‘If AA wants to make its meetings safe, then maybe it should ban alcoholics,’ said the builder boyfriend and I had to admit, he had cracked it.

There was me getting all wound up about why more and more of the meetings in Surrey won’t let the bricklayer in because of his criminal convictions and a vaguely expressed malaise about his liking for the ladies, and it was actually quite simple.

In this new age of safeguarding, it’s clear that the only way you could make Alcoholics Anonymous into an organisation that passes muster for all the corporate compliance big charities either have to or want to do is by banning anyone with a drinking problem.

Because there is no one so potentially stir-fry crazy on a bad day, or, for that matter, so needy and hung up on the idea of romance than a recovering alky, which is why, nearly 100 years ago, AA founder Bill Wilson came up with the idea of bringing these tormented people together to share their common problem in a bid to stay off the booze.

These meetings work brilliantly – if you can get into them. The bricklayer has been banned from nine meetings in Surrey, and I wonder what Bill W. would make of it, not least because he was someone who struggled in sobriety with compulsiveness around romance, which appears to be a big part of what the organisers worry about.

The latest meeting to ban the bricklayer sent him a Dear John text after he went there on their invitation to be the main speaker. The secretary running this meeting was new to the area and unaware of the controversy. He assumed the bricklayer’s strong message and hard-knocks story would be something inspirational that people wanted to hear.

Three or four middle-aged women sat in the front row, arms folded, faces like hatchets when the bricklayer turned up. They said nothing while he shared, but behind the scenes complained about his presence.

Barely a week later, he received a text informing him that he was not welcome to attend again, nor to go to any other meetings in that particular small town.

‘I have been made aware of your history,’ said the secretary, ‘and I think it best if you avoid [these] meetings to stop awkwardness and our female members feeling uncomfortable.’ And he went on to tell the bricklayer that clearly, he had ‘issues’.

Yes, that’s kind of why he’s in AA, you twerp. And it’s why you’re in it, too.

But in fairness to the secretary, I fancy the hatchet-faced women kicked him half to death, metaphorically, after the bricklayer went home.

I wonder what Bill W. would think of the organisation he founded for hopeless drunks becoming so smug that it doesn’t want people with issues any more.

I submitted a 10,000-word document to head office detailing the bans in good faith, and have had no substantive reply.

But someone does need to call time on the idea that only people who haven’t got too many issues can go to meetings.

It has become so corporate at the head office end of things that the safeguarding initiatives are multiplying like a plague, potentially to the detriment of the park bench drunk, the newly released jailbird with a tag on his ankle and the poor raving soul with the beginnings of wet brain.

The very people who need AA most would be purged from meetings if they only admitted people who allow all the safety boxes to be ticked.

So I went back to that meeting and tried to raise the unfairness of it all with the hatchet–faced women. I put up my hand to speak during the section for announcements and made my case. Their response was to tell me that this would be voted on in two weeks’ time. I pointed out they had already texted the bricklayer to say he can’t come again, so it would appear that the result of the vote had been announced before they had even pretended to hold it.

At this point, a couple of the women made a high-pitched sound I can only describe as the noise mares make when they are fighting in a field.

The meeting then continued with someone reading the preamble without a hint of irony: ‘The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.’

I got up and left. The Surrey housewives stand together against the bricklayer, and the organisers apparently feel that if they don’t stop him coming, then the women won’t come, and in Surrey that means the meetings will be almost empty.

It’s the bricklayer today, but it could be the ex-soldier with post-traumatic stress tomorrow. And at some point maybe even those who try to defend them.

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