I was never arrested for drink driving during the 22 years that I consumed alcohol. I was never considered by the authorities to be an unfit parent, or sacked from a job due to turning up drunk. I didn’t develop liver disease or fall down the stairs whilst inebriated.

But I did spend the best part of two decades carrying around a niggling suspicion that I had a ‘problem with booze’. Strangely enough, every time I went on a big night out with friends, I was utterly convinced that I would be able to control my consumption and not end up in the gutter. Sometimes this was the case. But more often than not it wasn’t, and I would invariably find myself involved in countless regrettable incidents as a result of my inability to locate a reliable, internal off-switch.

I once woke up beneath a tree in Hyde Park in the early hours of the morning following a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert, to find two policemen looking curiously down at me. I have no idea what happened during the previous few hours, other than I’d become separated from my boyfriend and missed the entire gig. I quickly discovered upon waking that, in addition to misplacing my boyfriend, I had also lost my phone and my purse.

Another time, I lost an entire nine hours to a total blackout after storming off from my then-boyfriend at a party. I returned to find him at the house where the party had been held the following morning, his head in his hands, convinced something awful had happened to me. It could well have: my memory between 10pm and 7am of that night is non-existent.

I recalled my history with booze recently when I read the stories in the media about Ant McPartlin, who happens to be my age, being charged for drink-driving, a consequence of which was that a small child involved in the three-car collision was taken to hospital. Some of the media coverage was vicious: Shamed Ant McPartlin in Lockdown chastised one headline. Ant McPartlin needs to get a grip, fast added another.

“The Ant McPartlin case proves we have double standards around drinking”