The thing about hitting the bottom is that you don’t know you’re on the way there until you’re actually there. I mean, you know you’re in a bad way, you’re not an idiot, but the bottom? Nah, that’s not you. The bottom is where other people end up. You’re not one of those bottom people, you’re better than that. And then you’re not. Suddenly you’re lying there wondering how you didn’t even notice you were falling. Or at least that’s how it happened to me. 

In the shape of about two months, I went from being a copper who did a bit of stand-up comedy on the side, with a nice wife and a nice house, to the kind of bloke who slept in his car with nothing but a farting dog for company. I was shell-shocked. Sitting here now all these years later, I still can’t quite believe it happened, but happen it did. But how?

I think the only bit of advice I took onboard from my Dad was: “Don’t end up working in a factory.” He’d spent 20-odd years doing a job he hated in a car factory in Liverpool, and every one of those years was marked off by a line on his face, so I figured he knew what he was talking about.

Not long after giving me that advice he dropped down dead aged 53 on his day off. How unlucky is that? His day off? 

A doctor once told me that my dad would have had plenty of warning signs before the heart attack that took him. He explained that had my dad asked for help they would have intervened and, in all likelihood, seen off the big one that ended up with him falling down on the floor of our living room dead.