He ends up in the grass arena: the parks and streets of the inner city, where beggars, thieves, prostitutes and killers fight for survival and each day brings the question of where to find the next drink. It is a part of life I have certainly walked past but never really thought too much about in daily life.

I found Healy's early childhood, the time when he went to rural Ireland to visit relatives, and even his army days a good start. It's so interesting to think of chess as a crutch or even a vice in anyway comparable to alcoholism. I remember when I was a child watching the film adaptation of this and seeing a pre-adolescent given a pint of beer in a pub bought by an older friend, and the child later became an alcoholic down the years. They pitch their tents in the same refuse-filled shadows as their forebears; a confederacy of the dispossessed.But during his wino days, Healy's writing is like a stand-up comedian performing his material in rapidly delivered one-liners, and there are a lot of them.

The story starts with Healy's abusive childhood and follows his descent into homelesness and alcoholism. Healy dangles short sharp sentences to amuse, shock or disgust as though he might have thought this was all he had to do. Healy was born into an impoverished, Irish immigrant family, in the slums of Kentish Town, North London.It has made me see the homeless with new eyes, not the soppy, sorrowful middle class consciousness I previously saw them through. We starts with his childhood beatings from his religious parents, setting a bit of a back story, head through his early boxing years, mainly concentrate on his tramp drinking in the public areas around Euston Station and finish with his salvation through discovering chess and becoming just as addicted. Out of school by 14, pressed into the army and intermittently in prison, Healy became an alocholic early on in life. The camaraderie of people in the same position is not lost in the transcript, even through the fighting that occurs through such desperate living. Therefore, Hershey's work I can identify with in the extreme: the blackouts, the amnesia, the violence, the harrowing sickness of alcoholic withdrawal, the individually apocalyptic effects of ant-abuse, the doom-laden and unsympathetic London streets, and ultimate redemption.