I REMEMBER hearing a doctor talking about alcoholism on a radio programme once.

He said the best way of discovering if a patient had a drink problem was not to examine the patient themselves, but to take a close look at their partner.

At the time, I had two close friends whose husbands were in the grips of severe alcoholism, and his words rang so true. My friends, pale, gaunt and weary from years of shouldering the burden of this progressive disease, struggled to hold jobs, homes and children together.

Their husbands told anyone who would listen that they didn't have a problem, everything was fine and they were totally in control of the situation. In the end, they, and their families, lost almost everything.

Anyone with close experience of alcoholism will appreciate how marvellously Alex Best appears to be coping with her husband George's latest bender, just a year after his lifesaving liver transplant. She has clearly learnt to separate the man from his illness.

Of course, if there were children involved, the couple had money problems or faced losing their home, it might be more difficult to deal with. These are the type of pressures ordinary families of alcoholics have to live with every day.

Alex says she loves George. She supports him. She just wants him to get better. She is not lecturing him, for she knows George is way past lecturing. She may have lashed out at the pub that served him alcohol, because she will do anything she can to protect him. But she knows the final decision over whether to take that next drink lies with George alone.

All she can do now is wait and, if she has a mind to, pray. She will be there to pick up the pieces. I just hope family and friends are there to support her too. Because, like all those long-suffering partners of alcoholics up and down the country, she is every bit as much a victim of this devastating disease as her husband.

THE case of the 12-year-old girl who ran away with an older man she met through the Internet highlights the risks of letting children use chatrooms unsupervised. But for every gullible youngster who hits the headlines in this way, there are countless others exposed to the much more insidious dangers resulting from spending long periods glued to computer screens. The 12-year-old's parents say they limited her Internet use to five hours a day. Yes, five hours. Isn't this a serious problem in itself? Perhaps schools should start introducing lessons in the real-life social skills we used to take for granted, before those children becoming increasingly hooked on computers lose them altogether.

YES, I admit it. Putting unleaded petrol in my diesel engine by mistake was just plain stupid. In fairness, I have had the car for four years and this is the first time I've done it. Humiliatingly, I had to arrange for the AA to tow the car to a garage that charged £90 to drain and clean out the tank. Since I admitted my blunder, countless others have revealed they have done the same thing. So why don't manufacturers introduce different shaped nozzles for different types of petrol tanks? It may save a few other idiots from making the same mistake.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/ features.