It makes us ill and tastes quite strange, but there seems to be no end to our fascination with alcohol, even as we get older. Looser inhibitions, sure . . . but most often that ends up in a mess of slights and rows.

One morning in the summer, after a big night left me with the most paralysing hangover of my life, I knew something had to change. It started exactly the way it did for Bertie Wooster in The Code of the Woosters, his waking preceded by a dream in which “some bounder was driving spikes through my head”. For me, it was the actual sound of engineers working on the road with that pneumatic, pro-hangover equipment they use.

Bertie at least had the ministrations of Jeeves, a butler always ready with his patent morning reviver to ease the hell of a head in torment. Not knowing the recipe, I spent the day on that delicate moonwalk as two people, neither quite able to catch up with the other.

As the day wore on I — we — found myself — ourselves — making a promise. No more. It sounded easy to accomplish. I was by no means a heavy drinker, comfortably within the recommended 21 units a week, although certainly a habitual one. I felt at ease with the prospect of ceasing altogether, despite nearly 30 years of steady, almost daily imbibing.

What I realised that dispiriting day was how my ability to drink alcohol far outstripped my skill at recovering from its consequences and the stresses they caused, the demons of doubt about almost every aspect of life that came racing in, were just not worth it.

The plain truth was that at 47 I was half the drinker I was at 27. My headaches were worse and my ability to bounce back had vanished. No amount of pills and rehydration could coax it back again.

But now, as the weeks wear on into months, I realise something, the loneliness of the long-distance teetotaller; how hard mixing with people becomes when you give up drink, how much of the way we conduct life is lubricated by alcohol and dependent upon it being there in some form.

A recent evening ended with somebody to whom I had just been introduced calling the waitress a “servant” to her face as he, an unemployed computer technician of apparently mild disposition, demanded a beer they had run out of even though they featured it on the drinks list. He had drunk just two pints of beer earlier, and that proved enough to find himself amusing and fearless, but to leave me paralysed by embarrassment at his unspeakable rudeness.

Everybody knows why people drink and a review a few years ago of by the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford of more than 5,000 studies and research documents confirmed the obvious: for calm, animation and euphoria.

No wonder non-drinking gets such a bad rap. Just look at the role models, invariably thin on the ground and often overbearingly serious, even slightly priggish. Tony Benn, for example, with his passion for tea and a grimmer type of socialism (no sugars, I bet). There is purpose to no drinking, and it unsettles those who continue to do so.

Two well-received books celebrating alcohol were published this summer. The Longest Crawl, by Ian Marchant, and Three Sheets to the Wind by Pete Brown. Both attempt to tell the story of society through how we drink, and each celebrates drinking as part of that society. It is hard to imagine their publisher commissioning, say, “The Longest Lemonade”, or “Stone-Cold Sober: My Life In Control”. There is no excitement there. We are conditioned to accept that drinking alcohol makes us whole, that it alone can soothe and explain us to ourselves.

No wonder we find it hard to just stop without feeling strange. Dr Derek Lee, consultant clinical psychologist with the Bedfordshire and Luton NHS partnership, specialises in helping the very worst cases of alcohol abuse and thinks the difficulty is cultural. “It’s our recreational drug of choice and more, just think of wine at Communion and alcohol being present at any kind of social occasion and celebration,” he says.

“It’s the drug we use to mark milestones and important events. It’s legal, available and about 90 per cent of the population allowed to drink probably does.”

No wonder I am finding it so hard. “One of the first things to go for people who need to be abstinent is their social life. It disappears, because people they hang around with are used to meeting for drinks and accustomed to them. They need to have excuses, such as ‘I’m driving’ or ‘I’m on antibiotics,’ even though it should be the other way around,” Lee adds.

Healthy non-car owners may find the traditional excuses insufficient. Lee recommends other courses of action. “Insist on buying your own drinks. If you have more than one, intersperse them with non-alcoholic ones. Don’t hold your glass, put it down regularly; eat while drinking and do not get caught up in rounds — that’s when people get really carried away.”

All this is easily said. Pubs and bars may offer a range of non-alcoholic alternatives, but most do so with the grudging generosity that a restaurant specialising in steaks offers a vegetarian option.

What the country needs is juice bars, not wholemeal places for earnest vegans, but places to hang out in and talk, a Starbucks for soft drinks, in every town. This would be a way to draw the sting out of not drinking and give a third space for people away from work and home, something that non-drinking nations understand already. It worked for coffee.