A memoir chronicling the comic and broadcaster John Robins’s life in alcohol and his subsequent path to sobriety, Thirst is structured around the drinks that changed his life. There’s the bottle of Jacob’s Creek wine left out on a kitchen worktop which he helped himself to at the age of seven, secreting it into his orange juice, and the beer given to him at scout camp which he drank alone. There’s also his stomach-churning recreation, while on a comedy tour of Australia, of the white russians drunk by the Dude in The Big Lebowski using a gallon of milk, a litre of vodka and a bottle of Kahlua.
As an adult, Robins, who is best known for his shows on Radio X and on BBC5 Live, romanticised pubs, which he saw as places of peacefulness and refuge. He even co-hosted the podcast The Moon Under Water where he invited guests to describe their ideal pub. Robins reveals that what kept him drinking for so long was the lie that he was in control. That he could, on occasion, get through a Dry January convinced him he couldn’t be an addict, although he got a wakeup call when a GP told him to “sort your fucking life out”.
Robins is our narrator and his reading, much like his prose, is heartfelt, darkly funny, sometimes self-lacerating and full of sage advice born from bruising experience. Currently sober, he must now grapple with the depression from which alcohol was shielding him. “I can thank alcohol for trying to step in,” he notes “but remind it that its services are no longer required, that I’ll take it from here.”
• Thirst: Twelve Drinks That Changed My Life is available via Penguin Audio, 11hr 36min
Further listening
The Land and Its People
David Sedaris, Little, Brown, 7hr 26min
The latest essay collection from the humorist was recorded live in front of an audience in Massachusetts and features reflections on his late mother, an anti-Trump protest in New Hampshire and the trials of looking after his partner, Hugh, after a hip operation.
The Book of Records
Madeleine Thien, Granta, 13hr 50min
Richard Lam, Athena Karkanis and Scott Turner Schofield are among the narrators of the fourth novel from the Dogs at the Perimeter author. It sees an ailing father and his daughter reflect on their past as they arrive at a remote migratory outpost called “the sea”.
