It's all padded out with some long-winded percentage calculations of how many drinks he "WANTED/NEEDED/ENJOYED" in certain phases of his life - you can skip these. JR: Well it does exist dear, you’re sat across from one, but I guess you’re saying the fact that you could say to yourself that you weren’t an alcoholic gave you permission to continue drinking to that level? AC: I think people are led to believe that moderation isn’t possible: that if you successfully moderate, it’s because you didn’t have much of a problem in the first place. Otherwise, the ideas are very binary. People will stop you in the street and say: “I hear you’re on the wagon,” or: “Are you a friend of Bill’s?” or: “Are you still off the booze?” It doesn’t even occur to people that there could be a middle ground, either you’re completely befuddled and drunk the whole time, or you’re completely sober.

Poor Siegfried looked every inch the school chess player. He wore the kind of glasses that make your eyes look bigger. I too wore glasses, being shortsighted, so I suppose we did have specs in common, but that was it. The popular broadcaster and columnist sets out to discover the unsung pleasures of drinking in moderation. JR: If you go online and ask: “Am I an alcoholic?” you get these long questionnaires: has alcohol ever affected your work life? Have you ever missed work due to alcohol? Has your family ever worried about your drinking? The questions are ridiculous because they are so broad. There’s not anyone who has ever been drunk, who wouldn’t be able to go, “Yeah, I lost a day to a hangover. Yes, it’s affected my mental health.” And, in some ways it doesn’t matter; your liver doesn’t care if you’re an alcoholic or a heavy drinker. But the real difference between us is that if we went to the pub and had two pints and then went home, you would be fine, and I would be in hell. Because I’d turned the machine on, the machine would want me to keep on going. My issue has always been that if you can stop, then you drink with impunity. That was very damaging, because it meant that I could go on drinking 100 units a week, thinking that was fine Adrian Chiles AC: Sometimes I do still feel as though it’s more than just a handrail; maybe a handrail and half the stairs.

JR: At the heart of this is one of the useful definitions of an alcoholic as opposed to a heavy drinker. When you take the first drink, are you able to limit your drinking from that point onwards? You talk about drinking two pints of Stella mixed with spring water as part of your moderation. That would be absolutely impossible for me to do, because once I have one drink, I then drink to exactly the same point every time. Adrian never talks down to the reader and is very open about his shift in perspective when faced by medical advice to cut down (after being sure he wasn't doing much harm with his weekly units each week). First book of the year as I wasn't entirely sure where to start but this stood out to me. As someone who enjoyed Chiles' 2018 documentary Dry January after a rather Wet December has been the sort of moderate conversation I've always really wanted to have with someone. I have scant memory of any of the excursions our exchange group were taken on, bar one. In the second week we went on a tour of Leonberg’s brewery. I moped around, disliking the smell, looking on without interest as we were shown how beer was made. At the conclusion of the tour, we were sat down at long tables and given what was probably rather strong lager to drink. I didn’t much enjoy it but, within a matter of minutes of it coursing through my veins, I was going through some kind of emotional transformation. The prose is quite chatty, but that is to be expected for what is effectively someone's memoir of their relationship with alcohol. I was almost averse to labelling this an autobiography, but there are some allusions to the slightly tougher parts of his life, both on and off the screen. Chiles tends to avoid the potential of it being self-indulgent and distracting from what is a rather consistent and well-constructed argument for moderation.

JR: The fact that you can drink those pints in the morning and then stop means that, ironically, you’ll have drunk more than I would have done. Because I would have drunk until three in the afternoon and then passed out. Moderation is complicated. It’s more complicated than stopping in the sense that everyone knows you’ve stopped’ … Adrian Chiles. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian I've occasionally been asked why it is that I need to go for a drink before watching the Albion play. I've always answered with something lame, along the lines of, "You wanna try watching us sober" ... where does this urge come from? I've raced off to games hours early to give me a chance to drink a lot of beer in a relatively short time ... the craic is good, usually. Sometimes it isn't, Occasionally it's all rather boring. But I always make the effort. Why? Well..' AC: Something you said that really resonated with me, and actually made a difference to my moderation, was when you said that when you’re not drinking, you’ve got to make an extra effort with people, to be funny, and charming. I thought drinking was absolutely essential to have a good time. If you’re using that word, “essential”, you’ve got to have a look at your relationship with alcohol. In the past, you could have filled a room with all my favourite people in the world, and if I wasn’t allowed to drink, I wouldn’t really be looking forward to seeing them. If you’re drinking more than 50 units a week. and think 14 is a ludicrous impossibility but you're developing diseases, just cut down to 30. GPs won't say this but they should. Some diversionary tactics will ensure none of your 500 friends will notice and disown you. If you can drop to 30 units, your health will improve enormously! I read some stuff. Don't waste good drinking time trying to get down to 14 units. It's stupid. You'll be boring. Don't be teetotal, unless you're a famous comedian. Do NOT try to drink 'occasionally', unless you're not one of my 500 friends.I think he makes a clear case for having a middle ground with drinking rather than abstaining altogether. He also comes at it from a familiar perspective, having had alcohol as a big part of social events and life in general, especially during his twenties/thirties. JR: If I could drink 36 units a week without it driving me to the edge of sanity, I would do that. But I can’t. A really important part of accepting my alcoholism was understanding I can never drink like that. I will never be a “normal” drinker. The thought of never drinking alcohol frightens me as there are so many social and cultural influences around us to drink alcohol and similarly to Adrian, the happy times of my life have been about socialising and drinking with friends. It is certainly easier to be at an event where you know no one to have a glass of wine in hand. However, the glass of wine after a hard day at work (oh poor me working in a book shop) I can generally do without, they've become a habit and the "hard day at work" is just an excuse. He thanks "the clinicians who’ve given me so much of their time sharing their expertise", but why not put some in the book? He assures us "there are mountains of scientific studies on all this" and he has done "a fair amount of reading and listening on the subject". Drinking 100s of units a week, he says, meant facing "some pretty dire consequences with my innards". Don't buy this book thinking you'll learn anything at all about the effects of alcohol on health.

Adrian Chiles: What I’d realised, writing the book, is that there are people working out there who talk about harm reduction. They don’t talk like therapists. They don’t say: “We need to get to the inner cause of your drinking.” They say: “Whatever it takes to get your consumption down.” But I’m absolutely clear that moderation isn’t for everybody; that abstinence may be the simplest way for some people, or the only way. AC: I just happen to have an off-switch with drinking, in a way that I don’t have with food. Left to my own devices, I can eat myself to an absolute standstill. But I wouldn’t give myself that get-out, because I’ve got, probably, a less good on-switch than you. Anything can get me to start drinking. If you’ve got an easily triggered on-switch, and no off-switch, then you really have got a problem. Alcohol was the handrail, the stairs and the destination’ … John Robins. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian I am completely in the same headspace as in that I enjoy drinking and if I can do it moderately then why give up the habit of a lifetime. Since the new year my drinking diary says I have averaged 15.78 units/week so not quite to the government's safe drinking guide level yet but close. It felt so good. At that moment, the last few days we had left on the exchange went from feeling like an eternity to something wispy and insignificant and even possibly enjoyable. I laughed and joked with my friends and even fancied I spotted a girl called Claudia looking at me. And I became overwhelmed with sorrow for poor Siegfried, who couldn’t face more than a mouthful of beer but, with unbearable sweetness, was plainly delighted to see me smiling.

JR: I just want to be very clear: I’m not anti-moderation. I’m just saying that for an alcoholic, it might make things mentally worse for them and for those around them. The analogy I’d use is a 40-a-day smoker. Give them two cigarettes a day, they will be much worse company. If I was stranded on a desert island and there was one can of Guinness on there, it would still be there the day I was rescued. Because the idea of drinking one can would be horrible, I would be in such a state. Forty years later, having put petrol-tanker quantities of alcohol through my system, I see the significance of that first drink. And, more importantly, the significance of the first drink on any given occasion. The first one is the only one that matters; it’s the only one that brings about a wondrous change in your emotional state. All subsequent drinks are increasingly fruitless attempts to recreate that initial feeling. Grasping this truth is the surest route to drinking less. Relish the first drink, and perhaps a second if you must, but don’t bother with the rest.