A JOBLESS alcoholic who spends £200 a week on booze and drinks 30 cans a day was told by a judge: "There's something wrong with your lifestyle."

Dilan Sadeq was locked up for almost blinding a man by with a screwdriver - simply because he would not let him use his mobile phone.

The sentence follows several prosecutions for being drunk and disorderly, causing criminal damage, assaulting a police officer and possessing drugs.

Sadeq, 36, told a probation official that he saw nothing wrong with his drinking habits, Teesside Crown Court heard yesterday.

Judge Simon Bourne-Arton, QC, told the Kurdish asylum-seeker: "You are an alcoholic, but you fail to appreciate that you are an alcoholic.

"To the probation officer you say that although you spend £200 a week on drink and average a consumption of 30 cans a day, you can see nothing wrong with your lifestyle.

"Well, there IS something wrong with your lifestyle. In particular, it brings you before the courts. It may not bring you before the courts for offences of violence until this occasion, but it has brought you before the courts for generally behaving badly."

Sadeq, of Monkland Close, Middlesbrough, was jailed for 32 months after he admitted unlawfully wounding Arif Hussain on November 17 last year.

His barrister, Duncan McReddie, told the court that an apparent confession to the probation worker that he had shot someone was untrue - and down to booze.

"He has a tendency to fantasise and exaggerate," said Mr McReddie. "He takes no issue with it being recorded, but he says all sorts of things he doesn't mean."

The court heard how Sadeq had been thrown out of a Middle Eastern restaurant the night before the attack after getting into a row when asking to use another's phone.

He asked Mr Hussain if he could use his mobile when the pair met in the street, and reacted furiously when he was refused.

Prosecutor Ian Mullarkey said he pulled out the screwdriver, waved it about and stabbed the victim four times - twice in the shoulder, once in the hand and once above his right eye.

When he was later arrested and questioned, Sadeq falsely claimed he had been attacked by the other man, punched 50 times, and picked up a nail to defend himself.

At hospital, doctors discovered the victim had a blood clot on his brain from the puncture wound above his eye; and he still suffers from double-vision and flashbacks.

Judge Bourne-Arton told Sadeq: "Serious as the injuries were, they could have been more serious. Essentially, it is only by luck that you did not cause him to be blind."