One broiling Tuesday this August, I walked into the London Oratory, parked my various cases, took off my suit coat (it really was very hot) and began to pray. Or rather, I began trying to pray. I tried the Ave Maria, but that didn’t do it. I recited the Pater Noster, falling back on that prayer learnt in earliest childhood. No dice. Rather worried now, I resorted to the Credo; fervently, almost zealously offered. Still nothing. This was the first ever time in my relationship with the Catholic Church – and that church in particular – that I had gone to pray yet been unable to find the inner peace necessary. The strange thing about staring into the abyss is not, as one would expect of cavernous depths, the overwhelming noise, but the eerie silence. Nothing so much as a slight echo to reassure one that, yes, there is a way out. For almost six years I had lived in London, for most of which I had drunk deep of the city’s offerings. This was literally so when I became a diary reporter on the Times. It will come as no crashing revelation to those who knew me in earlier years that I have always enjoyed alcohol. Really though, I mean wine. Since the first time I tasted wine, heavily watered, at my grandfather’s table (I must have been seven or so, judging by the clothes worn in my mind’s eye) I had enjoyed it. After a brief, disastrous dalliance with bourbon at 16, the result of my then absolute conviction that my destiny was as a rock guitarist, I stuck to wine. That’s not to say I drank nothing else: who could deny himself the jolting pleasure of a dry martini or the heavy, reassuring warmth of aged single malt? Day to day, though, party to party, wine was my drink. And all this was fine. I was a twenty-something in the world’s greatest city. Moreover, I was a twenty-something reporter for the Times who, every night he wanted it, could go to marvellous parties and drink for free in the company of fellow young hacks, as well as the odd famous person. Nothing unusual in my behaviour; nothing to suggest to me or to any of us in that pack that we ought to have a night off now and then. This was what young journalists were supposed to do, were encouraged to do by our editors and by practically every depiction of the writer’s life in art, literature and cinema. Of course there were warning signs. And, being essentially a stubborn sort, I ignored them. When trousers became rather tight and shirts rather throttling, I put it down to age and found an alterations tailor. When I called in sick to work with food poisoning rather more often than was creditable in the age of the Health & Safety Executive, I reasoned to myself that it was OK because I still got the work done when I was there (though this itself was a stretch). When one mentor, who has guided me since I moved to London, took me aside and gave me a (thoroughly deserved) handbagging, telling me I’d gained a reputation for unreliability, even laziness, and that I’d let myself go like a retired barrister, I dismissed his heartfelt concern as bitchiness.