They call me the ‘problem teetotaller’

My guts went on strike last July. I was staying in a hotel and I spent several days sprawled on the bed, vomiting occasionally, eating and drinking nothing and barely able even to wet my lips with water. Meanwhile, a bottle of Prosecco offered by the management stood untouched next to the widescreen TV. I started to wonder if this was my Frank Skinner moment. My farewell to booze.

In his memoirs, Skinner describes how he gave up drinking by accident in his twenties when a virus confined him to his bed for a week and destroyed his interest in alcohol. Restored to health, he went back to the pub to meet his friends but he shunned drink because he’d realised it was superfluous. As rehab stories go, Skinner’s is bizarre because it’s so quiet and unassuming. There’s no clash of cymbals. No Wagnerian power-chords. No rock-bottom moment of remorse and renewal.

I fear I’m becoming unpopular. At my current address, they call me ‘the problem teetotaller’

Skinner gave up drinking as easily as renewing his car insurance. And his tale of recovery undermines all the mighty epics offered by the psychiatric trade whose members insist that drugs can’t be defeated without a lifelong war that involves teams of shrinks on 24-hour stand-by ready to swing into action if the poor addict succumbs to a night-time craving.

My experience last summer took the same unshowy path. After two days without water my tongue was parched, cracked and almost bleeding, and I crawled out to a supermarket where I bought a flagon of tropical juice that contained at least a pint of concentrated corn syrup. The sugar-hit was instant, and I laid in extra supplies of this delicious fluid in my hotel room. Later on, still unable to touch alcohol, I met a few friends in a bar and I chatted away as they knocked back their wines and their ales.