AA Gill and I have never met, which might seem strange given that we have both been reviewing restaurants for decades, he of course for the Sunday Times where he is also a respected television critic and feature writer.

The closest we came to an encounter was six years ago when we were placed next to each other at a lunch party at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons to celebrate its 25th anniversary.

In the event, Gill didn’t show, despite having accepted Raymond Blanc’s invitation. His non-appearance necessitated a last-minute change in the seating plan.

The sole other jacker at this prestigious event was Giles Coren, The Times’s restaurant man.

A couple of years ago in this column I lumped the two writers together in another context. Both of them having forsworn alcohol, I noted the strange circumstance that two of our best-known food writers were denying themselves one of the principal delights of the table, viz wine.

Coren has since gone back to the bottle, sometimes with vigour, as his reviews reveal. Why Adrian Gill never can is set out in graphic, shocking detail in his recently published autobiography, Pour Me a Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20).

This is a brilliant book in all respects, save perhaps for its rather naff title. As a study of the nightmare life of an alcoholic – Gill was one such until the age of 30 – it looks destined for classic status.

The quality of the writing is amazing when one takes account of the fact that Gill is dyslexic and understands nothing of grammar. Like all his work, it was dictated by phone to a scribe he has never met.

He spares us no detail in this haunting, frightening memoir, even to descriptions of his loss of bowel control that led to his soiling beds, not always his own.

How bad did it get? “Well, apart from the DTs, there was peripheral neuritis, – numbness and tingling in the extremities, guttate psoriasis – I was covered in scabby flakes of skin and my nails bled.”

And the quantity of booze? “I don’t know how much I drank. I suppose it was probably a bottle of Scotch, half a dozen cans of Special Brew and then five or six or 12 pints in the pub.”

Besides endangering his life, the round-the-clock drinking led his first wife, Cressida Connolly, to walk out on him, never to return.

Gill describes his first meeting with Cressida in a seedy London drinking club.

“She said I looked sad. I told her that the girl I was in love with was in New York and I couldn’t afford to go to New York.”

Removing a large glittering ring from her finger, she told him: “Take this. I’m sure it’s worth a ticket to New York . . . It was my great-aunt’s engagement ring . . . she was marvellous, had masses of lovers and would insist you take it. What on earth are engagement rings for if not to bring lovers together?”

This is a story absolutely typical of Cressida, who is a very old friend of mine.

When I first knew her in her teenage years in Oxford, not long after the death of her father, the celebrated critic Cyril Connolly, she presented me with his stylish grey fedora, knowing that I would like to wear it.

Alas, it was very shortly ‘borrowed’ by a pal who wanted to cut a dash somewhere and I never saw it again.

Gill writes affectingly, too, of his elder brother Nick, a Michelin-starred chef with an impeccable pedigree who, following problems with drink and drugs, disappeared for ever. Adrian last saw him in 1998.

“He got to the door [of Adrian’s London flat] and said: ‘I’m going away now. France maybe. But I’m not coming back’ . . .

“And that was the last of him. Nothing. Not a hint, not a trace, not a court record, a hospital, not a Salvation Army bed, not a bank account, a credit card, not a passport, not a headstone.”

Reading the sad story in Gill’s matchless prose made me think again of the smiling young man who used to cook splendid lunches for me at the Feathers Hotel in Woodstock where he worked from 1990.

I found a picture of the first occasion in our files (see above). His similarity in appearance to his brother is startling.