By ALICE KING

Last updated at 00:51 22 February 2008

My first taste of champagne - I have been told - was at my christening, a golden drop from the tip of my mother's little finger.

Yes, as far back as I can remember, I loved champagne.

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Fading fuzz: Alice King seemed to have an ideal life, but she was succumbing to alcoholism

Those dancing bubbles are the froth of daydreams. In reality we weren't affluent enough to drink it on a regular basis, though my father, a wine shipper, conjured it up for every Christening - and there were nine of us children.

I was fascinated by my father's job.

While my classmates would write lovingly of their pets, I was soaking the labels off wine bottles and teaching my friends how to differentiate between a Bordeaux and Burgundy bottle from its shape.

As I grew up, it became clear I had a talent for tasting wine.

After taking a course in journalism, I got a job as an editorial assistant on Decanter, "the world's finest wine magazine".

I quickly rose through the ranks and by the age of 22 had become deputy editor.

My inexperience didn't faze me.

I was determined to taste as many wines as possible, and simply couldn't pull the corks fast enough.

I was just 21 when I had gone to interview Niall, a flamboyant wine merchant with a shop in Hungerford, Berkshire. He seemed to have achieved a lot in his 27 years.

He had his own company and was an accomplished musician. He knew about wine and had a shop full of it. I was fascinated.

We fell in love quickly and six months later bought a cottage together in a village just outside Hungerford.

Six months after that, we were married. We honeymooned on the Isle of Mull.

I packed two cases of champagne with my trousseau.

Back home and settling into married life, not a day passed without us sharing a bottle or two over supper.

It was perfectly normal to talk, write, taste and drink wine all day at work, then come home and carry on.

Our marriage was passionate.

Fireworks were commonplace in such a volatile, wine-fuelled environment.

But I loved Niall with an intensity I didn't understand.

I worked hard and began to travel extensively.

I enjoyed the life of a cosseted journalist, treated to the best of everything - first-class tickets, the best wines, restaurants and hotels.

Then one day, after catching a very early flight after a weeklong tour of chateaux in Bordeaux with Niall, I noticed that my left hand was shaking. How bizarre. Jet lag, maybe.

With two incomes and no children, we got wrapped up in the "more, more" culture of the early Eighties and soon bought a larger property in Hungerford - Avon House, a majestic, fourstorey, 19-room Victorian townhouse - even though our cottage hadn't yet sold.

I liked to party until I dropped, but I'd sometimes catch myself feeling sad, empty and alone, particularly if we'd spent time with a happy, relaxed couple or family - who weren't drinking and arguing as much as we were.

In recovery: Alice King, after she gave up drinking, in reflection

It was around this time that, after going to one particularly drunken party without Niall, I woke to find myself naked in bed in a stranger's spare bedroom. Shocked, it took me quite some time to work out where I was and how I'd got there.

Eventually, I realised that after leaving the party and failing to get into the friends' house that I was supposed to be staying in (it turned out I had been trying the wrong door), I had taken a cab back to the party - only to find everyone had gone to bed.

Even though it was 5am, I rang all the bells in the apartment block in which they lived until one of the neighbours let me in.

When we still couldn't rouse the party hosts, the neighbour had suggested I sleep in his spare room. I had never met him before and no one knew where I was.

Embarrassed and horrified by my recklessness, I vowed never to drink so much again.

But it was a vow I couldn't keep.

Nothing beats the thrill of your first book, of seeing your name on the cover. Winewise was published in 1987, when I was just 26, and generated huge publicity, with newspaper and magazine reviews, plus radio and TV interviews and appearances.

It was all heady stuff, but underneath I was terrified. I would throw up from nerves before going in front of the television cameras, rewarding myself with a large drink or six when I returned home.

All this publicity resulted in a column in this newspaper followed by other columns in glossy magazines.

Several magazines ran profiles on my lifestyle - even my marriage.

Sometimes they interviewed Niall and me together.

Asked for my recipe for a successful marriage, I answered: "To love, honour and laugh."

Increasingly, though, I wasn't laughing.

There were rows at home.

I would wake up most mornings with my heart racing, in addition to the usual hangover.

We had borrowed money from my father to pay for Avon House and I was worried about the repayments. Wine was the only thing that calmed my nerves.

Then, in 1992 I discovered I was pregnant.

I had always planned on having children, I just hadn't quite decided when.

But after we had got over the initial shock, Niall and I were delighted.

During the pregnancy I cut down on drinking - at most allowing myself a glass a day - and for a time things seemed to get better.

We had two more children in quick succession, but they couldn't paper over the cracks in our relationship.

We were arguing constantly and Niall's business was in trouble.

A couple of times, suppliers knocked on our door demanding money. I reacted by pouring myself another glass of wine.

My tolerance for alcohol became unpredictable.

I would be drunk when I didn't think I should be, and often felt extremely sick.

In 1994, Niall's company stuttered to a stop.

I had to work to keep us afloat, but the more I was out, the more irritable Niall seemed to become.

We tried marriage guidance, but it seemed to drive us further apart. In 1997, only months after our third child was born, we split.

To my great distress, Niall - who had moved into a smaller local home while I stayed in Avon House - married again within a year of our divorce.

Even though I had wanted a divorce, it still hurt.

I remember bumping into his new wife one day, when she was with my kids.

The pain was so bad, I went on a three-day bender.

It was the only way I knew how to quell my feelings of anger and hurt.

I had a string of affairs and one-night-stands. Some I ended up seeing for a few months and made me feel better about myself.

Others just left me depressed and often embarrassed by my drunken behaviour.

Then in 2001, I was forced to sell Avon House.

An incometax demand for £46,000 was one thing; no income to pay it with was another.

I barely even had enough to pay my mortgage.

Worse still, all my work had dried up.

I'd had a lucrative contract with Tesco as a consultant, but they'd recently declined to renew it and my income had nose-dived.

All right, I had got horribly drunk at one corporate dinner. Embarrassing.

Not a good plan. Actually, I couldn't remember much about it, so didn't know how bad I'd been.

The children seemed unrattled by it all, but they were young and I shielded them from as much as possible.

Instead, I decided I no longer needed such a large home and used the money from the house sale to pay off my debts and the taxman.

But cash-strapped, I'd gone from owning the biggest house in the street to renting the smallest.

Any capital I had was disappearing fast at the bottom of the glass.

My stomach was hurting and my back ached continuously.

I thought that perhaps I' d picked up some kind of bug somewhere.

Every time I went to the loo, bright green or yellow liquid poured out of me. My mother asked me if I thought it was to do with my drinking.

"Don't be stupid!" I snapped. I didn't drink that much. I'd always had a weak stomach.

Only one thing for it, one thing that could take away the dull ache in my back - neat vodka, straight from the freezer.

I prided myself on not taking painkillers.

By 2004, things had reached an all-time low.

One morning I woke up in a police cell.

After dropping the kids at their father's I had driven to a local restaurant where I'd downed two bottles of Montepulciano before deciding to visit a man who had recently dumped me.

The police caught me trying to drive my car out of the restaurant car park.

When I was finally let out of the police station after eight hours, I had the shakes. Instead of going home, I headed straight for Café Rouge and ordered a large glass of red.

And another. I was on my fourth when a friend arrived to pick me up.

I received a year's ban, to be reduced to nine months if I agreed to attend a drink-awareness course on Saturday mornings.

There were 14 of us on the "naughty course", as I came to call it.

We would carry on our research in the pub afterwards.

I had been seeing a therapist for five years, since my divorce from Niall.

She was always talking about me taking responsibility and not blaming everyone else for my perceived misfortunes - for the mess my life was in.

And it was a mess - my drinking was out of control.

I had no money, no work, no self-respect. I couldn't hide from that any longer, not even in a glass.

One afternoon in January 2005, when the kids were with Niall, I left my therapy session and headed straight to a bar.

I was standing there, just about to start on my second glass of rosé when I felt hot, my legs went weak, the pub went fuzzy... and the world went out.

I came to on the floor, with the publican looking at me in shocked concern.

I could taste blood in my mouth. Apparently, I had gone down like a felled tree.

I told the paramedics I was fine.

I was more embarrassed than anything else. I wasn't even drunk - not on one glass of rosé, surely?

I took a taxi home and went straight to my bedroom.

I looked in the mirror and was horrified - my skin was grey and my eyes bloodshot. There was a chip on my front tooth and a scrape on my forehead.

I must have banged my head when I fell.

At that moment I realised: "It's true - I am responsible for my life.

"No one else. I can't keep doing this to myself. I can't keep drinking. I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."

I decided to stop drinking. Only total abstinence was going to get my life back.

I had been too unreliable for too long - always trying to find someone to pick up the boys from nursery or school because I was drunk.

If I did get to the school, I'd avoid other parents in case they noticed I could barely stand.

My idea of a day out had been to take the boys to the pub - or leave someone to look after them while I went out.

It was hard.

At lunchtimes and 6pm, drink-trigger times, I'd pace round the garden or find something to keep me busy.

I felt relieved and bereft at the same time - but once past the first week it was a joy to fall asleep rather than pass out.

On week five, I was asked to do a water-tasting piece for TV.

We filmed it locally, and I got chatting to a man I knew from the village.

Martin was a recovering alcoholic and suggested I go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with him.

In my eyes I wasn't an alcoholic, of course, but reasoned that since I wasn't drinking anyway, I might as well go to AA.

During the meeting, people told their stories - and the similarities to my situation, my feelings, my drinking were scary.

I thought back over my life, realising that every time something had happened I hadn't felt comfortable with, my reaction had been to have a drink.

Was I really like these people?

My mind went back over one man's story, how he had kidded himself for years that he didn't have a problem.

The signs were there for others to see, he said, but he had been blind to them.

Was I like that?

Surely it was just bad luck, losing all that work? And losing my driving licence was a case of wrong place, wrong time. Wasn't it?

At home, I lay in bed, thinking about the meeting. I felt something I hadn't felt since... oh, I couldn't remember when. Hope.

At the next meeting, I listened to a woman describe her symptoms - then explain how, by accepting her alcoholism and staying sober, she now had a wonderful relationship with her children.

In that second, I realised with horror that I had been an absent mother, that alcohol had become my all-consuming baby.

I was not here by accident - I was an alcoholic.

It is now three years since I had my last drink - supported by AA, I have managed to turn my life around completely.

Now I drink tea instead of alcohol and exercise or read instead of spending endless hours in the pub.

I'm still single, but that's not important.

I'm there for my children, friends and family, who no longer have to worry about my drinking and my health - I'm no longer out of breath, suffering from the shakes and having kidney pains.

If ever I feel like a drink I pick up the phone, not a bottle, and talk. I feel blessed to have rediscovered me.

• Adapted from High Sobriety: Confessions Of A Drinker by Alice King, published by Orion on March 13 at £16.99. ° Alice King 2008.