real lives : the interview

PAUL MERSON TALKS TO BEN THOMPSON photograph by david sandison; He was Britain's most famous wreck - addicted to gambling, alcohol and cocaine. Now he's clean, but not cured

To invite the media into your life in any way at all is risky. To invite them into your home is to make a blind date with destiny. In the course of this interviewer's arrival, the light green carpet in Paul Merson's very tidy front room acquires a couple of suspicious brown flecks. The acme of uncomplaining affability, Paul Merson dabs at them with a piece of kitchen roll, and as he is on his knees sniffing the carpet, the photographer jokingly makes as if to take his picture. Thankfully, the prognosis is clear - the remains are of mineral rather than animal origin - and no photo is taken. Amid an atmosphere of silent rejoicing, Paul makes a cup of tea.

It's very peaceful where Paul Merson lives - in a nice, big, mock-Tudor house, just outside St Albans. Does he like a quiet life? "Oh yeah," a wry smile, "I didn't use to." The tranquil vibration is certainly far from the boozy whirlpool of domestic dysfunction regretfully recounted in the 28- year-old Arsenal star's book Rock Bottom. Detailing the course of not just one but three addictions - to gambling, alcohol and latterly cocaine - and with chapters from his long-suffering wife Lorraine and his superbly-named counsellor, Stephen Stephens, Rock Bottom was the first big recovery document of the Loaded generation (no doubt there will be plenty more before all the chickens of Nineties hedonism have come home to roost).

For all the assistance supplied in its writing by Daily Mirror sports journalist Harry Harris, there is something acutely authentic about the Merson memoir. The inclusion of a picture of Paul "doing a Merson" - the trademark celebratory pint-glass raising gesture "which now makes me cringe" - would be self-lacerating enough, without the addition ("Even worse!") of Loaded's charmless snap of his oldest son, Charlie, aping him. Merson's public admission of drug-taking necessitated a very open process of rehabilitation if he was to escape a lifetime ban from the jumpy FA. But there is a touching sincerity about his contention that he "brought himself into disrepute, not the game".

There seems to be no reason to doubt Paul Merson's assertion that he is now a "different person" to the Racing Post-fixated beer boy of Highbury legend. Coming successfully to the end of his first, full, dry season, he still has the humble air of a man drinking diet Pepsi in the last chance saloon. "Since I came back last year, everyone's been brilliant: they've just left me alone and let me get on with my life, but I know - God forbid - if I went back to my old ways tomorrow, everybody would be saying 'I told you it wouldn't last.' "

He doesn't seem to mind talking about the painful events of the last couple of years. "I'm more comfortable talking about these things than I am talking about football to be honest - I get more out of it. People come over all embarrassed and say 'Well, we don't want to touch on the past' and all that, but I have to keep on talking about the past - if I forget about it, I'm struggling." Life does not seem easy for Merson: there are a lot of hours in the day, after all, not to be lapsing in.

But the hard work involved in being Mr Clean is nothing next to the tensions induced by juggling enormous gambling debts and a burgeoning cocaine habit. "I used to get so paranoid: if ever the doorbell rang, I always used to think it was the papers." Has he seen Goodfellas? Paul looks pained. "The helicopters! It's spot on that is. If I used to be driving and a car would be behind me for a minute or so, I'd have to throw a left or a right - even if I wasn't going that way - just to make sure it wasn't following me." Those days are gone now though. Numerous framed family photos on the walls testify to new pleasures of home and hearth: later in the afternoon he is taking his three boys swimming.

When Paul Merson was a boy, his Harlesden coalman dad was a gambler too. There is a very sad moment in the book where young Paul's mum despairingly gets him to phone his dad's card school, but his dad pretends not to be there. "People analyse it and say 'because of that you did this', but I don't blame him. It was just unbelievable how it happened to me as a child, and then Charlie was ringing me up - he was crying on the phone saying 'come home daddy', and I wouldn't. There's a lot I don't remember about my drug-taking, because I was always out of it, but that's one thing I'll never forget.

"I'm an addictive person," Merson says matter-of-factly. "If I open a bag of sweets, I won't just eat one or two, I'll eat the lot. If I go and play on my computer, it won't be just for an hour, it'll be for five hours." Does he have to try to stop doing that too, as a way of keeping control of himself? "Playing with my computer's not going to kill me..." a rueful smile, "there's worse things I could be doing.

"A lot of people just think it's greedy," he continues. "Why didn't he just stop? But it isn't like that. Our physiotherapist at Arsenal came down to see me when I was having treatment and said, 'Why didn't you tell me how bad it was?' But if you tell someone, they're going to tell someone else, and you'll have to stop - and if it's not time to stop, you aren't going to. You don't get people coming into Gamblers or Alcoholics Anonymous saying, 'I won a million quid yesterday' or 'I got drunk out of my head and really enjoyed myself': if everything's good, people don't stop."

Paul Merson is understandably unreceptive to the notion that he owes a debt of gratitude to cocaine for bringing him so low so quickly that he could only change his ways. But he's in no doubt of the benefits of the AA, NA and GA meetings he continues to attend several times a week. "I can pour out all my troubles: there can be 40 people there and I know whatever I say it won't go any further. There's such a good feeling because everybody's in the same boat. When I started going I was telling people things and I thought they wouldn't talk to me again, but they did, because they'd all been there.

"It is an illness," Merson insists. "I don't throw my wife down the stairs [as he remembers doing in one of Rock Bottom's most harrowing passages] every day of the week, I was ill." Apart from anything else, presumably it makes life easier to look at it that way. "I have to look at it that way... just like if I start thinking about how much money I lost gambling, I'll be back in the betting shop first thing tomorrow trying to win it back. You have to get those things out of your head, otherwise they'll drive you up the wall."

Merson is wholly lacking in the self-righteousness often to be found in the newly clean and sober. "I wouldn't turn around to people and say they shouldn't drink or have a bet, because they can probably do things in moderation. Some business people can go to the pub and have two pints in the afternoon and then go back to work. I look at those people and think, 'How can you do that? That's unbelievable.' If I had one drink I know I'd have to carry on until I was paralytic."

Without for a moment ascribing his own weaknesses to any of his fellow professionals, Merson makes the intriguing suggestion that England's relative lack of international success in recent years might somehow be alcohol- related. "If you look at Italy or Germany, it's a different way of life." A glass of wine with their evening meal? "Exactly. Whereas when English footballers finish playing, the most natural thing for them to do is go to the pub." What price the platinum rogue footballer stereotype when Paul Merson says: "A lot of people would be a lot fitter if they didn't drink"?

Shifting lithely in his armchair, Merson focuses again on the business in hand. "If I don't have a bet or a drink today," he declares doggedly, "then I've done well. And I can start again tomorrow."

8 Paul Merson's testimonial game (ie, he gets the gate money as a reward for 10 years' loyal service) is on 8 May at Highbury, 0171 354 5404. Arsenal will play an International XI including Paul Gascoigne, Matthew Le Tissier and Ruud Gullit. 'Rock Bottom' is out in paperback on 30 May.