I remember sitting in a car park late at night, my back up against the rear tyre of a truck, playing my whistle. I was trying to reproduce a note I’d never heard before. Something totally new: an ostinato that had sneaked its way into the world without my noticing, and that only my legless, almost mindless state was allowing me to hear right then. As I moved my fingers to half-block the stops and hit painfully elided semitones, ribbons of nearly invisible nothingness like the ghosts of tapeworms drifted past me and through me, seeking the music as though it was a form of sustenance.

I remember lying with my cheek pressed against cold stone, thinking with something like relief that it might all be over at last. This might be a mortuary slab that I was sprawled out on. But it wasn’t. It was just another stinking, sticky pavement strewn with broken glass, just another station of the booze-hound’s cross.

Alcohol is a curious thing: an arcane and complex thing that opens up its mysteries to you in successive layers. At the very heart of its cruelty, there’s a dark and terrible compassion, which is this: after it’s poisoned you, you can take it as medicine. You can get into a cycle where you’re drinking to carry your body through the pains and wrenches of withdrawal, and in the short term it actually works.

I rode that horse for a while. Then I fell off it and it trampled me. Then it pissed on me as I lay in the gutter.

Coming back was slow, and at first almost accidental. I woke up in my lightless room, stewed in my own sweat and feeling like someone had magically transformed my tongue into a size-10 army boot. I was on fire with the ague of chemical need, alternately too hot and too cold inside my skin, on which salamanders were crawling with hooked claws, and snakes with rasping scales.

I couldn’t find the light switch, couldn’t even remember the layout of my own room. I staggered to the bathroom in the dark, filled the bath with cold water and fell into it, fully clothed. Well, the clothes smelled like they needed a wash in any case, so it counted as economy of effort.

By the time the sun came up, I’d ridden out the worst of the shakes. I stood up on wobbly legs, stripped the sodden clothes from my body and washed properly. Shaving was harder, because my hands were still about as steady as the plastic mule in the game of Buckaroo, but I persevered.

I staggered downstairs about an hour later, wearing a pair of clean underpants that I’d providentially found down the back of a radiator and one of Pen’s 200 or so T-shirts with Celtic knot designs on them. On the table in the hall there was a stack of mail for me, including a brown envelope in legal quarto size which had come recorded delivery and had bad news written all over it. I ignored it for now. First things first.