I think that feels, to me, like an authentic and desirable way to get through this thing called life. It doesn't feel like that anymore, but there's a great advantage to trying to live in the day and experience life as it arrives and as it shows up. Not just - it began with a way of not drinking, like today, just today, just this hour, I'll make it through this hour without having a drink. Part of the philosophy, the way I live now, and I have done for a very long time, is to try to live in the moment. It's more like, I have a think problem than a drink problem, but of course it could become a drink problem very quickly. I've been sober since I was 29, and as you say, I'm 57 in about a week or two, so I've been sober a long time. The paradox and the conundrum of alcoholism is not that people drink because they're trying to destroy themselves, they're trying to save themselves. The thought that came into my head, that felt rational at the time, that I must kill myself - on the way to actually committing the act, I had a big glass of sherry with a friend of mine, and that took my mind off it, in that odd way that alcohol saves the life of alcoholics sometimes. I didn't like the way I was living, I couldn't stop drinking, I wanted to - I didn't really want to stop drinking, but I didn't want my life to continue the way it was. I just know that I became sadder and more kind of desperate as time went on, and alcohol seemed to work for a long time, and then didn't. I think perhaps, I was very sensitive, I was a very sensitive little boy, and at the time, it wasn't particularly advantageous to be that way.

Is it upbringing? As you say, I'm in my upper 50s, so I don't really want to start blaming my parents, or Scotland. I tried to mess around with what that might be in the writing of this particular book, because it is more meditative than anything I've done, and sort of - I don't know if it's genetic? I think it's certainly partly that.

I was a kind of troubled youngster, more than anything.' I think I was a rather desperate character - desperate to be liked, desperate to feel okay.

'But the truth is, I think people felt sad for me. 'I think part of the legend that reformed alkies such as myself tell is that we were wild and crazy, and kind of Johnny Cash in 'A Boy Named Sue,'' he says. Riding the Elephant is a series of reflections on what he's learned along the road of being a comic and a drummer in Scotland, a bouncer in New York, stints on American TV shows, including The Late Late Show, meeting Princess Diana, and all 12 steps of recovery. Craig Ferguson is in his upper 50s, and it's a small - maybe not so small - kind of a miracle that between drinking, drugs, and hard general hard living, he's around, and a quarter-century sober, to write this book.

Riding the elephant craig ferguson