My newsagents are a family from Bhuj, in Gujerat in India.

Two sisters-in-law and the man who connects them, kind, generous, patient, good-humoured even when they’re complaining. There is also another man, younger, self-effacing, just as industrious, keeping to the back of the tiny shop, packing, unloading, keeping the floor clean, shifting the tons of vegetables and foodstuffs that get sold every week, reminding me of the subtle caste distinctions that operate in India. He has never caught my eye – like the Cleese/Barker/Corbett sketch, he knows his place. On Tuesdays and Fridays, strange vegetables arrive direct from Bangladesh, wrapped up in baskets made from long leaves; for a mad hour the shop is crammed full of little women in black, sifting expertly through each pile with bony fingers. I’d love to know what the vegetables are, and how to cook them: but when I asked behind the counter, I got a shrug – they didn’t know either.

Twelve hours a day they work hard, and on Sunday mornings the kids, for whom they do it all, bespectacled and tooth-braced and lanky and cockney, come in and help out, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Then, at lunchtime, they shut up shop and all pile off in the cars in their finery and go somewhere for a big meal together.

This wonderful family have kept me sane in my darkest hours in London. Times in which my drive to isolate and neglect myself to soul-corroding degrees is at full throttle, are when their cheery enquiries and jokes and kindness save me, connect me again to life.

The top shelf of the magazines there is the same as in all British newsagents: stacked with porn. There is some dubious contractual obligation that the main newspaper/magazine distributors in Britain impose on newsagents, which makes it very difficult to refuse to stock porn. So, because I am tall, every day after chatting to my friends behind the counter, I turn to leave and my eyes are always caught by the images, directly at my eye-level, of big breasts and legs spread wide and pert bum cheeks in black lace. When I ask the women what they think of having to sell the magazines, they just laugh; they think it’s funny when a man buys one, which isn’t often. Attractive, middle-aged women both, they wear beautiful saris and their midriffs are often bare; sometimes henna tattoos adorn their hands and forearms, and little jewels often glitter beguilingly between their eyebrows. They are not threatened by printed paper images.

On Sundays, when I get the paper, there is usually a single copy of the Irish Sunday Independent in their stack. Obviously it gets printed in England and distributed by the British Independent. But my nostalgia for the oul’ sod does not normally override my resistance to the Sunday Indo, and its extraordinarily small-minded gossipy back-stabbing bickering that passes for cleverness. It may have changed now, but I can’t usually be bothered to check it out.

Anyway, on the cover it had a headline:”Irish Sex Addicts Turn To Internet Where There’s No Fear Of Rejection”. It caught my eye, the way it would, as any loyal reader would know, that’s terrain I’ve travelled.

I’ve been dismembered by the Dionysian vacuum of the chatroom culture, followed the Sirens of cyberspace to my ruin on the rocks of depression. And I’ve put myself together and come out the other side. I hardly ever go online now, and even then it’s usually because I get a plaintive phone message saying, ‘I did e-mail you about this last week, didn’t you get it?’. It feels like I’m holding my breath when I log on, just dipping in and out long enough to get what I need. Stay there too long, the fantasies begin to tease, then torment: there’s someone out there waiting for you who will be your dream lover, the one who knows your animal side, who will make your eyes water with forbidden pleasure, who will be beautiful, sensuous, charming and life-affirming – and tailor-made for you. Even if it’s just for the afternoon. The hour. The moment. However long it takes to come.

Nowadays, I prefer to look people in the eyes, listen to their voices, dance the slow tango of body language, thank you very much. It’s one of the lessons I learned, the hard way, when recovering from my depression: my need to ground myself daily in contact with real, whole people, not fantasists with phalluses, mere facets of men, selfishly exploring their fetishes with anyone, everyone. I could play the parts required, adopted many roles and performed many curious and exciting things in pursuit of pleasure – but somewhere inside I drifted away and became detached from myself, not seeing my reality, which consisted of sitting typing one-handedly in front of a monitor, phone jammed in between jaw and shoulder, all night through, nicotine-buzzed, red-eyed, clammy flies undone, thinking that this was living, half-hoping that rescue was on its way.

The dust of rejection I’ve chewed on often enough. The moment you believe someone is going to make your life whole, is when you set yourself up for rejection. But it’s not just about sex or romance. The intoxicating buzz of believing that the piercing pain of being alone has gone forever can come from anything. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, food, drink, chatrooms, being born again, a cause, a belief, an obsession, a job, a creative project. Most dangerously, a child.

The world is full of half-people, aching for something, looking to fill the gap, unwilling or unable to accept that the pain has to be lived with, made friends with, understood. Scandalous headlines about internet sex, or drug barons, or teenagers on ecstasy, all divert our attention away from unpleasant feelings to the salacious details of the fix. And if we focus on the fix, (or the object, not the drive, in Freudian terms) then we are missing the point. The internet was not the cause of my downfall – it was the agency; I steer clear of it now not because it’s bad, but because I dug myself a rut to oblivion there, that’s hard to forget; indeed, something I probably should never forget. Sex addiction – to porn or to prostitutes or to masturbation or to compulsive promiscuity – is not a feature of sex per se, but another way in which we try to numb that heart pang. It’s the ache that needs headlines, needs our attention. We need to look inside for understanding, not outside for someone, or something, to blame.