Dry January window of opportunity for help

It’s the people who desperately want to complete Dry January but fall into a vat of drink midway that we need to watch out for, writes Suzanne Harrington

Funny how we never fantasise about hangovers. Just as we never say to each other in bed: “Darling, let’s make a teenager”; nor do we ever say to a bar person: “Make mine three days of existential dread with headaches and nausea. Cheers.”

We think only of the adorable baby, rather than what it will grow into; we think only of the perfect glass of whatever, rather than throwing up in a bin at work the next day.

In Dryanuary, everyone becomes obsessed with boozing.

‘Two glasses of wine a week’ people talk about their struggle to stay sober; grizzled alcoholics mutter darkly about having spilled more than the entire Dry January population are trying not to drink.

Everyone writes books about their drinking, and how sobriety is not as terrible as they imagined.

People bang on about being empowered, about shiny eyes and glowy skin and being able to get up in the morning and having a longer fuse and being suffused in joie de vivre instead of last night’s gin.

Every single January. Monotonous as a mince pie.

Or, if people are not doing it, they backlash. Not doing Dry January becomes a series of hilarities on Twitter – dry white wine, dry champagne, dry gin. Lolz. Insuffrables like Piers Morgan, in between snowflake tantrums about vegan sausage rolls, order temporary January non-drinkers to shut up about it.

The internet becomes sodden with 10 Ways To Do Dry January, like drinking your lime soda from a wine glass, or making friends with 0.0% lager, or creating complicated mocktails to distract yourself from the fact that there’s no vodka holding them — or you — together.

The people who do Dry January and find it horrific are very different from those who’d quite like a polite unit of wine after work but will happily have a cup of tea instead, despite their cheerful moaning.

It is the ones who are depressed by day three, rattling through their first dry weekend, staring at their calendar with blank horror at all the hours, and endless boozeless hours, until February.

The ones who cave in too early, but are not laughing about it.

While Dry January is genuinely funny for recovering alcoholics, watching the rest of you wrestling with 31 days of bottled water and making all that noise about it, it’s the people who desperately want to complete it but fall into a vat of drink midway that we need to watch out for.

The ones for whom, unlike normal drinkers, booze is their best friend and worst enemy. The ones who are soon hungover and mortified, hungover and defiant, hungover and miserable.

Nobody fantasises about that.

Maybe this is what Dry January is really for.

Not just something communal to talk about at work after the holidays, but a chance for all the struggling alcoholics out there to realise what they are, and get help, during that brief annual window when not drinking is, for once, the norm.