Icy January without a drink? Put a cork in it
OLD joke: ‘How do you know if someone’s a vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.’ Boom, boom. Except it’s not vegans I’ve been surrounded by over the past month, but people doing dry January. And they don’t half go on about it.
‘Ooh, I feel so healthy,’ they say. ‘Non-alcoholic wine’s really come on, you know.’ And the worst, said through teeth so firmly gritted you couldn’t get a paper straw in there: ‘I’m not missing the booze at all.’
Really? Because I had two inadvertent dry weeks in January due to medication and I missed it like a long-lost puppy dog.
And what’s it all for, anyway, other than some misplaced sense of Presbyterian denial?
Lorraine Kelly revealed this week that she had, in fact, put on weight during her dry January because she was ‘eating chocolate instead of drinking gin’ and felt like she had suffered ‘a month-long hangover’. Doesn’t sound particularly healthy to me. Just pass me the hair windcheater and be done with it.
Look, I’ve no problem with those who genuinely feel they need to re-set their drinking habits, or want to dip their toe into the sparkling elderflower waters of sobriety. My question is, why January?
As months go, it’s miserable enough as it is. Unless you’re the Aga Khan or an Instagram supermodel the chances are that come January 1 you’re skint, fatter than you were a month ago, and locked in a constant battle of wills with your icy front path. It’s the month where it takes 20 minutes to leave the house (coat, scarf, boots, hat, gloves, keys, remove gloves to lock door with keys, put gloves back on, realise it’s icy outside and you’re wearing wrong boots, take gloves back off, unlock door, dismantle wardrobe in effort to find boots…) and it goes on for ever.
Wednesday, the last day of the wretched month, felt like January the 74th. It is a ghastly chunk of the calendar, one where you look outside and find it unimaginable that you might ever be able to sit in the garden again with a chilled glass of Chablis and watch the sky turn a delicate dusky pink.
So why make a grim month 100 times grimmer by denying yourself a glass of sherry by the fire?
This is not about people who have a real problem with the booze. If you experienced the shakes on your first couple of dry January days, then I expect giving up for a month or longer is probably a good idea. But for those of us couple-of-days-a-week drinkers – the bottle of wine on a Saturday night and a couple of G&Ts on a Friday folk – that first glass is a warm and comforting balm against the very worst that January can throw at us.
So bottoms up then, to all of those breaking their dry Januarys this weekend with a glass of Merlot the size of their head. I hope it’s been worth it. But if it hasn’t, you can always make up for it in February.