I had knocked back throughout most of my adult life, I didn’t want to keep flirting with disaster now I was responsible for another human.

Somewhat dangerously, pre-Jasper, I had always been very convincing at cosplaying a relatively sober person, even when blackout drunk. I didn’t slur my words or wobble. I did most of my drinking alone. 

Yet it was clear my tolerance was creeping ever upwards and I was beginning to depend on it, such that the ‘itch’ to pop open the cork started around 4pm each day like clockwork.

I’m proud to report that I didn’t fall back into that pattern after Jasper was born – but I fantasised about it often and it would only have been a matter of time, I’m sure. On the few occasions in the first few years of Jasper’s life when I wasn’t in charge of him – two solo work trips, for example – I guzzled wine with reckless abandon as soon as I was able to.

And so when I came across an article on naltrexone, the little-known medication that would change my life, I knew I had to try it. This pill has a lot in common with Ozempic-type drugs in that it erases cravings and cures overconsumption to a staggering extent in a very short timeframe. In a nutshell, it stops alcohol from being moreish.

When it’s taken according to the Sinclair Method – developed in the late 1980s by Dr John David Sinclair, an addiction specialist at the Finnish Foundation for Alcohol Studies – an hour before drinking, the drug inhibits the dopamine produced by alcohol and kills off the reward loop that urges us to drink it.

In the simplest terms, it switches off the part of your brain that usually associates alcohol with that flood of warm euphoria that keeps you coming back for more.

Unlike abstinence-based models such as Alcoholics Anonymous, which require you to stop drinking altogether, the Sinclair Method actually needs you to keep consuming alcohol.

It just stops it from being pleasurable, meaning that very quickly your mind stops yearning for booze.

It must be prescribed, and obtained privately. Naltrexone is available on the NHS to treat alcoholism but for a variety of reasons isn’t much used.

The drug has been out of patent worldwide since 1998, so there’s no real money to be made by Big Pharma and little incentive for them to promote it to doctors.

It also falls outside typical GP budgets because it has to be prescribed ‘off label’ – when a drug is issued for a condition it is not approved for.

I got mine from the Sinclair Method UK, a clinic where packages start at £449 for the phone consultation, prescriptions (the pills cost an extra £100 for 28 tablets) and three months of counselling.

For me, its effect was extraordinary, taking less than a week for results that have lasted permanently. From the very first time I took Naltrexone and then started on my favourite wine, nothing happened. 

There were no unpleasant effects – the alcohol just failed to produce any response, and I swiftly gave up and tipped the rest of my second glass down the sink, a previously unthinkable feat.

I took the drug a few more times after that – popping a pill an hour before every occasion on which I might be tempted by booze – and then stopped because I no longer needed it. That length of time was enough, it seems, to completely rewire my brain.

To this day, the sight of a crisp glass of chardonnay no longer triggers longing. It’s as if I’ve been reset to those pre-teen years before alcohol meant so much to me. Even without the pill, it’s just a neutral, slightly bitter-tasting liquid now.

The clinical trials back up my own experience with Naltrexone. The Sinclair Method has close to an 80 per cent success rate at getting patients to drastically reduce or eliminate drinking altogether.

This pregnancy has therefore been very different, without that wretched monster on my back.

I’ve been on holiday, at booze-filled social occasions and even around my father, and it’s been bafflingly easy simply to turn down the offer of drinking that one ceremonial glass I so coveted last time.

I feel infinitely calmer now, without so much mental energy going into managing cravings or rationalising an occasional slip-up.

For any pregnant or planning-to-conceive women who endure similar struggles to those I once had, Dr Janey Merron from Sinclair Method UK who prescribed me with naltrexone, says the drug can be taken in pregnancy if the benefits outweigh the risks.

‘For women who can’t quit on their own or who are physically dependent on alcohol, I’ll treat them with naltrexone,’ she tells me.

Of course, you should always see your own doctor if you’re pregnant, or want to be, and think you have a drink problem.

I’ll always feel a little guilty that I drank while I was expecting Jasper. Minimal though the amount was, it’s a reflection of just how overly precious alcohol was to me.

And I couldn’t be more grateful to have found a solution to a nearly lifelong problem I simply hadn’t been able to crack on my own. Jasper, and his soon to be sister, will no doubt have a better mother because of it.