The account
Thousands of men, one hour at a time.
Who he is
James Roberts, born in Manchester in February 1976. More than 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.
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.