When comedian and podcaster John Robins looks back at 30 years of drinking, his impulse is to recall the good times. He’ll remember the lubricated dinners out with friends or the “perfect pint in the perfect pub”, he says. “I tend to forget the 99 per cent of times where it was just me, alone and hating myself.”
Robins, who has been sober since November 2022, has written a memoir documenting his life in alcohol and path to sobriety. Bracingly candid and darkly funny, Thirst is a far cry from the radio shows and podcasts in which Robins and friends used to jovially detail boozy nights out. Instead, the book goes deep into the bad times as it recalls the drinks that both shaped and nearly destroyed him and shines a light on the dangerous spell cast by booze.
Those drinks include the bottle of Jacob’s Creek wine left out by Robins’ mother on the kitchen worktop that he helped himself to aged seven, disguising it with orange juice. There’s also his recreation, while on tour in 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 Robins spent the next day “throwing up a luminous yellow bile”, he remained in denial, attributing the vomiting not to the vodka but the milk.
