Hooked by Paul Merson

Author:Paul Merson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline

10

SOBRIETY

I had managed to hold it together in France. The World Cup is a powerful distraction, but the dark moods that had been haunting me since February were now at the front of my mind. Out of the England bubble, within a few hours I felt like I had crashed. We went away on holiday to Portugal with another family and I found it hard to relax or even relate to the adults in the state I was in, brooding about betting, hating myself for thinking about it so much. I was constantly restless. I hung out with the kids instead, trying to occupy myself that way, in the pool, playing games.

I’d bought a house on the Wynyard estate near Stockton-on-Tees in the spring as a family home for us and also as an escape from ‘the madhouse’ in Hutton Rudby which we were due to move into at the start of the season. Lorraine helped choose the house, liked it and had agreed to come up with the children. But when we got home after Portugal there were delays and arguments. She said she didn’t want to move while I was so depressed and snappy. They did come up briefly to join me, though by that point I had realised that I had to get out of Middlesbrough. The marriage, even if I didn’t recognise it at the time, was coming to an end as well.

When we got back from holiday, I took my eldest son Charlie and a friend of his up to the new house for a few days for the pre-season friendlies. As soon as I was up north, I withdrew £10,000 from the bank, stuck £4,000 of it on a Scottish football accumulator and lost it. Next day I lumped on Dewsbury, a second-tier rugby league team, to win a match against Leigh by 20 points. They were too obscure for regular Teletext updates so I took to ringing up the lady on the club’s switchboard for the score every few minutes. They were 20 points up at half-time but the opposition fought back and gradually whittled the lead down. It was 26–18 at the final whistle but I had already slammed the phone down on her for the final time by then, ending a sequence of increasingly agitated calls with ‘What a load of crap your team is.’ I pulled myself back from the brink for a few days, but after I’d taken the boys home to St Albans, I was on my own, rattling round a big, empty house, antsy and with nothing and no one to restrain me. I was off the leash.

I joined Gazza and Chris Waddle and some mates of theirs on a charity golf day and when Gazza offered me a swig from a bottle of schnapps he had stashed in his golf bag, I took it. There was a rage that came over me that had been brewing for months and the booze was like a release valve.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.