When Kerre Woodham was first approached to give up alcohol for a month for charity, her reasons for accepting the challenge were purely personal. “I get asked to do quite a bit for charity, and although I’d like to help everyone, I just can’t do everything I’m asked to do.
“When a colleague rang to ask me if I’d be an ambassador for Dry July and give up the booze for a month, despite his scoffing that I’d never be able to di it, I agreed – because honestly, I don’t know a better way of losing 5kg than to give up the drink!”
Kerre has been open in the past about her battles with the “p*** fairy – the alter ego who sits on my shoulder, saying, ‘Come on, have another one. A little glass won’t hurt!’”
But despite her self-confessed love of drinking, she has no worries that she’ll be able to complete the challenge. She will completely abstain from alcohol in a bid to raise money to improve adult cancer treatment centres. “I find it a real struggle to be moderate – it just isn’t in my character,” she admits.
“I actually do give up alcohol quite regularly, and at one point I gave up for seven years when I was 33 – I only went back on it the night I turned 40, when I was offered a glass of vintage Bollinger at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant in Claridge’s.”
Kerre readily admits that being teetotal through July is going to benefit her personally. “It’s not just the 5kg, although I’m looking forward to saying goodbye to all that extra fat around my tummy!” she smiles with her trademark candour.
“It’s going to be good for me mentally too. I think women have a very complicated relationship with alcohol now. “In the past, women’s drinking was a dirty, furtive secret. Women didn’t drink – they didn’t have the opportunities to. Now we have our own money and time, we work busy lives and alcohol is a convenient way to forget things for a while. Yes, you can sit and meditate on a candle for 20 minutes, but let’s face it – it’s easier and quicker to have a nice glass of red or a good whisky.”
But no matter what Kerre’s original reasons for agreeing to give up alcohol, all that changed when she and fellow abstainee, actor Temuera Morrison, were taken to visit the cancer treatment ward at Auckland Hospital. “I honestly had no idea how people with cancer got their treatment,” she says.
“When people say they are going in for chemo, I imagined a little cubicle, perhaps with a La-Z-boy, perhaps a little TV – something that gives you a chance to help your mind and soul heal while the chemicals do their work. Then the head of oncology took me into the treatment room, and it was like a really busy bus stop, with loads of people hooked up to chemotherapy drips. There’s no privacy, nowhere for parents to spend time with their children. And they sit there, eight hours a day, five days a week.”
Kerre was genuinely shocked by what she saw, and is busy persuading friends, family and fans to sponsor her and others going dry for July. She knows that, with one in three Kiwis affected by cancer in their lifetime, it’s sheer luck it’s not her or any of her own loved ones being treated, as she describes it, “like battery hens”.
“We all end up in the same place. I’m paying it forward, hoping that I can raise enough money for a La-Z-Boy that maybe one day I or someone I love will end up in.”
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