Jye

Why shouldn’t he write to earn a living, OK he's not great at it but he's had a more interesting and fulfilling life that some of you spiteful 'never been' wannabe's

Dracoro

yes, but he can't remember any of it!

Many Humbug Returns

What is fulfilling about 30 years in an alcoholic stupor?

The only thing filled was his glass, every 10-15 minutes probably!

south-star

On the subject of his Sunday Mail column...personally i find it very poor reading.He has very little original to say.

Still doesn't justify being hounded by the tabloids though,f*ckin scumbags that they are.

Jye

What is fulfilling about 30 years in an alcoholic stupor?

And before societies drug of choice took hold, what of that?

I guess sitting in your 'ivory tower' has dulled your memory.

Regacy

Interesting slant on this in todays Guardian....
The Guardian

Fulham71

what an excellent piece of writing !!!!

'I know how George Best feels'

Phil Robinson, recovering alcoholic
Tuesday July 15, 2003
The Guardian

Five years after I take my last drink I'm standing in Marks & Spencer holding a bottle of Margaux with intent to do harm, like someone else might hold a hand grenade. The supermarket is silent, people no longer move around me, all I see is the bottle in my hand. This shouldn't disturb me but it still does. I can walk into pubs, be surrounded by drunk people and not even flinch. And then there are quiet times like this. When I'm on my own and I find myself standing there sweating with a bottle in my hand and I remember I'm an alcoholic.
To me, this alcohol would be like salt on a slug. I drink this, I know what will happen. I'll turn a little nasty, cut everyone to pieces and after talking about myself for three hours, getting louder and louder I'll shout: "Listen to me - no, listen to me! I've got something to say."

My old self waits within me and I still feel like a plant cut down by an untimely frost. I wait for spring, wait to grow out again and bloom in all my drunken splendour.

So because of this I think I know how George Best feels right now. Or at least how he felt before he walked in to that pub and took a drink. It is hard. It's harder to give up drinking than it is to give up heroin and cigarettes combined. Three hundred people don't tend to celebrate a wedding by sitting at large round tables doing smack off sheets of tinfoil; and when you quit the ****, people might offer you some from their own packet and resent you for beating death but they won't say to your face: "You're not fun any more."

Those first months after you stop you are painfully aware that you live in a world where everyone is free to drink with abandon. You're not fun anymore? You defined fun. Everyone used to laugh at you and now look. You stay at home watching DVDs and hitting a punch bag. You go running. You're a bore. Your life is a bore. About this point in the recovery process you're only hanging on to sobriety by your fingernails. And you hate sobriety, whatever that is. At this stage you need good help, which is hard to find in a world where undiagnosed alcoholics run pubs and shops for other undiagnosed alcoholics. Where you see all the new booze advertised on TV, all of it offering life-transforming experiences in the Latin quarter, beaches filled with parrots, young women, fresh lager, new sensations. Anywhere but here, anywhere but your boring life.

After a doctor has told you that you're an alcoholic, those next few months are filled with self-pity and anger. When I was told I was an alcoholic I cried right there in the doctor's surgery. I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, I probably would have cried if he'd told me I had contact dermatitis, I was that upset. At the same time I didn't believe him that I was an alcoholic. And no one I knew believed him. I actually thought that he was a generation out of touch and that he didn't understand the complexities of modern life. I thought an alcoholic was just a big drinker with no mates. That alcoholic wasn't me. I had lots of mates and they all liked it when I drank. The doctor said he wanted me to go to AA.

Moments into my first session, I began to develop a loathing for AA. There were hand-painted boards on the wall - boards full of rules and laws. The legendary 12 steps. They mentioned God nine times and they sucked. The people around me were thin-skinned, veiny relapsers. They seemed completely dependent on AA. Attending AA, being on the programme. And being new I felt this was my future. My whole life was now going to be lived in sufferance, one long apology. They even said I had to let God take charge.

Let God take charge? The bloke who created pestilence? I thought, "I'm not letting him in on one a single thing!" I also didn't want to spend the rest of my life closing my eyes and humming, "Michael Row the Boat Ashore," whenever I walked too close to a pub.

It would have been easier if people who knew me well didn't keep offering me drinks. People I'd told nine times before. People who had read my novel about a man who has to stop drinking so he can re-find his true self in the exploded splatter of his old life. Even now, supposedly intelligent people say: "So you still can't drink? Not even one glass?"

No, I wrote a book about it. What do I need, a billboard?

So after five years of not drinking and listening to friends try to tempt me with "one glass" I know I wouldn't want to be George Best. Every untreated alcoholic in the country wants to buy that man a drink. And everyone including himself, expects him to fail. His life, according to many, is all lost promise, his talent the definition of mercurial. He chose to shorten his career with drink and women and now he's an ex-legend and the very definition of a full-time "recovering" alcoholic. Throughout my life he has made the same headline over and over again. "Best back on the booze."

The first thing I ever knew about alcoholics was that Best was one and that he had pills stitched into his stomach to stop him drinking. So did Jimmy Greaves, who was speaking about it on TV-am. They made him sick, he said. Greaves was my uncle's favourite footballer and he was very funny. Now he was making sad faces. I couldn't see why. As I got older and began to drink seriously I found the stories of both men's drunken exploits hilarious. The first thing I ever wrote for Loaded, in October 1994, was a box-out in a feature on "George Best's Birds". I remember how it was difficult to make it funny and ignore the more serious incidents of domestic violence.

Along with mostly every other intelligent man working for the magazine, I also wanted to be Gorgeous George - a man who has lived about six lives and done bad things in all of them. Despite this, his wife, his family and most of the people in this country still love him and cherish the memory of the oldest George. George the footballer. He'll know all that when he drinks, but that won't stop him because the person who hates him most is, actually, in charge. This is the person who accepts drinks on his behalf from strangers. This is the person who thinks George Best is nothing more than scum - and it's this person who tells him when to take a drink and when to keep on walking. This person is George Best himself. This George, who drinks even though he has pills stitched into the lining of his stomach to make him vomit, and another man's transplanted liver.

Most alcoholics never talk about their low self-esteem, self-loathing even. They can't express it. They can only escape from it with a bottle. We're like this with most mental illnesses. People spend their nights in AA putting out these fires without ever asking why the match was lit in the first place. They never learn about depression or low self-esteem because drink is a handy demon. You know where it lives and what it does and you can blame it whenever you get in a fix. What you don't understand or ever confront is the demon inside you.

Still, being in denial actually helped me see past being an alcoholic. Instead of getting fixated on being a drunk (which everyone else does for you, so you don't have to worry) I looked for the problem elsewhere. After a month spent in a depression clinic I got hold of some of my problems. I wasn't always right. I blamed my wife or my job and even myself, though not in a useful, productive way. At least now I could admit there were problems outside the drink that maybe pushed me to the drink. Four years later, I'm sometimes lazy and forget I have to fight it, then my troubles come back.

Over the years the drink becomes less dangerous - which is dangerous in itself. You encounter more difficult social situations and pass through them unscathed. You realise that you have a choice how to live and because your behaviour is no longer patterned around a bottle, these choices are actually infinite.

Alcoholics who don't get proper treatment live in fear of relapse because they don't understand it. Because when times are good they never get help and soon that voice that haunted them daily becomes quieter and less terrifying and they think, "Well, I'm strong now, what harm can it do?"

We are all hung up on our old lives. We have "baggage". With the right therapy the grief for this life now gone lessens. You experience moments of extreme clarity where you see your old life for what it was. Instead of only dumb laughter and exuberance, your recollection of the past becomes more complete. Even in your least rational, depressed moments you summon up more pity for yourself in those days than you ever can enthusiasm to begin it all over again. The slamming doors? Do I want that? My wife throwing buckets of water over my unconscious body? The blowouts and tears, apologies and life as one long marathon crawl?

You make a choice. One of many you can make now because your life is open. You don't want to be that person again, with people shouting at you, you pushing them away, stuck in that rut till you died. So what you have now, this quieter life, is OK, good even - and when you do find yourself standing in a supermarket bathed in a blue light with nothing in the world between you and a bottle of wine, you have an opportunity to find out exactly how strong you are. After five years you know how to handle it. You buy the bottle for the people who are coming round for dinner and you look ahead into the sunshine and say,

"Yeah, well that's not me anymore."

And you get on with whatever it was you should have been doing in the first place.

Fulham71

what an excellent piece of writing !!!!

'I know how George Best feels'

Phil Robinson, recovering alcoholic
Tuesday July 15, 2003
The Guardian

Five years after I take my last drink I'm standing in Marks & Spencer holding a bottle of Margaux with intent to do harm, like someone else might hold a hand grenade. The supermarket is silent, people no longer move around me, all I see is the bottle in my hand. This shouldn't disturb me but it still does. I can walk into pubs, be surrounded by drunk people and not even flinch. And then there are quiet times like this. When I'm on my own and I find myself standing there sweating with a bottle in my hand and I remember I'm an alcoholic.
To me, this alcohol would be like salt on a slug. I drink this, I know what will happen. I'll turn a little nasty, cut everyone to pieces and after talking about myself for three hours, getting louder and louder I'll shout: "Listen to me - no, listen to me! I've got something to say."

My old self waits within me and I still feel like a plant cut down by an untimely frost. I wait for spring, wait to grow out again and bloom in all my drunken splendour.

So because of this I think I know how George Best feels right now. Or at least how he felt before he walked in to that pub and took a drink. It is hard. It's harder to give up drinking than it is to give up heroin and cigarettes combined. Three hundred people don't tend to celebrate a wedding by sitting at large round tables doing smack off sheets of tinfoil; and when you quit the ****, people might offer you some from their own packet and resent you for beating death but they won't say to your face: "You're not fun any more."

Those first months after you stop you are painfully aware that you live in a world where everyone is free to drink with abandon. You're not fun anymore? You defined fun. Everyone used to laugh at you and now look. You stay at home watching DVDs and hitting a punch bag. You go running. You're a bore. Your life is a bore. About this point in the recovery process you're only hanging on to sobriety by your fingernails. And you hate sobriety, whatever that is. At this stage you need good help, which is hard to find in a world where undiagnosed alcoholics run pubs and shops for other undiagnosed alcoholics. Where you see all the new booze advertised on TV, all of it offering life-transforming experiences in the Latin quarter, beaches filled with parrots, young women, fresh lager, new sensations. Anywhere but here, anywhere but your boring life.

After a doctor has told you that you're an alcoholic, those next few months are filled with self-pity and anger. When I was told I was an alcoholic I cried right there in the doctor's surgery. I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, I probably would have cried if he'd told me I had contact dermatitis, I was that upset. At the same time I didn't believe him that I was an alcoholic. And no one I knew believed him. I actually thought that he was a generation out of touch and that he didn't understand the complexities of modern life. I thought an alcoholic was just a big drinker with no mates. That alcoholic wasn't me. I had lots of mates and they all liked it when I drank. The doctor said he wanted me to go to AA.

Moments into my first session, I began to develop a loathing for AA. There were hand-painted boards on the wall - boards full of rules and laws. The legendary 12 steps. They mentioned God nine times and they sucked. The people around me were thin-skinned, veiny relapsers. They seemed completely dependent on AA. Attending AA, being on the programme. And being new I felt this was my future. My whole life was now going to be lived in sufferance, one long apology. They even said I had to let God take charge.

Let God take charge? The bloke who created pestilence? I thought, "I'm not letting him in on one a single thing!" I also didn't want to spend the rest of my life closing my eyes and humming, "Michael Row the Boat Ashore," whenever I walked too close to a pub.

It would have been easier if people who knew me well didn't keep offering me drinks. People I'd told nine times before. People who had read my novel about a man who has to stop drinking so he can re-find his true self in the exploded splatter of his old life. Even now, supposedly intelligent people say: "So you still can't drink? Not even one glass?"

No, I wrote a book about it. What do I need, a billboard?

So after five years of not drinking and listening to friends try to tempt me with "one glass" I know I wouldn't want to be George Best. Every untreated alcoholic in the country wants to buy that man a drink. And everyone including himself, expects him to fail. His life, according to many, is all lost promise, his talent the definition of mercurial. He chose to shorten his career with drink and women and now he's an ex-legend and the very definition of a full-time "recovering" alcoholic. Throughout my life he has made the same headline over and over again. "Best back on the booze."

The first thing I ever knew about alcoholics was that Best was one and that he had pills stitched into his stomach to stop him drinking. So did Jimmy Greaves, who was speaking about it on TV-am. They made him sick, he said. Greaves was my uncle's favourite footballer and he was very funny. Now he was making sad faces. I couldn't see why. As I got older and began to drink seriously I found the stories of both men's drunken exploits hilarious. The first thing I ever wrote for Loaded, in October 1994, was a box-out in a feature on "George Best's Birds". I remember how it was difficult to make it funny and ignore the more serious incidents of domestic violence.

Along with mostly every other intelligent man working for the magazine, I also wanted to be Gorgeous George - a man who has lived about six lives and done bad things in all of them. Despite this, his wife, his family and most of the people in this country still love him and cherish the memory of the oldest George. George the footballer. He'll know all that when he drinks, but that won't stop him because the person who hates him most is, actually, in charge. This is the person who accepts drinks on his behalf from strangers. This is the person who thinks George Best is nothing more than scum - and it's this person who tells him when to take a drink and when to keep on walking. This person is George Best himself. This George, who drinks even though he has pills stitched into the lining of his stomach to make him vomit, and another man's transplanted liver.

Most alcoholics never talk about their low self-esteem, self-loathing even. They can't express it. They can only escape from it with a bottle. We're like this with most mental illnesses. People spend their nights in AA putting out these fires without ever asking why the match was lit in the first place. They never learn about depression or low self-esteem because drink is a handy demon. You know where it lives and what it does and you can blame it whenever you get in a fix. What you don't understand or ever confront is the demon inside you.

Still, being in denial actually helped me see past being an alcoholic. Instead of getting fixated on being a drunk (which everyone else does for you, so you don't have to worry) I looked for the problem elsewhere. After a month spent in a depression clinic I got hold of some of my problems. I wasn't always right. I blamed my wife or my job and even myself, though not in a useful, productive way. At least now I could admit there were problems outside the drink that maybe pushed me to the drink. Four years later, I'm sometimes lazy and forget I have to fight it, then my troubles come back.

Over the years the drink becomes less dangerous - which is dangerous in itself. You encounter more difficult social situations and pass through them unscathed. You realise that you have a choice how to live and because your behaviour is no longer patterned around a bottle, these choices are actually infinite.

Alcoholics who don't get proper treatment live in fear of relapse because they don't understand it. Because when times are good they never get help and soon that voice that haunted them daily becomes quieter and less terrifying and they think, "Well, I'm strong now, what harm can it do?"

We are all hung up on our old lives. We have "baggage". With the right therapy the grief for this life now gone lessens. You experience moments of extreme clarity where you see your old life for what it was. Instead of only dumb laughter and exuberance, your recollection of the past becomes more complete. Even in your least rational, depressed moments you summon up more pity for yourself in those days than you ever can enthusiasm to begin it all over again. The slamming doors? Do I want that? My wife throwing buckets of water over my unconscious body? The blowouts and tears, apologies and life as one long marathon crawl?

You make a choice. One of many you can make now because your life is open. You don't want to be that person again, with people shouting at you, you pushing them away, stuck in that rut till you died. So what you have now, this quieter life, is OK, good even - and when you do find yourself standing in a supermarket bathed in a blue light with nothing in the world between you and a bottle of wine, you have an opportunity to find out exactly how strong you are. After five years you know how to handle it. You buy the bottle for the people who are coming round for dinner and you look ahead into the sunshine and say,

"Yeah, well that's not me anymore."

And you get on with whatever it was you should have been doing in the first place.

boxst

Hello

That is very well written, and even makes a lot of sense.

Steve.