I hate teetotallers. The pitying looks they give you with their cold, unclouded eyes. Those patronising, bored smiles they smile, as though they are indulgently listening to the table-talk of children. Their uncouth early departures from the dinner table and tactless talk of early starts. Teetotallers are as bad as people who insist on whipping out their phones to film fellow guests when they’re dancing. They’re buzz-killing squares who should learn to live a little.  

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And yet … I have, despite my worse judgment, recently mounted the wagon. In my heart, I remain a devoted drinker. In my mind, I continue to see myself as the Falstaffian life of the party. But deep in my vitals – as Sir John might put it – a rebellion has erupted and swept to victory over the whole. The truth is that my body can no longer cope with a daily tsunami of neurotoxic Chianti and liver-inflating rye whiskey. A shutter has rattled down on my life that will never be reopened. I have become an exile from my own past.  

There were, in all honesty, certain signs and portents that all was not going well. Late at night I would loudly abuse noisy (fellow) drunks in the street through a giant brass bullhorn from our terrace. This escalated to throwing down powerful bangers and finally opening fire on strangers at five in the morning from my new (happily, blank-firing) Beretta 92. My wife, appearing naked in the........

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