Grandma had just died and I was away from home. Then I drank – and the pain disappeared | Adrian Chiles

It's all about the first drink, like the first drink of your life and the first drink of the day. That's what I learned while writing a book about cutting down on alcohol, which involved looking at how I came to drink so much in the first place. And I trace it all back to a miserable fortnight in Germany when I was 14.

It was a school exchange. I was paired with a boy I will call Siegfried. We had nothing in common. It was entirely my fault, because within the week we filled out the interest form, I had started chess. I have duly declared that chess is my main interest in life. This was not the case. My main interests were football, music and the unrequited adoration of a succession of girls. I quickly realized I was bad at chess and gave up, but by then the wheels of the matchmaker selection machine were turning. It didn't take a particularly thorough application of Teutonic logic to pair me up with the German school chess champion.

Poor Siegfried looked like every inch of the school chess player. He wore the kind of glasses that make the eyes bigger. I too wore glasses, being nearsighted, so I guess we had some specs in common, but that was it.

For me, the whole trip was collapsed the day before kicked off. When I came home from school, I had the strongest feeling that something was wrong. Shortly after, my father told me that my grandmother in Croatia was seriously ill. Baka, as I called her, had a stroke at her home in Zagreb. My mother was urgently talking to her sister there on the phone. I was close to my Baka; she spent every Christmas with us. I really didn't want to participate in the stupid German exchange. I was terribly upset and anxious, and it was already clear from the correspondence between Siegfried and me that he was not my type.

But mom and dad decided that I had to go. I dearly wished they hadn't. I had never been so miserable in all my life; Come to think of it, I haven't been so miserable since. Never have two weeks passed so slowly for anyone. The school was in a town called Leonberg, near Stuttgart. I got along with Siegfried as badly as I feared. I looked longingly at my classmates, all having a wonderful time with their new friends. The German girls were remarkably beautiful and obviously had no interest in me or my glasses-wearing colleague. We go home without a word. To his surprise, I turned down all his offers of a game of chess. Eventually I gave in just to show him how ignorant I was, which didn't take long. We didn't play chess anymore.

I was so homesick that it hurt me physically. To make matters worse, a few days after I arrived, my mother called. She said: "The situation in Zagreb is unchanged and we are going there tomorrow." The situation in Zagreb is unchanged? It sounded like something a news anchor might say. My mother just didn't talk like that. I knew my Baka was dead.

I fell even lower. Siegfried's mother was a lovely woman who tried everything to cheer me up, without success. A friend back home sent me a clipping about Bryan Robson, my team's best player, being sold to Manchester United. If it were possible to die of sheer misfortune, that would have been the last straw that would have broken the camel's back and seen me breathe my last.

I I have few memories of the excursions our exchange group took, except for one. The second week we took the Leonberg brewery tour. I moped, not liking the smell, staring blankly as we were shown how beer was made. At the end of the tour we sat at long tables and received what was probably a fairly strong lager to drink. I didn't enjoy it very much but within minutes of it coursing through my veins I went through some kind of emotional transformation.

It was so good . At that point, the last few days we had left on the exchange went from feeling like eternity to something hazy and insignificant and even maybe even pleasant. I laughed and joked with my friends and even thought I saw a girl called Claudia staring at me. And I became overwhelmed with grief for poor Siegfried, who couldn't take more than a sip of beer but, with unbearable sweetness, was obviously delighted to see me smile.

Waves of well-being crashed over me. And this at a traumatic time in a critical formative phase of my life. I had never had to deal with the death of a loved one before. I was going through shock, bewilderment, fear, loneliness and terrible and heartbreaking homesickness. I was sick. But a sip of this strange brew took away that pain. Within minutes, my whole world had been reframed. It was magical; why wouldn't I want more of the same?

Forty years later, ha...