Last updated 13:26, Thursday, 26 June 2008

FORGIVE me if I have adopted a tap room pallor, and the nervous tic of junkie over the past few weeks.

A gnat has twice the attention span that I have, and Mrs Hextol is close to braining me with the iron.

You see, I am in the grip of a serious addiction.

I have had similar obsessions before.

I had a mild flirtation with frozen Jubblies whilst at school, but I was too impecunious for that to be classed as a proper addiction.

It was when I first started work, and had cash in my pocket for the first time in my life, that I had my first brush with my inner demons.

I was never out of Brassington’s cake shop in Macclesfield, to purchase ludicrous quantities of yellow buns, cream-filled confections oozing calories from every crumb.

I blame yellow buns for much of my present rotundity.

Then it was salmon fishing, a sport I was introduced to by a former editor.

I could take it or leave it at first, until that heart-stopping moment when my clumsily tossed Toby spoon was seized by something a thousand times bigger than the minnows and sticklebacks I had caught in the streams of my childhood.

As salmon go, it was little more than a tiddler, weighing in around eight pounds, but finally hauling its silvery splendour on to the banks of the North Tyne after a half-hour battle was an exp-erience close to religious ecstasy.

I was literally quivering with excitement, and from that moment on I was on the river every waking hour.

At this time of year I would be up and out of the house long before 5am, acupunctured by midgies, chased by cows, lacerated by barbed wire, drenched either by rain or by falling in, and savaged by nettles, but blissfully, blissfully happy.

I even caught the occasional salmon, weighing considerably more than my first specimen, and once caught four in a single morning, as well as half a dozen sea trout.

My obsession was such that once, when accompanied by my father, I carried on fishing for another couple of hours after he said he had poked himself in the eye with a twig whilst clambering down a steep river bank.

It was only when we got back to the car that I realised he had given himself an inch-long gash in the white of his eye, and I had to whisk him off to hospital at dead of night.

I did eventually get over it, and never go salmon fishing any more – but the rods are still there.

My present hopeless predicament may be a little more difficult to get out of my system, as it involves the tools of my trade.

You see, my every waking moment is filled with qats, fehs and beziques, and a clock ticking like a deathwatch beetle on steroids.

It’s all Mrs Hextol’s fault – when she went away to the Isle of Wight the other week, I was riding a riptide on the computer when I came across an Internet Scrabble site.

Fancying myself as a bit of a dab hand with the old tiles, and with an exaggerated faith in a vocabulary bigger than Dr Johnson’s, I logged on, and was instantly totally hooked.

I romped away to victory after victory over wordsmiths from around the world, outsmarting Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, not to mention a multiplicity of Americans, South Africans and folk from the United Arab Emirates.

Just like those folk who dabble in cocaine, one-armed bandits or John Smith’s Bitter, never did I anticipate just how big a hold it had on me.

Then I started to lose the odd game, and took it personally, before I got a real kicking from a redneck called WilburDawg, doubtless operating a pedal-powered machine in a hillbilly shack in Georgia with one hand, whilst stirring a vat of moonshine with another.

I suddenly found myself unable to lay big scoring hands, and even the computer turned against me, refusing to let me play perfectly good words such as naze (a headland) whilst allowing opponents to get away with non-existent words like za, which appears in no dictionaries.

I am now aware that unscrupulous opponents can look at the tiles in your hand, and block winning moves, and also fire up a computer programme which feeds them the best possible scoring hands.

But even against such ruthless chicanery, I’m still hopelessly hooked.