Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Sober reality

My 15 years of heavy drinking wasn’t an exercise in wickedness, but I did wicked things

Have you noticed how nearly everyone in the media has won an award? Is there even such a thing as a documentary maker who isn’t ‘award-winning’? Most journalists my age have picked up some sort of bauble. I sulked about this for years until a colleague reminded me that I did have an award: Private Eye’s ‘drunkest person at the Spectator party 1991’. I’d forgotten, perhaps because there was no awards ceremony. Shame. I like to think of myself clutching the prize — perhaps a tasteful statuette of someone doing a technicolour yawn — while insisting modestly that it should really have gone to the vicar who fell backwards into the rose bushes.

Likewise, I was cross that I had never merited a single article about me in a national newspaper. Again, not true. I was once in the Sun, no less. It’s not in my cuttings book, but from memory the headline was ‘Journalist’s “joke” costs him £1,000’. I was done for drunken driving — if you can call it driving, because I’d failed my test three times and was too plastered to move my mate’s car more than a few feet before I toppled out of the open door into the arms of a lurking copper. My brilliant defence that it was a ‘joke’ failed to sway the magistrate. I was religious affairs correspondent of the Daily Telegraph at the time. ‘You idiot,’ said the news editor. ‘If you’d told me in time I could easily have kept it out of the Sun.’

I’m not sure what year it happened, but it must have been before 15 April 1994, because that was the last time I drank alcohol. ‘Sober for a quarter of a century — what an achievement!’ say my friends — and I have to explain that my continuing bad habit of gobbling codeine painkillers and benzodiazepines hardly counts as sobriety.

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