Will Self: PsychoGeography

Auk met me on the stairs and instructed me to hand my rucksack to a young woman who he claimed was the housekeeper. "She'll give it to the maid who will unpack it in your room and put out your clothes for dinner." The young woman smiled indulgently in a tight-lipped sort of way. Auk seemed in good form, as he ushered me into a cosy room where tea things were arrayed on a trestle table. "Try the fruit cake," he cried. "Mysteriously, they don't put sherry or Madeira in it but a little orange juice instead." Then he took me around the room introducing me to my "fellow guests".

"This is Gareth," he indicated a lithe young man in a silky tracksuit, resplendent with thick, gold bracelets and a chunky necklace. "He's something awfully important in the crack trade."

"Safe man," said Gareth, touching his tattooed knuckles to mine.

"And," Auk continued, "judging from his chain of office he appears to have a mayoralty." So it went on, as we went from genteel sherry-head to delinquent glue-tippler, Auk integrated them all into the fiction that this Palladian manor house, with its sunken gardens and its ha-ha, was in fact his country seat, rather than a residential treatment centre for drug addicts and alcoholics.

Still, in fairness to Auk, everyone gets the rehab he or she deserves. After all, the very term "rehabilitation" implies that recovery is to be judged by how far the patient believes themselves to be "at home". I well remember my own stint in rehab during the mid-1980s. The establishment was housed in the kind of large, Edwardian villa favoured by successful provincial businessmen, and stood on a modest eminence looking out over Weston-super-Mare.

I was so addled when I arrived, that for at least a fortnight I expected to be invited to form a bridge four, or join my fellow guests for a cocktail in the lounge. It was only the relentless group therapy and the allocation of "therapeutic tasks" - such as vacuuming and washing up - that finally convinced me of where I was. On arrival, my counsellor, a brisk young man in khaki chinos, said to me: "They call us brain-washers here, but we have to wash your brain because it's dirty." One of his colleagues regaled us with tales of his own self-maculation: "I used to get so bladdered," he fluted with his Welsh accent, "that I would piss on my own head. I was literally a piss-head."

This was light relief, because by far the worst thing about rehab was the confinement. For the first few weeks we weren't allowed out at all, and after that only escorted, in a crocodile of substance abusers, to the local shopping parade. Standing chomping sherbert lemons on the dismal Tarmac of a suburban playground, it occurred to me that the whole experience was - in psychogeographic terms - a ghastly reintegration with my own, privet-lined childhood. Once fully rehabilitated, I would doubtless become the certified accountant I was always meant to be before heroin ushered me into the gutter.

As the weeks of reclusion passed, Weston-super-Mare itself acquired a fantastical hue. Seen from the bow windows of the treatment centre it seemed a veritable Xanadu of pleasure domes, fertile gardens and sinuous rills. I couldn't wait to get down into it, and eventually, when I was allowed a day pass, its mean streets, decked out with garish, inflatable tat, were as exciting as any Manhattan.

No doubt WSM - like every other English resort town - is now a bustling and trendy burgh. But in the mid-1980s it had the dubious distinction of having one of the dirtiest beaches in Europe. Mine wasn't the only treatment centre in the town, so there was a nice fit between the filthy Bristol Channel plashing on the toilet paper-strewn bled, and the posses of junkies and alcoholics who convoked in dismal church halls to exorcise their demons.

I stayed for four months in all. Graduating from primary to secondary treatment, where I cack-handedly sealed a shower cubicle with a mastic gun as part of my therapy. Many of my peers stayed on, but like the born fool I was, I rejected rehab and headed back to the metropolis. I only hope Lord Auk has the good sense to stay put until he really understands where he's landed up.