Times Online: Author and journalist A. A. Gill, on alcoholism.

I was, in English terms, very good at drinking. Too good. I had a substantial capacity for absorbing the stuff and had worked out the Dumb Crambo of moving around when your internal gyroscope has fallen over. I learnt to enunciate when my mouth felt like it was made out of putty and my teeth had all changed places and I had the tongue of the dog whose hair I’d consumed.

I drank steadily, with a steely determination. I drank on and through peripheral neuritis, alcoholic gastritis, an atrophied brain, an enlarged liver, a damaged pancreas, blackouts, suicidal depression, anonymous bloody sores and DTs so severe that I would have to take the first drink of the morning using a towel hooked round my neck as a pulley, because I was frightened of knocking my teeth out with the glass.

I went for help one April and the doctor said that I’d better be serious about stopping, because if I didn’t I was unlikely to see another Christmas. Incredulous friends said they couldn’t believe I had a problem as they’d never seen me drunk. The truth was, they’d never seen me sober, I’d just woven drink into the fabric of who I was and I had to unpick it...