Life becomes a big, unwieldy set of scenes and all you can do is play your part: enter stage left; exit stage right; read the lines; just pray the critics haven’t made it to the show. To an alcoholic, deception is an integral part of the script, the key element.

With a drink in me, my confidence returned, my direction seemed clear-cut, and I reveled in lofty plans and dreams for the future. Drinking to escape became as important as eating to survive.

Now is a good time to stop and summarise where we are. Essentially, alcohol provides us with a feeling of relaxation. However, the brain and nervous system reacts to this by releasing stimulants and becoming more sensitive, with the result that when the alcohol wears off we are more anxious and unrelaxed than we were before we took the drink. So we

The hard part is going against groupthink, the herd mentality of our alcohol-saturated culture. After all, alcohol is the only drug on earth you have to justify not taking.