Monday October 1 - I'll get by with a little help from my friends. But not my family.

My name's Will and I'm a social alcoholic. It's been nine months and 20 hours since my last drink.

Well, you may recall that last week I was getting fed up with the project and was seriously considering knocking it on the head.

Since then I've had a fantastic, action-packed weekend. Saturday was pretty much the perfect day: golf, football, and foreign food with family. OK, so in the perfect day, I'd have gone around Augusta in par rather than around Huyton Municipal in 134, and I'd have watched Blues beat Man Utd 1-0 rather than vice versa, and the foreign food would have been from India instead of Morocco, but it was still a brilliant day.

So did it reduce my yearning for booze? Did it bollocks.

By Saturday night, the cravings were stronger than ever. So strong were they that I began to talk seriously to anyone who would listen about why it wouldn't be so bad to start drinking again now.

In a nutshell, my arguments were as follows:
1. I've done nine months, which is still a decent achievement.
2. Apart from Christmas, there are no challenges left, so what's the point?
3. This may well be the only Christmas in my career which I get to myself (the media is a 365-days-a-year machine, but CityTalk doesn't launch until January).
4. I'm so BORED of not drinking.

I put this theory to two separate focus groups - my beer-swilling football mates, and my sister Charlotte, who is a primary school teacher and the devoted mother of two young boys.

The two responses were very different.

One was along the lines of: "Don't sell yourself short. You've set yourself a target of 12 months without booze, and anything less would be a failure. Just be strong, and believe in yourself."

The other was more like: "If you want to drink over Christmas, just do it. What do you think is going to happen on New Year's Day if you go the whole year without drinking? You're not going to win a prize. Just get pissed and have some fun."

In case you hadn't guessed (in which case, you must be pissed) the second of those pieces of advice was from Charlotte. The first came jointly from Eddie and Karl as they stood, swaying gently, outside the Adam and Eve pub in Digbeth.

I just don't know who to believe. I think I'll go with Eddie and Karl's advice for now, but only because it sounded like a speech from The Wonder Years, which I was very fond of back in the day. (Charlotte's advice sounded more like something from Teachers, which got a bit tired after series two.)

Anyway, I survived Saturday, and the family party at mum and dad's house on Sunday was relatively easy, even though the booze was relatively free-flowing, and there was even a hilariously-titled bottle of Knob Creek whisky on the go. I had a good day, and by Sunday evening was glad that my sobriety remained in tact.

As I write this, I feel perfectly calm and am not craving booze at all. I suppose I'd had my tantrum on Saturday and ran out of steam. Even the squawkiest of brats has to get up off the floor at Tesco eventually.

I can't promise it won't be the last, though. I sense that this final quarter could be the hardest of them all, and any thoughts of an easy home straight have disappeared faster than a bottle of Knob Creek at a tramp's picnic.