The account
He has filled time badly, and knows what that is like.
Who he is
James Roberts, born in Manchester in February 1976. Nearly twenty years in travel and hospitality recruitment, latterly running a firm of twenty, meeting and interviewing men all over the world. He drank daily from eighteen to forty-five, went into residential treatment in Cheshire in June 2020, and has not drunk since. He moved to Tenerife that December, ran a small BnB there for five years and sold it.
He is not a clinician, therapist, counsellor, coach or scientist, and holds no qualification in anything on this site.
Who you are talking to
I have been in a lot of rooms.
Most of them with other men. Some of them very ordinary, a few of them not ordinary at all. Every one of them taught me how to listen.
- 01
Thousands of men
Nearly twenty years of recruiting, all over the world. Men at the top of their game, men on the way out, and every one in between.
- 02
Unusual housemates
I have shared a home with a man who had done time, and with a journalist who wrote for the Daily Sport and the News of the World. Neither was dull.
- 03
Famous company
I have spent time with a Premier League footballer and a pop star. Same questions, same worries, better shoes.
- 04
Half the planet
I have navigated half the world and never once been punched. Polite and cheeky, in that order.
- 05
Any room, same man
As happy in a trailer as on a stag do. I have seen in the New Year with a prince, and another with a sheikh.
- 06
Other men’s stories
I take inspiration from other people and live a little through them, in a happy and healthy way. Then I make my own judgement.
I can sit with any man, in any room, and be myself. That is what I bring to the conversation.
James Roberts, Tenerife
Why this subject
He says plainly that he cannot go long without a purpose, and that when he has not had one he has made one. The guides in this network were built for himself before anybody else read them, which is the honest account of why they exist.
Twenty-seven years of daily drinking is, among other things, a way of filling time. That is his own account of it and not a template for anybody, and this site does not advise on drinking in any direction.
His view of the era
He holds that we got ahead of ourselves as animals, and that natural selection will reset. It is on its own page, marked clearly as his view rather than a finding, because it is a belief and not something anyone can demonstrate.
One man's account of one life. Not a route, not a method, and not a prediction about you.