On the evening of 1 January, my wife watched as I opened a bottle of wine and filled a glass to the brim.
“I thought you were doing dry January,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“So what’s that?” she said, pointing to my glass.
“Dry January doesn’t start on New Year’s Day,” I said. “It’s a public holiday.”
“Where did you hear that?” she said.
“Everyone knows,” I said. “Dry January starts at midnight on the second.”
The next evening we have a rather sharp discussion about which midnight I’d been referring to: the one arriving first thing in the morning or the one at the end of the night.
“Mid-night,” I say. “The clue is in the name.” But by the morning of the third my dry January is truly under way.
I can’t recall the first time I endured dry January, but I know I tried and failed in 2012, because I wrote about it at the time. I also know I managed it in 2018 and 2019. In 2020 my wife and I both did it, only she never went back to drinking. I didn’t bother in 2021, because I’d already abstained the previous October. I have no memory of either January 2022 or 2023, which would strongly suggest I didn’t even try. This year, it seemed to have the weight of obligation.
Even with the increasing atomisation of the calendar of monthly privations – going vegan, stopping smoking, forcing oneself to grow a moustache – dry January retains a certain purchase on the public imagination. It’s so widely observed that it’s easier to succumb to peer pressure and join in.
Anyway, I’ve done it enough to know what to expect: a couple of nights of poor sleep; a sense of grievance that slowly dwindles until it only lasts a quarter of an hour either side of 7pm; and a sudden realisation that drinking liquids of any kind is hugely overrated.
I knew that at some point mid-month I would wake up thinking: “I honestly imagined I would feel better than this. By the third week I’ll be inwardly celebrating my total liberation from alcohol. Then at the end of the month I will instigate another pointed discussion with my wife about exactly what midnight means.”
We are invited to supper with our near-neighbours Emma and Stuart. Stuart is also doing dry January.
“Your skin looks amazing,” I tell him.
“Your eyes,” he says. “They’re so clear.”
“Listen to them,” says Emma.
“I brought you some fake beer,” I say, holding up a four-pack.
“Is it any good?” he says.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Stuart and I drink four fake beers and two litres of fizzy water, with the resigned air of two men attending a children’s tea party. At the end of the evening my wife and I walk home.
“How was that for you?” she says.
“Fine,” I say. “What day is it again?”
“The eleventh,” she says.
“Flying by,” I say, looking at my phone.
“You haven’t made that much of a fuss this time,” she says.
“Oh my God,” I say. “It’s twenty past nine!”
“I know,” she says.
“I can’t believe there’s so much today left to get through.”
The next week we have people round for Sunday lunch. I buy wine, beer, fake beer and fizzy water, but in all the wrong amounts. Of the seven people attending, hardly anyone is drinking. Even my oldest son is doing dry January. I can’t give away more than three glasses of red wine across the entire afternoon, and I have to send someone out for more fake beer.
“What is all this alcohol?” my wife says, looking in the fridge the next day.
“People bring it, and then no one drinks it,” I say. “It’s beginning to pile up.”
“There’s almost no room for anything else,” she says.
“It’s like everyone quitting smoking,” I say, “and still turning up with cartons of fags.”
“You don’t find it too tempting?” she says.
“It’s lunchtime,” I say.
“I don’t mean now,” she says. “I mean as an ongoing thing.”
“It doesn’t bother me at all,” I say, taking a sip of some stupid tea.
“Anyway, I imagine you’ll get through it when the time comes,” she says.
“I imagine I will,” I say.
“All on the first of February,” she says.
Actually, I almost say, I was planning to tack the days I missed at the beginning of the month on to the end. Then I think: keep your mouth shut.
