LIKE FATHER LIKE SON –

Dec. 31, 2022 – ’m afraid to announce the bar is closed. There will be no refreshments on this journey. Apologies for the inconvenience,” declares a smug voice over the Tannoy on the 6.15am from King’s Cross to Edinburgh. Inconvenient isn’t remotely close to what this is. It is a cock-up of catastrophic proportions and the very last revelation needed on a five-hour train to rehab. An announcement of an Isis-led mariachi band joining at Newcastle would have been more palatable.

This has to be the single most agonisingly long journey anyone has endured: Phileas Fogg would have pulled his little curls out and packed it in at this point. I’m dolefully slumped against the window, vacantly gazing at passing fields out of an empty carriage, slowly but inevitably…

My mother and sister sit attentively opposite me: I can’t bear to look at either of them. Any eye contact results in a pitiful forced smile, accompanied by a couple of wide eyes, the sort of look you’d give a toddler on the verge of an explosive meltdown after scraping his knees. There’s a lot to be glum about: one particular sorrow floods my limited conscience on this train and, although silent, it’s deafeningly obvious they must be thinking it too: I wish Dad were here.

He was AA Gill to his readers but just a gentle old dad to me. He died of cancer on December 10, 2016, at the age of 62. Three and a half years later, I’m making my fateful train journey.

Dad once confided in me that on his own train journey to rehab, back in the 1980s when he was a similar age to me, he shared two bottles of vintage champagne with my grandfather as they made their way to Wiltshire, to the clinic Clouds. I’m sure it was a far less glamorous scene than the one I picture, but a fierce new wave of grief swarms over me as I sit there, fatherless, champagne-less and en route to attempt the impossible. I would have traded all the cheery birthdays, sports days, Sunday lunches, comfortable silences, pointless debates, lengthy phone calls, belly-aching laughs and teary sentiments just for a few words from him in that moment. A week prior, I had been opposite a doctor at her practice in Marylebone. At 27, my health had taken a noticeable decline and I was struggling to keep my drink down. So I went for blood tests and a consultation with a professional carrying the best name in all things medical: Dr Tickle.

She peered at me. “So, Ali. Can I ask: what substances have you consumed in the past 24 hours?” I usually had a fairly predictable daily set menu, but Dr Tickle had caught me at a time I’d gone particularly à la carte. I proceeded to list more than half a dozen powders, pills and smokables.

“Right. So, no booze?” she asked.

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