The account
Thousands of men, one hour at a time.
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. That work meant sitting opposite men in many countries, one at a time, for an hour, asking about their lives.
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 and ran a small BnB there for five years before selling it.
He is not a clinician, therapist, counsellor, coach or mediator, 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 he is the one who noticed
An interview is a strange vantage point. The man opposite is composed, being assessed, and telling you about his life in an hour. Do that for twenty years across four continents and the pattern is not in what men say, which varies. It is in what is missing everywhere, which does not.
What was missing was the sound. He does not present that as research, and it is not. It is what one man saw from an unusual seat.
His own part in it
He laughs out loud, often, and says it is not something he arranges. He gets stared at for it and does not know whether that is the laughing or something else. The question is left open here because he cannot honestly answer it.
Twenty-seven years of daily drinking is also, among other things, twenty-seven years of contact without much connection. That is his own account of it, not a template, and this site does not advise on drinking in any direction.
Why the guides exist
He built the guides in this network for himself before anybody else read them, which is the honest account of why they exist.
One man's account of one life. Not a route, not a method, and not a prediction about you.