I saw royalty, lords and degenerates all come and go from my drugs den: Son of late restaurant critic AA Gill and ex Tory MP Amber Rudd, Alasdair Gill lost a decade to addiction. Now, six years sober, he tells his extraordinary story ⊖⊖

A crack house. We all have a mental image of one, on the poorest fringes of town in its meanest street; squalid and derelict, like the dissolute and lost souls who frequent it.