Pour Me

'Wake up! You're at sea - it doesn't matter which sea, it's just rising and falling. You're alone in a little boat. You have no idea how you got there. You look along the horizon. It's as sharp as a razor-cut. There's nothing but sea and the cloche of sky, the salty bobbing earth curving away... and then there is something just there, where the sun makes the water flare and shimmy. There are two dots. Two things that aren't sea; they're boats. 'These boats have a purpose, they have come for you and that is the nature of these things, these instructive fables. The inner narrator tells you that although they are coming solely for you, you can stop only one. On the one boat, there is a man who will give you food, fresh water, some oars and directions to get to land and he'll even come with you if you like; but in the other boat there is only a man who, if you ask him, will tell you how you got here. So that's the dilemma - which boat do you stop?' Aged thirty, at a treatment centre in the west of England, A. A. Gill lay in the last-chance saloon, in the dark of a dormitory with six strangers. His dark yet laugh-out-loud memoir charts the year between the end of his marriage and the end of drinking, on April 1st. Or perhaps it was not a year - it might be only six months or eighteen. None of this is hand-on-Bible fact. The one charity of drink is that it strips away memory. So this book is an attempt to resurrect the boat that was going the other way, and its cargo, its log of how he got here. Being A. A. Gill, this is no faith-infused tale of redemption. It isn't an account of a debauched drink-and-drug hell; there will be no lessons to learn; or handy hints or golden rules. But it is a brilliant, funny, and wise book by our greatest journalist.