'I was drinking all day, every day - to the point where I got alcoholic gastritis, which is throwing up all the time, and burst all the blood vessels in my eyes. I was four stone heavier, because I drank beer as well as whisky - sick, sweaty; you sweat all the time, you sweat urea. I also had delirium tremens, where you have to take your first drink by putting a scarf round your arm and over the back of your neck [he demonstrates] so you can pull the glass up, otherwise you smash your teeth. And drinking through a straw, Benylin and vodka - that's great, let me tell you, if you want a recipe for this article. But the delirium is worse than the tremens - it's as if you're dreaming all the time and you see things that look as real as that sofa there. I had spiders the size of soup plates. So you live an incredibly complicated fantasy life - this ongoing, rather syrupy Steven Spielberg movie runs constantly in your head, with you as the wronged but ultimately triumphant hero. And I would pray - really pray - for a fatal illness. I wanted to have cancer, because cancer would make sense of it all. I had no excuse for being a junkie and a drunk. I came from a happy, supportive, endlessly liberal family who loved me. But if I had cancer I would have an excuse and, more than that, there would be an end, an end to the self-loathing, the monumental huge rucksack of self-hatred which you have to drink on. And the fear - a lot of being drunk is to do with being frightened all the time.'
At last, when he was 30 and already yellow with hepatitis, he agreed to go to a drying-out clinic. He took his last drink - Moët et Chandon - on the train to Clouds, on 1 April 1984. 'I was quite close to dying. I was on the edge of cirrhosis. I had the highest liver count of anyone there. I was on a 24-hour watch with a nurse because you can die - in fact, I watched someone die - from alcoholic withdrawal. You have fits, and they were very worried that that might happen to me.'