A guy is walking home from the pub, it is late and dark, and he lives way across town. There is a short cut, but it takes him through the old graveyard and he doesn't fancy it. He is standing by the gates, trying to make his mind up whether to go in or not, when he hears a voice coming towards him. “Seventy-eight,” says the voice, “seventy-eight...”

They two almost bump into one another and the approaching stranger asks the man why he is loitering around a cemetery at midnight. When told of his predicament, the stranger reveals that he used to be frightened of crossing the graveyard at night, too, but has recently come up with the idea of repeating a comforting thought as he walks. He says it has really helped. “Like now,” he explains, “I'm coming home from my grandmother's birthday party, and she was 78. So I keep saying 78 to myself. You should try it.” So they set off together between the headstones, the stranger in front and the man behind, taking it in turns, chanting their little mantra.

“Seventy-eight...” “...seventy eight...” “Seventy-eight... is this working for you?” “Oh, yes, quite a lot... seventy-eight...” And the man completely forgets about his fear of the graveyard right up until the moment when the stranger swings round and, his eyes blazing his homicidal madness, brings down a claw hammer on the man's skull, pounding and pounding until there is nothing left but a viscous mess of blood and brains and bone.

And as the stranger disappears again into the darkness, his voice echoes through the night: “Seventy-nine... seventy-nine...”

Paul Gascoigne loved that joke. It was so black, and he told it really well. He probably identified with the main character, too. Paul didn't like the dark either; or flying; or wasps; or silence; or numerical disorder. And he would definitely have enjoyed the repetition involved in narrating it. He loved repetition. He used to drive up the motorway, counting the same number between every road light. He would have to tap the steering wheel ten times before reaching the next one. And this was when he was well.

And that is the thing with Paul. He hasn't been dictionary-definition well for a long time. He has been celebrity well, which means half-mad but we love it, the way we love photographs of Amy Winehouse getting wasted.

Alex, the widow of George Best, recalled how her husband's alcohol addiction became almost a spectator sport because of our increasingly bizarre relationship with fame and the famous. Word would get round that George was in a pub and suddenly it would be packed. People would be jostling to get close enough to say they shared a drink with George Best; a drink everybody knew was killing him. And now we mythologise his life to make believe it was one long party, surrounded by all his friends.

I took George to see Manchester United play Southampton once, and he insisted on sitting in the back of the car because in the passenger seat he would be too easily recognised. That is not the behaviour of a man craving company. We had to stop at an off-licence so he could buy a six-pack of strong lager because he could not face a 90-minute journey without drink. Southampton would not let us use the car park nearest the ground, so George had to walk through the crowd, which was what he had hoped to avoid.

At his funeral, when Sir Alex Ferguson said of Best “a million memories, all of them good” he was erasing the million more that ended in a right-hander or a hospital admission. He drank himself to death at the age of 59, but that is edited, too.

“George was a very morose character,” said his biographer, Joe Lovejoy. “He would start off fine, but would quickly become depressed. He would leave the dinner table and that was the last you saw of him. The food would be sitting there untouched, and George would be gone. A sad man.”

The reasons behind the decision to section Gascoigne under the Mental Health Act this week were threefold. Certainly, he is a danger to himself with his suicidal thoughts, and that makes him potentially dangerous to the public, too; yet we are also a danger to him. A mad alcoholic does not need people buying him a drink and, under normal circumstances, this would not be an issue. Derelicts living beneath railway arches do not spend the day fielding invitations from strangers to go to the pub. Gascoigne does and, seeking desperately the attention of his playing days - and the hangers-on are all that is left of them - he accepts. Hey, that is his weakness, I know; but it is ours, too, because if you saw a man in the street trying to hang himself, you wouldn't offer to help out by getting a stronger rope.

Best made it easy for everybody by politely allowing the falsehood to perpetuate that his was a cheerful end. If Gascoigne's present journey ends at the cemetery, too, there can be no pretence. And unlike his favourite joke, no punch-line, either, to distract from the bloody mess.

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