Over 50 years ago, at university, Jeremy Walker began a six-year drinking binge. He thanks God it came to an end
I can’t beat Brendan Behan, the Irish writer who was an alcoholic from the age of eight. My six seasons in hell – to adapt a phrase from Rimbaud, a fellow traveller in the land of excess – began soon after my 18th birthday. All addicts are determined extremists and I joined the fraternity suddenly and totally. Sharing a Winchester education, but little else, with the Prime Minister, I left the cosy embrace of boarding school in 1969 and became subjected to the baffling, nightmarish demands of Merton College, Oxford, in 1970. There I came into contact with a new form of human – woman – and the terrifying burden of choice. I could choose whether to go to the occasional lecture. I could choose whether to inconvenience my eccentric tutor by visiting his house for the odd tutorial. And I could choose whether to get up before dusk. And...
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