Eamon Dunphy, a teammate in the early 60s, has described how Best always liked bars that functioned as "a home for those who didn't belong anywhere else ... Bars where human vulnerability was not frowned upon, was, on the contrary, celebrated." Through the eclipse years of the 1980s and 90s, Best could invariably be tracked down to a tiny local tucked away between the river and the Kings Road in London.

At his corner table at the Phene, half-hidden but with an unobstructed view of the door, he didn't invite conversation and, if the look he shot them over his glasses didn't deter unwanted visitors from invading his space, he didn't mind letting them have the rough edge of his tongue. The Phene had practical advantages: his friends lied on his behalf and said he wasn't there when wives, girlfriends and creditors were in hot pursuit on the phone; the bar staff laced his "orange juice" with vodka and tipped brandies into his coffee in the periods when he was supposed to be drying out.

But it had a deeper, totemic kind of significance which left his wife puzzling over "his constant desire to be at the smelly old Phene Arms". The Phene was the centre of his existence and he was content to spend entire days there, the days silting up into weeks and months, with the occasional foray to the betting shop, the off-licence on the corner, now and again (food was never high on the list of priorities) to Pucci's pizzeria on the Kings Road.

A fringe-benefit of his enduring celebrity was that the fire-fighters at Chelsea fire station, which was mid-way between the Phene and another pub he sometimes lay low in, would make him up a bed for the night if they came across him unconscious on a bench or saw him staggering home, looking excessively the worse for wear.

For somebody who, like his friend Rod Stewart, was rarely photographed without at least one generic blonde actress-slash-model in tow, Best was a man who seemed to luxuriate in his own company. Whenever I would see him in the Phene - old man's glasses low on his nose, Daily Mirror crossword propped up protectively in front of him - he'd remind me of the life-lagged narrator of Peter Handke's short novel, The Afternoon of a Writer. After a day spent not getting any words down on the page, the writer of the title habitually hauls his carcass to the local "gin mill" to lose himself: "He recalled certain particulars concerning each one of them. Not a few had told him the whole story of their lives, most of which he had forgotten by the next day ... For today he required no more, no sight or conversation, and above all nothing new. Just to rest, to close his eyes and ears; just to inhale and exhale would be effort enough."

Best's Chelsea neighbours got used to seeing him on the street, sometimes just wandering, with a faraway look in his eye. As if he didn't even see everybody watching him, or they weren't there. After spending some time with the baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, the American writer Gay Talese thought that look was the consequence of fame. It was the same look Talese had seen in the eyes of Greta Garbo: "Because when people got so famous that there was no one else on their level - no one else had a life at that pitch of hyperexistence - then, it was like the other people didn't quite have existence ... they simply weren't there."

Part of the deal with whoever Best happened to be shacked up with was that he could fly off to spend some time on his own with a bottle on a beach somewhere, with no notice given, no questions asked. "I used to love going to Amsterdam, not because I wanted to pay for a woman or smoke dope, I just loved sitting in the old square having a couple of beers and watching the world go by," he wrote. "Maybe 'loner' is too strong a word, but I've always enjoyed being on my own. I can just sit there quietly and am perfectly happy."