The same resolution every year goes nowhere. Stop fighting battles and just have a nice, quiet life, I tell myself – and by the second day of the year I’m up to my eyeballs in kerfuffles.

Having sworn off helping anyone with anything ever again for the grand total of three hours of 2023, from shortly after midnight until about 3 a.m., I awoke during the night, at that dead of night time when ideas come out of nowhere into your dreams, and sat bolt upright in bed.

‘Oh! That’s it!’ I exclaimed. And I got up the next morning and spent the first day of the year not celebrating my 51st birthday in order to deal with the fallout from the latest assault on my friend the bricklayer, who is being banned from AA meetings.

So far as I can make out, he’s being objected to on the basis that he is too much trouble. In this day and age, a self-help group cannot possibly be expected to deal with the sorts of people who need help.

In Surrey, one finds the meetings are more like coffee mornings with women sharing their childcare problems, their marriage woes, their teenagers’ gender orientation choices, their disappointment with a new washing machine.

The last thing they want in their midst is a recovering alcoholic banging on about not wanting to drink Kronenbourg and get arrested.

The better class of alcoholic in the Surrey Hills have perfected the art of upmarket lifestyle advice gathering, the wellbeing forum, and these are not the sort of groups where they want to risk triggering impressionable young millennials by admitting a common or garden rock-bottom alky who actually really needs to come.

To recap: this man has been informed he is banned from meetings because he has criminal convictions, and because, allegedly, he makes women feel uncomfortable.

He’s been banned from meetings he’s only been to once. He was banned from one meeting after agreeing to be the main speaker at the invitation of a group member who wasn’t up to speed with the campaign against him, and who had to then inform him, after he bared his soul by giving an honest speech about his life and times, that he should not come again.

And that was where I thought it had plumbed the depths. But then the bricklayer turned up at another meeting he thought might welcome him and was afterwards informed that a discussion was going to be held about whether he could come again.

And after that discussion took place, shortly before Christmas, he was then not informed of the result.

That’s right. They held a discussion about him, decided whether he could or could not go, and refused to tell him.

He battered his head against that particular brick wall for a while, so I asked them for the answer on his behalf.

This was in case they didn’t want to speak to him for ‘safety’ reasons, because the gossip about the bricklayer is now so wild I would not be surprised to find there are people who think that if they ring him he might hypnotise them into setting themselves on fire.

I asked if they could please tell me the result and I would tell him. And they told me they couldn’t tell me because it was ‘complicated’.

I pointed out he could not be expected to know whether or not to go if they didn’t tell him. Please just inform him whether he is banned or not. And reply came there none.

Was it a trap? Did they want him to turn up to find them all at the door waving placards saying ‘No People With Problems Here!’. He would lose his rag, a fight would ensue, the police would be called, he would get banged up in jail with no possibility of parole… Is that what they wanted?

I was asleep in bed when it came to me. I sat bolt upright and I thought: maybe they won’t tell him he’s banned because he’s not banned.

Maybe these people finally realised they can’t ban someone from meetings without it looking bad for them.

Maybe the nicer breed of alcoholic decided that all they can legitimately do is not tell the bricklayer he is not banned in the hope he won’t go there if he doesn’t know he can go there: the bricklayer is not supposed to know if he’s coming or going. Maybe that’s the whole point.

As for me, I’m starting to think this issue will not get sorted until someone sets up a revival organisation where old-style alcoholics can meet to talk about alcoholism, not childcare and washing machines.

Until then, my New Year’s resolution to opt for a nice quiet time is going nowhere, as usual.