He went out for groceries. There was a bar next to the supermarket.

One beer, then I'll do the shopping.

He never got to the supermarket. It was open the whole time, forty steps away.

Jabulani Gwamuri has lost five jobs to alcohol across two continents. He has been walked to an airport by a hired guard. He has stood at a coffin too drunk to be consoled. He has woken to workdays he could not account for and read his own behaviour off the faces of colleagues who would not look at him.

This is not the book where he tells you how he beat it.

He has not beaten it. He writes from inside the fight rather than the far side of it, and he refuses to offer an ending he has not lived. What he gives instead is rarer: an honest account of what this costs, from a man still paying.

For the crew member drinking alone in a cabin. For the worker in a city that isn't home. For anyone who has made a small, reasonable promise to themselves and watched it fail.

I am not cured. I am not a success story yet. I am still fighting