Binge drinking drove me out of Britain | Annalisa Coppolaro-Nowell

Being Italian I was brought up to associate alcohol with food. It shocked me that in the UK people seemed to need booze to have fun

When I first landed at Stansted airport I felt like I was living the dream. After graduating with a language degree, I met an English man while he was on holiday in Tuscany, in my village near Siena. We married and moved to Pimlico in central London, which was exactly the opposite of 60-strong Lupompesi. It was all so exciting.

But the more I lived in London (15 years in total), the more I discovered big cultural differences, especially in daily life. One of the most obvious was the binge-drinking culture and how much of it I could see in all layers of society.

Related: Stay sober? No thanks – I'm British | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

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