Analysis: Ian Paisley, as is well known, is a teetotaller. He eschews the devil's buttermilk, to use one of his favourite phrases.
He has his drug of choice, though, the narcotic of political acclamation; it courses through his veins and it was clear at the DUP annual conference in Belfast on Saturday that he will never be cured of this addiction.
If there is ever going to be a power-sharing deal - and it's a big if, if we are to take the words at the DUP conference at face value - then Dr Paisley intends being around to rubber stamp it, that is if the Bigger Man spares him, of course.
When he took to the rostrum for his keynote speech in the Ramada Hotel, the 600 delegates as one rose to their feet to express their faith and fervour in their leader.
For three solid minutes - and this before he had uttered a word - they clapped and cheered him. Dr Paisley could have calmed them much earlier but he basked in the adulation.
He lapped it up like a cat with the cream. "I was beginning to feel people did not want to hear me," he joked when he finally allowed the crowd to settle into their seats.
This is his 35th year as leader of the party he founded. Just two months short of his 80th birthday, Dr Paisley looked in good health, a far cry from the time not so long ago he appeared at death's door.
He told delegates, "I am a devolutionist", as are the SDLP, UUP and, more or less, Sinn Féin. But listening to the Doc and the rest of the DUP senior politicians on Saturday, it was obvious that the challenge in the months and seasons ahead of trying to restore the Northern Executive and Assembly will be huge.
Dr Paisley, as usual, was in classic preacher man/politician mode on Saturday, his dark three-piece suit accentuating that strange evangelical mixture that, on these islands at least, is unique to the DUP.
There were many religious references in his speech. He exhorted delegates to uphold "the faith of our fathers" (no, not that faith) and warned that the possibility of compromise with the violence or criminality of the IRA is "buried in a Sadducee's grave". (Sadducees, as Ian Paisley jnr instructed us, didn't believe in resurrection.)
Deputy leader Peter Robinson, in more secular tones, was equally dogmatic. "Read my lips, the Belfast Agreement is dead," he asserted.
Leader and deputy thundered that if Bertie Ahern wouldn't have Sinn Féin in government in the South, it was "preposterous and outrageous" to expect unionists to share power with republicans in the North.
And just to deviate for a minute, one odd element of Robinson's speech was the manner in which time and time again he stuck it into the Ulster Unionist Party.
The DUP has nine MPs to the UUP's one, many more Assembly members and councillors, and is queuing up to take seats in the House of Lords, yet listening to Mr Robinson you would think Reg Empey posed a serious threat.
Mr Robinson's justification was to guard against complacency, but Sir Reg and his party will probably take it as a backhanded compliment that he mentioned them so often.
Anyway, in returning to the main theme of whether power- sharing politics might ever prevail in Northern Ireland, you could sense how the pall of the Independent Monitoring Commission report hung over proceedings.
Its findings that the IRA was still engaged in criminality and intelligence-gathering and its suggestion that the organisation retained some weapons ensured that this was not the conference where you might hear subtle hints of a potential willingness to engage with Sinn Féin.
Peter Robinson again advocated the notion of phased- in power-sharing that would be fully functioning when the IRA lived up to all its obligations, but that has been shunned by Gerry Adams.
Dr Paisley's off-the-wall remarks about President McAleese might have exacerbated that sense of dejection. Dr Paisley does not like her, questions her integrity and reckons she hates the North. It was fairly barmy stuff and if any Southern politician made a similar remark about the queen of England there would be an almighty row.
But with Dr Paisley it's just something you expect. He tends to get a fool's pardon for this kind of thing, but down the line, it could be this very predictable unpredictability about Dr Paisley that could scuttle any chance of a political deal.
Were the IRA to finally get a clean bill of health from the IMC, Dr Paisley might just destroy any chance of an accommodation with additional demands for ritual humiliation from republicans, or some such requirement. You just can't tell with him.
But maybe it isn't quite as black as all that. DUP conferences now are different creatures than 10 or even five years ago. The mood is more relaxed, less uptight. There was even a Department of Foreign Affairs official at the conference as an observer, for goodness sake - and for the first time.
While Dr Paisley appeared to be demanding the disbandment of the IRA, privately many delegates were of the pragmatic view that if it was evident that the IRA had distanced itself from criminality and other activities, that a deal might be done. But not for a while, perhaps a very long while.
Saturday therefore was a holding operation. The slow work of talking (but not directly with Sinn Féin) starts at Hillsborough today.
Saturday was not the occasion to disclose what sort of political deal to which it might eventually subscribe. It was good knockabout.
As a colleague said, "it was a prolonged lap of honour" for the electoral successes of the party. The more serious business starts today. But oh so slowly.
