The owner of one of the UK’s first alcohol-free hotels has described how he turned his life around after years of alcoholism left him homeless and ‘close to death’.
John Elford is known for his work helping people recover from drug and alcohol addictions, and has published a series of popular self-help books. Six years ago he opened Somerton Lodge on the Isle of Wight, one of the UK’s first alcohol-free ‘sober hotels’, which he continues to run as a successful business. But the earlier part of his life was dominated by alcoholism, with his chaotic lifestyle leaving him jobless, homeless, and regularly in hospital for treatment.
Elford told his story on the latest episode of Listen UP, an addiction recovery-themed podcast from Abbeycare, one of the UK’s leading residential rehabilitation centres. He described how after first trying alcohol as a teenager, he continued to drink heavily during his career with the RAF, where he served as a medical assistant.
Recalling his descent into addiction, he told the podcast’s host Eddie Clarke, ‘My alcoholism just started to get worse and worse, from my early 20s until I stopped drinking at the age of 35. By the time I had got to 35 I was homeless. I wasn’t allowed to pick up my kids from school. At one time I lived in the woods. You’d wake up every morning, and you’ve been eaten and bitten by every damned insect in those woods, and you were cold and hungry.
‘At the end of my drinking, I weighed about eight or nine stone. I had really bad peripheral neuropathy. For anyone that doesn’t know what that is, my nerve endings in my hands and feet had stopped working. I couldn’t really walk properly. I couldn’t hold a drink, my hands would shake. I was really, really bent out of shape, physically and mentally… pretty close to dying.’
During his active alcoholism, Elford was unable to hold down any job for long. Despite his medical experience in the RAF, he had to take on factory work. He recalled, ‘My last job that I was sacked from was in a tomato factory. I was on a production line, and we had to put six tomatoes in a punnet – and I couldn’t do it. I would put five in, I would put seven in, I would put green ones in. They had to get rid of me, I couldn’t do the job. Alcohol had damaged me that much, that I was no longer functional to be employed.’
After his addiction brought him ‘really close to death’, Elford’s recovery journey began at the age of 35, when he had a ‘crazy spiritual experience’ during a detox at his parents’ house. As his body fought alcohol withdrawal symptoms, he had a conversation with a silhouetted figure who asked him if he wanted to live or die.
He recalled, ‘I absolutely knew at that second that I would never pick up a drink again. I knew that the whole world had changed, and my relationship with it. I knew for the first time that I was an alcoholic. I knew all of that stuff that people had been trying to tell me for years.’
Since that moment, Elford has maintained his sobriety, and he went on to write several books about the recovery process which have sold tens of thousands of copies. He also developed his own structured rehab programme, a version of which was used by the prison service in England, and has continued to champion innovative approaches to addiction treatment.
He now runs Somerton Lodge, a ‘sober hotel’ providing alcohol-free accommodation for people in early recovery, as well as other guests who would simply prefer not to drink. He now plans to relaunch it as a retreat in partnership with the Equilibrium Project, which is also based on the Isle of Wight and offers detox support and peer-led workshops.
Eddie Clarke, outreach manager at Abbeycare and host of Listen UP, said, ‘One of the best things about working in recovery is hearing from people who have managed to turn their lives around, despite everything that addiction threw at them. John is one of these people. At one point he was living in the woods in the grip of alcoholism, without any hope, and now he is a successful author and business owner.
‘As well as showing the transformative power of recovery, his work demonstrates how people can not only rebuild their own lives, but also create opportunities for others.
‘Our podcast aims to show that recovery is possible, and John is living proof of that.’
The Listen UP podcast can be found here.
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