About

I'm taking October off the booze. I'm giving the money I save to this Crohn's Disease charity. It'll be about 250, because I drink quite a lot and I live in London. Four quid a pint! Shit! I thought maybe some of you might like to sponsor me too, although perhaps not at the market rate of 4 a pint. Why? As many of you know, my dear friend Nick died earlier this year. He always thought I drank too much. Nick was a lifelong sufferer of Crohn's Disease. Although this isn't what he died of, it certainly didn't help. Some of my earliest memories are of going home after school to visit him during the entire year he was off sick. We'd play computer games and I'd push him round in a wheelchair, because he was too weakened to walk. But my strongest memories are of him full of energy and life, in football matches, on stage, laughing. It still seems utterly ridiculous that he's gone. Cancer was quick, a couple of months, but Crohn's was there for all 33 years. It's much less known, much less understood. Its sufferers, on the evidence of Nick, are total and utter heroes. So I'm embarking on a month-long sobriety binge. I'm going to give the money I save to this Crohn's Disease charity. Take a pint off and pitch in.