I’m just embarking on year nine of Dry January - and it won’t be easy. It never is.
I initially undertook the informal challenge in 2016 with a small group of pub friends and work colleagues after a particularly raucous lead-up to the festive period (which seems to start just as the last Halloween pumpkin wizens).
To set the scene here, year-round corporate hospitality is part and parcel of my role as Irish News business editor for the last quarter of a century (yikes).
Even when I was thin(ner), I was disparagingly referred to as a ‘corporate colossus’, and the tag has stuck.
But from mid-November on, it cranks up to a completely different level as companies galore (your know who you are) and PR/marketing agencies (so do you!) want your undivided attention at their Christmas gigs, and will often stop at nothing to have you there (four ‘dos’ in a single day isn’t unheard of!).
It was even worse before the property crash in 2007, when all of the main local banks also had festive drinks and nibbles.
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Woe betide if you showed up at one and not the others, because word spreads fast in Belfast, so it was four or none. (One year I did skip one bank reception and thought I’d got away with it, until the same esteemed financial institution sent me a bottle of wine with, let’s just say, a rather sarcastic note attached).
Thankfully, tens of billions of lost pounds later, our banks haven’t revisited the festive largesse (at least for the media) which, on the plus, side does free up four calendar windows elsewhere...
But we’re talking Dry January here, and it was over the umpteenth mulled wine in 2015 that a few of us decided to have one abstemious month, and challenged each other to see if we could last the whole 31 days (from memory, some actually bet they’d do it using pints as their currency).
The Dry January campaign is actually a living thing, developed and delivered by the Alcohol Change UK charity and first registered in 2014. In its first year, 4,000 people signed up and it has grown in popularity ever since, with 215,000 people globally signing up to take part in 2024.
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Personally, as someone who can take it or leave it with alcohol, it’s never been a problem going a month, even months, booze-free. Indeed, given the festive over-indulgences, the first two or three weeks of January are generally easy. You just want the break.
But then it becomes problematic for two very significant reasons - rugby (the Six Nations often kicks off late in the month) and Burns Night (as a bagpiper, my services are usually in demand on the 25th, and tradition dictates that a dram with the host is obligatory).
But guess what. On year one of my self-imposed challenge I actually managed the entire 31 days of January alcohol-free. Maybe it was more by accident than design, as Ireland’s opening game wasn’t until the first weekend in February and unfortunately I also dislocated a thumb, which ruled out piping (but not work).
Well done me, I hear you all cry...
The benefits, I was told, would be a better sleep pattern, having more energy, feeling less irritable and perhaps a bit of weight loss. In truth, I can’t say I noticed any of them.
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The next January was my ‘oh so nearly’ year. I didn’t have a Burns Night piping gig and abstained for 30 days. But an Irish News colleague happened to be moving on, and chose January 31 for his lunchtime going-away bash with colleagues. How selfish.
Despite my protestations, I was handed a pint of proper Guinness (0:0 didn’t exist at that stage), was congratulated on getting this far, and, well, I succumbed to temptation .
And that was as good as it got. An annual accountancy banquet in Dublin in mid-January can’t always be avoided. It, and then tucking into a hearty haggis supper – the ‘great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race’ – and downing drams of Scotch on the 25th after piping at a house party, continues to be my Achilles heel(s).
In fairness, I no longer claim that I’m doing Dry January. I prefer to say it’ll be dry-ish... and it always is. So cheers.
