Having spent an early career in public relations I know a public relations scam when I see one. Most anniversaries, memes, and movements are little more than the creation of a fertile, scheming brain working out how to promote a cause. It’s helped me avoid all sorts of tomfoolery, faddishness and showing off disguised as charitable good deeds.
I’ve avoided Movember because my efforts at growing facial hair are reminiscent of breeding mole rats on my upper lip. Armpits For August and Fannuary have felt very worthy but a bit exclusive. And Ginuary and Septembeer are just figments of my imagination that I offer (for an exorbitant fee) to any global drinks behemoth looking for one of the aforementioned PR scams.
But having failed to toast the start the 2020s with a glass of champagne I went cold turkey on alcohol in a dry January that makes Death Valley look like an oasis. Just two weeks into the month I realized that I was also facing Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year, with all the cheer of the aforementioned chilly piece of poultry. And that’s as much a downer as listening to a synth-pop and alternative dance song, composed on a prototype-level homebrew “step-time” sequencer in binary code.
The famous New Order song, Blue Monday, is about judgement, control and abuse apparently and has been ranked as the 38th most acclaimed song of all time. Evidence, if it were ever needed that for most people that the only thing better than a 7-inch single with four minutes of misery is a 12-inch remix with seven minutes of anguish. I much prefer Fats Domino’s idea of ‘Blue Monday’ with the comforting thought that ‘Sunday mornin’ my head is bad, but it’s worth it for the time that I had’.
I do have a certain affection for the Blue Monday concept because it is a masterpiece in meme development by my good friend, PR genius and East-End boy about town, Andy Green. In 2005 he adopted the idea of the most depressing day of the year from Porter Novelli and turned it into a multi-year media hit. It’s always struck me that as a lifelong West Ham fan Andy has probably had more Blue Saturdays than most so giving the tag to a Monday was extraordinarily selfless.
And all of this with the gloomiest month of the year yet to come because in the northern hemisphere February is the dead zone between the carousing of Christmas and the sunlight of Spring. Little surprise that FebFast, the Australian movement urging a break from alcohol, sugar, caffeine, and digital overload, never made it over the equator. Also, pretty cunning of the Aussies to keep their abstinence to the shortest month of the year.
Strictly speaking I’m not admitting to ‘doing’ dry January because that would interfere with my bid to secure a 28th Amendment that safeguards the freedom for anyone to have an alcoholic beverage whenever they want. My case is based on the premise that one of the most scarring moments of my life was pitching a tent on a rainy Sunday evening in Wales and then finding that I was in a county which still banned the sale of alcohol on the Sabbath. And I can assure you that in rural Wales at the time ‘bootlegs’ were just a local form of pernicious and extensive trench foot and speakeasies were a reference to the loquaciousness of Cymru’s favourite sons.
For the record the Sunday Closing (Wales) Act 1881 banned the sale of alcohol in Welsh pubs on the Sabbath and was not repealed until 1961. Local referendums followed and it wasn’t until 1996 that Dwyfor – now part of Gwynedd – became the last district in Wales to drop the ban. A commentator even argued, “Without the coffee shop, would Dylan Thomas have been the same writer?”, when the mighty Welsh poetic giant, my personal favourite, seemed no stranger to a whiskey or seven.
As I’m in a country where Prohibition is still within living memory, I think I have a right to be nervous on this score. This January is the 100th anniversary of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution coming into effect. It was ratified in 1919, and was not repealed until December 1933 with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment. It wasn’t illegal, under Federal law, to drink per se but for those without a home distillery the ban on transportation and sale probably meant 14 years without a legal drink.
As it happens and as one of the world’s inveterate ‘joiner inners’ I have always respected the cultures of countries where alcohol is generally unavailable. On trips to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan I did not go the easy route of completing the form in the hotel saying that I required drink for ‘medical purposes’. It felt uneasily like signing up as dependent and sitting in a hotel room with miniatures has never appealed to me.
The question on the mind of anybody who has made it this far in the blog should be – how do I actually feel after not drinking for 24 days, 5 hours and 35 minutes. The dull truth is that it’s been easy but tedious. There have been times of day (early evenings) when a glass of wine would have been welcome, occasions (watching football) when a beer is missed and social moments (the Whistlestop on a Friday evening) that have just not been the same.
On the positive side my running times have been excellent and for anyone with sufficient vanity I can confirm that after several weeks it helps reduce any midriff bulges. But I am not sleeping any better and I have not noticed a healthy glow to my skin. All the research and evidence would suggest that my liver and other internal organs are in better shape and that I will live a little longer.
But it has reminded me of the saying that ‘nobody remembers the nights they went to bed early and got plenty of sleep’. That’s not an argument for returning to the frequency of wilder days with their plethora of amusing, sad, and startling memories with people who will be grateful not to be named in public. But tequila shots in the early morning at the THE Awards and Education Investor nights at the Italian bar opposite Ronnie Scott’s were the only possible preparation for the endurance test known as the Global Recruitment Conference.
It’s difficult to say if I’ll keep going to the end of January and I already have a slightly subversive view that it’s a cruel and unusual month of fasting that ends on a Friday night. Maybe that’s the point where a small toast to the good times, the future and the ability to make choices is appropriate. Cheers everyone.
Image by Annalise Batista from Pixabay