I can't beat Brendan Behan, the Irish writer who was an alcoholic from the age of eight. My six seasons in hell – to adapt a phrase from Rimbaud, a fellow traveller in the land of excess – began soon after my 18th birthday.
AH addicts are determined extremists and I joined the fraternity suddenly and totally. Sharing a Winchester education, but little else, with the Prime Minister, I left the cosy embrace of boarding school in 1969 and became subjected to the baffling, nightmarish demands of Merton College, Oxford, in 1970.
There I came into contact with a new form of human – woman – and the terrifying burden of choice.
I could choose whether to go to the occasional lecture. I could choose whether to
