I’d had the perfect childhood – what was it about me that made me an alcoholic?

While some link certain personality traits to addiction , one woman puts it down to “something in the brain that means we’re unable to stop”. Alison Sharpe, 68, had an idyllic childhood in the Surrey market town of Staines. She grew up in “very much an open house, with friends and relatives stopping by on weekends and holidays ”, and Sundays were spent at the local sailing club where she crewed with her father.

There was a well-stocked bar in the corner of the sitting room, where her parents would entertain, but they weren’t alcoholics – her father, who liked to drink, “would always know when to stop”. But three decades ago she walked into a room full of rough-looking young men, all gathered for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and felt “an immediate identification”. By her 30s she had become a high-flying marketing manager, and some of them had recently been to prison.

It was Sharpe’s first time at the group, but she felt no need to come back to a later evening session “where there would be more ladies”. “Even with that small bunch of young men, I knew the minute I walked through those doors that I was in the right place with the right people,” she says. For years she had been keeping up with her male colleagues in the pub after work or at boozy lunches, later drinking on her own first thing in the morning, simply because last night’s bottle of wine needed finishing.

“These people understood where I was coming from,” she says. “Suddenl.