REHAB NOTES

BLIMEY, SOME week! A chaos of rubbish bags, bananas, helicopters, Heaven and Hell, plus a chronic outbreak of spring shagging. It began, traditionally, on Sunday.

Sarah is a painter from the East End who's fallen in with a crowd of devil-worshippers from Notting Hill. They take a lot of hallucinatory drugs in order to imagine The Devil exists and everybody gets so f---ed up that, as far as Old Nick's identity is concerned, Sarah is spoiled for choice.

But drugs are Sarah's secondary addiction. She's actually a bulimic and, on Sunday, she told us what it's like for her. She eats and vomits almost constantly. Her method is to fill a whole black plastic rubbish bag with vomit before she ties it up, leaves it outside for collection, and starts the next one.

Just after she'd stunned us with this story, the Cool Chef reported that someone had stolen a bunch of bananas. The skins were tracked down to the lady's toilet and the finger pointed inevitably at Sarah.

Meanwhile, four crack addicts in their early twenties arrived and immediately had sex in various combinations. Two were discovered at once and were expelled, only to return three days later in a helicopter hired by Australia's Channel 9 who want to make a programme about us. As the cork hat chopper touched down we were having a post mortem in Process Group on the banana theft and the remains of the shagging.

In a rare moment of unity counsellors and patients joined forces to repel the airborne invasion. The last thing Sarah, or any of us, wanted was a bunch of Aussie snoops in a ratings war.

Robert the Property Developer chose this moment to vent his spleen about the confiscation of the house bible, on the grounds that it might cause offence to those of a non-Christian persuasion. What you do in the privacy of Notting Hill is your own affair, but within these confession-spattered walls our public arena demands a nod to others. In a dramatically biblical way, Robert the Property Developer was the one to cast the first stone at Sarah concerning the banana theft.

With Sarah weeping in outrage, news came through about the bombing of the Chinese embassy. To be honest, from in here it all looked pretty trivial.

Ultimately, the Aussies were routed, Italian Francesco confessed to the banana caper, Robert's bible-bashing was revealed as one more of his anti- treatment diversionary tactics - which left poor Sarah.

Last night we heard about an ex-patient. His life on the outside had been completely transformed. Treatment had won. From our chaos - thanks to it - this does happen to more than half of us.