To us alcoholics, dry January is for amateurs

Dry January is not for proper alcoholics. We need February to December to be dry as well, without breaks for birthdays or bar mitzvahs, writes Suzanne Harrington

Oh get you, you normal drinkers with your Dry January. Counting the days until February 1 — just 48 more hours, soda sippers — whilst diverting yourselves with board games and jigsaws and clench-jawed eye-rolls of wry solidarity. Some of you not even making it to the end of the month without collapsing, like Chris Evans, into a beer, saying it’s just too hard. That life without booze is too samey. That Friday night and Tuesday morning feel no different.

The rest of you may sincerely believe your liver will be writing you thank-you notes once it can sit up straight and focus again after Sodden December. You might even believe you are going to lose weight, get glowy skin and sparkly eyes, increased memory, enhanced intellect, become more sexually attractive.

Dream on, January people. It’s only a month. If you want to achieve this glorious state of dewy-eyed bushy-tailed freshness, you need to be a proper alcoholic. You need to be bang on it, falling off bar stools, shouting at parked cars, never quite knowing where you are going to wake up.

Shedding jobs and friends like a pissed reptile. If that all sounds too hectic, there’s always the inner despair variety of alcoholism, where you limp through life guzzling Nurofen and snapping at people, hating the world and wondering how long until wine o’clock. Less actual punch-ups than a permanent fizz of irritable discontent soothed — and inflamed — by booze and booze only. Dry January is not for proper alcoholics. We need February to December to be dry as well, without breaks for birthdays or bar mitzvahs. We cannot have just a sip of gin, any more than a vampire can have just a nip of neck — we are drainers, emptiers, finishers, bleeders dry. And with this extended dryness, or sobriety, as we like to call it, comes genuine fabulousness.

Not just are recovering alcoholics sexier than the rest of the population — we don’t need booze to have sex with you, for a start — but we are livelier and more awake, in every sense. We are never in a fuddle-headed muddle. We don’t miss a trick.

We remember what you said, and who we phoned, and we never send texts that make us want to shoot ourselves in the face the morning after. (Or if we do, it won’t have been because of 18 Bacardis).

We don’t care that Friday night feels like Tuesday morning, because both feel great. There is no more soaring drunk followed by plunging awful — instead, a steady clear eyed joy. A knowledge that no matter what happens, we will not be getting pissed on it. A smugness so hard-earned, so brutally begotten, that it makes us want to stand on rooftops and shout, “Dry January, I laugh at your pathetic 31 days! Dry January, you are NOTHING!”

Unless of course you are a proper alcoholic, in which case, it’s a great place to start. Welcome.