A lone nun sold hot dogs in the steps of Lima cathedral. Grubby hands grabbed as the crowd swayed backwards and forwards like a bunch of drunks in a packed pub on a Friday night. Intoxicated by religion or just hungry, they were certainly enthusiastic. Special Brew often conjured up bizarre images for me. It seemed I didn’t need it here. A month out of rehab and twelve hours in Peru, I was viewing this strange sight sober. My decision to come to South America looked like it was paying off already. After ten years of illusion and delusion, I had at last found somewhere that had a sober laugh at every street corner and a culture that made me think not drink. In a Swindon kitchen six months earlier with a knife wound beading claret on my wrist, planet earth seemed far away let alone the bizarre experiences of Peru’s capital. My attempted suicide opened the door to a confusing chain of events that saw me enter the dead end world of mental care. No one, least of all me, understood what was going on. Failed treatments, twenty-four hour drinking and a throat blocked with pills led me down a spiral staircase I fell at the foot of. Star studded clinics and Ketamine crushed closed wards soon became my territory. Sucked in by the system I was eventually spat out across the Atlantic to Cusco, high in the Andes and the place I chose to make home. Swapping continents may seem like escape, but distance from the life that crushed me and the drink I chose to use as a cage seemed like a good idea. Plenty of people have written plenty of words about their alcoholic experiences, whitewashed wards, beatings at the hands of their family, waking up on a bench in a pool of vomit. I only did the whitewashed wards, but my tale tells of how I stepped out of the baffling world of addiction into the confusing country of Peru. So it’s not a get well quick course of anecdotes for the problem drinker, nor is it a series of funny drinking stories. It’s not even a travelogue about the wonders of Latin America. It’s about how knocking back 32000 cans of Special Brew and bagfuls of pills changed my life, firstly for the worst, secondly for the better. I’m no expert on alcoholism or any other form of addiction and I didn’t find redemption in God or a ‘higher power’. But what I do know about is me, what I did, how I did it and how I came back from that blood dripping wrist to stand in awe opposite a crowd of Peruvians clamouring fast food from a holy habited convent girl. Knowing myself and my previous self I am sat here now in awe too, how did I get here? Below me the red roofs of the Inca capital stretch out beneath the Andes and I’m sipping Inca Kola, writing this and wondering why I’m alive and not dead like so many others who trod the same route to the off licence as I did. I am always a whisper away from going back to square one and that thought, coupled with my miraculous salvation, is blurring my view of Cusco. Whereas before, drink made the simplest thing shimmer in front of my eyes but smothered every feeling, emotion now wells up easily after my long and painful trek. No matter how beautiful that mad town down the mountain looks, I can see the black clouds of the past hovering over Machu Picchu, the place I dreamt about when the rain fell before. As therapy clawed and pored its way through my past the Inca city provided me with a target to aim for. I was always good at missing targets in my former life, this time around a new determination into a future. There was no abuse in my childhood for me to look back on and I married my childhood sweetheart. Life was steady, maybe too steady for me, almost certainly too boring for me. Trapped on all sides I disappeared into a seemingly endless spiral of drink, desperate to escape but not knowing how and doubting my survival chances. I was hell bent on self destruction and nearly achieved it, a unique rehab pointed the way, but the arrow pointed in no particular direction, that I had to choose myself. Six months locked away, followed by six weeks in South America, followed by the rest of my life, sounds simple, but the road was stony and I did most of it in bare feet. My alcoholic routine was, however, straightforward, its consequences were not. For a decade, each morning of my life started the same way. A dive to the bathroom, if I was lucky a wet retch, most often a painful dry one. Then a search for last nights hiding place, behind a book, in my golf bag, briefcase or stashed inside my computer printer. Over the years my storage methods became more and more sophisticated but with my brain cells evaporating, I more often than not forgot the previous night’s inventiveness. Once I had located it, my opening drink of the day stayed down for the first seven years, after that it gushed back up. What a waste. Then I would prepare breakfast, Bacardi and Orange Juice - a pint. This ‘health’ kick was even more painful, the pithy fruit clogging my throat as it surged back out, often bringing with it the handful of pills I’d taken too. Another Special Brew calmed the tremors, the one after that got me fit to drive. If I risked a third can, there was always time for more and by then brief happiness shone through my permanent depression. By now time was moving on and I had to get to work so I went to the car and got out with the mints and cough candy, my shield against awkward workplace questions. If I puked up again in the car, as I often did, I had to restart the camouflaging, more mouthwash, more aftershave and a lunchtime visit to the dry cleaners with my yellow stained suit. Auto pilot took me where I had to go, the car’s occasional weaving from kerb to kerb the only give away, that a loaded alcoholic was in charge of the vehicle. Passing the local infants school I slowed, no matter how much alcohol was on board I still realised the consequences of one false move with the lollipop lady. Then I would arrive at work and sit in the gents for fifteen minutes, the Bacardi making my head spin, the Special Brew heating my face. A silent dive into my office followed, along with the hope that there would be no human contact for an hour or so whilst I attempted to compose myself. Getting the work done was always problematic, phone calls were especially difficult, the fug in my head making me forget I’d made or received them. What I could figure out I repeated, duplicating work, duplicating days, the same slog, the same slug of booze, the same spinning, day on day on day. By lunchtime my quivers had come back and it was off home to stabilise them. I tried to only drink Special Brew, masked by a garlic and onion sandwich and more sweets. On rare occasions some red wine made its way in too but that just loaded up my depression and argumentative side, I avoided it, it drew attention to me. I wanted to be invisible.