About · Who wrote this site
About James Roberts
I drank every day for twenty-seven years. I stopped on 20 June 2020. This site exists because almost nothing I read in the first year of sobriety told me the truth.
The dates
I was born in Manchester in February 1976. I am 50.
My parents were strict. I did not drink before university. I made up for it after.
From 18 to 45 — every day. Some days a glass. Most days a bottle. Some days more. Twenty-seven years.
I was a functioning alcoholic. I ran a headhunting firm of twenty staff, placing executives across travel and hospitality, in offices and hotel bars from London to Dubai to Cape Town. I made money. I kept friends. I drank through all of it.
Functioning alcoholism is a major issue for my generation. Most of us are still drinking. Some of us are dead. A few of us got out.
The medical detox was not optional. Stopping a twenty-seven-year drinking habit without medical supervision can kill you. Seizures, delirium tremens, cardiac complications. If you are a daily drinker, do not detox at home alone. The page on dangerous withdrawal signs on this site explains why, with sources.
June 2020
I went into Delamere in Cheshire in June 2020. Four weeks residential. Medical detox, then the rest of it.
I have not had a drink since.
I am not going to write a redemption arc here. Rehab is not a cure. It bought me a structured month away from alcohol with people who knew what they were doing. The work was after.
Why that place, and not one nearer
I could have gone somewhere closer to home. At the money private treatment costs, geography stops being the constraint people assume it is — a flight is a rounding error against a four-week fee, and almost every decent clinic takes people who arrive from somewhere else. That is worth knowing early, because most men start by looking at what is within an hour of the house and quietly rule out the thing that would actually have fitted.
I chose Delamere for two reasons. Their practice was different from the others I looked at, and the place was modern and clean rather than a grand house with a brochure. The second reason is the one nobody writes down: I knew most of the staff would be northern English, like me. Four weeks is a long time to be understood on a delay. Who will be in the room with you — how they speak, what they assume about you, whether you will have to explain yourself first — matters more than the photographs, and it is a legitimate thing to ask a clinic about before you book.
Tenerife
In December 2020 I moved to Tenerife and bought a finca outside Icod de los Vinos. I called it Casa Salvia — salvia is sage in Spanish. I burnt sage in the mornings.
Casa Salvia ran as a 9.7-rated BnB for several years. I hosted guests in recovery from many walks of life. I ran sober golf events. I sold the BnB recently.
I do not currently live in the UK. My clothes are still in a house in Scotland I have not been back to. My ex-husband has visited me here. He has supported me through this in a way no money could buy. Genuine love. That part of the story is not finished.
The second vantage point
The 2020 stay taught me what treatment is like from the inside, for one man, once. Casa Salvia taught me something different and, for this site, more useful.
A good number of the people who came through that house were in recovery — from several countries, at every stage from a few weeks out to a decade in, some of them open about it on arrival and some of them not. I was not their clinician and I was not their sponsor. I was the man making the breakfast, which turns out to be a position you learn a great deal from. The sober golf sounds like a joke and is not: structure, other people, and something to do at six in the evening.
What those years showed me is that recovery is mostly ordinary life, held together by arrangements nobody else notices, and that the arrangements which work are rarely the ones in the literature. They also cured me of the idea that this is a British subject. The men and women at that table had gone through very different systems, at very different prices, and arrived at roughly the same set of problems.
Why this site exists
In the first year of sobriety I was the buyer rehabs want.
I had money. I had panic. I had a family who wanted me fixed. I read everything. Most of what I read was written by people selling something — a rehab bed, a programme, a book, a sponsorship pipeline.
The honest information existed. It was buried. NICE guidelines, peer-reviewed papers, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, NHS pages. Not optimised for Google. Not written for someone in week one.
the male.guide network is my attempt to put the honest version where the buying happens.
- sober.guide — for the person who has stopped drinking, or is trying to
- partner.guide — for the person living with a drinker
- theirdrinking.guide — for the parent, sibling, child watching it from outside the house
- lovedone.guide — for the family member trying to help
- discharge.guide — for the days after rehab ends
- relapse.guide — for the day after the slip
Each site has a bot. The bot will not invent a rehab name, a phone number, or a price. The encyclopedia pages are written in plain English with sources you can check.
What I am not
I am not a doctor. I am not a therapist. I am not a counsellor. I am not in recovery as a profession.
I am a man who drank for twenty-seven years, stopped, and built the resource I wish had existed in June 2020.
If you need medical advice, see a doctor. If you are in crisis, the crisis links on every page are never paywalled and never will be.
How this is funded
the male.guide network is independent. No rehab pays me. No broker pays me. No referral fee comes to me from any clinic mentioned anywhere on these sites. I have no financial interest in any treatment facility, broker, or referral business.
The bots are paywalled past a free conversation length because running them costs money. The encyclopedia, the crisis routes, and the directory information are free and will stay free.
If a clinic ever pays for placement, the page will say so at the top in plain English. That has not happened and is not planned.
The line
I am unique. But this is the truth.
We all are.
— James Roberts
Manchester, by way of Cheshire, Tenerife, and a few other places. Last reviewed April 2026. Nothing on this page is medical advice.