I once smoked so many cones I didn't even know whose car I was illegally driving as I delivered our crew of giggling space cadets to the cricket.

I once spent a full week doing nothing but drinking obscene quantities of beer and sleeping on assorted people's couches.

I once ate the flesh of a raw cactus for no better reason than a friend, eerily Ozzy-like, told me it "fucks you up, man".

I once swallowed a pill of questionable composition and found to my irritation in the early hours of the morning that sleep was still far far away.

I hold no pretension to being "hardcore", but let it be known that I am not fundamentally opposed to chemical enhancement, and have been blessed in that my experience any negative consequences have been moderate and never lasting beyond a day.

But I now admit that my caffeine addiction is way out of control. I don't even drink coffee: I drink plain black tea in uncontroversial quantities. But deprived of it I am overcome with fatigue, laziness, headaches and depressed introversion. I would have been better off avoiding this drug from the first, but instead my dear mother has poisoned me with this dark filth for a quarter of my life.

I find the fact that such a bland, unremarkable substance exercises such totalitarian control over my daily existence to be unbearably tedious.

I don't know if anyone else is like this.