Now It’s Over, Let’s Talk About Why Dry January Doers Are the Worst

I don’t know what I found so captivating about this image, but I’m pretty sure it’s the greatest photo ever taken (Photo by George Redgrave via)

This article originally appeared at VICE UK.

And so they emerge from their underground bunkers—the non-drinkers, the Dry January doers—covered in sand and looking wounded, thinner and more haggard, but underneath it somehow still smug.

They crawl towards the bar but they have forgotten how the bar works: they’ve forgotten how close to stand to the bar, forgotten not to put their palms on any of the sticky surfaces, forgotten to order rapidly and with precision, and they are flailing around now – “One pint of lager please, barkeep? A… reasonably… priced… wine?” – baffled by the entire idea of paying for and drinking a unit of alcohol, and then they sit and settle into their chairs, and they wiggle their bottoms and get comfy, and they take a single sip of alcohol and say: ah. They say: ah, and then: this is my first drink in a month.

Twenty minutes later and they are screaming their dinner back out into a flat-panned pub toilet.

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Dry January is a long month, cold and grey, and for drinkers (January cleaves the populous into two kinds of people: the drinkers and the non-drinkers, those who succeed at Dry January and those who do not) the length of the month is exacerbated by non-drinkers. I would say you can add a decent 24 hours onto how long January feels each time someone says: “Soda and lime for me, mate, I’m not drinking.” Add a week on for every time you here someone say “I feel really good”.

January stretches into infinity – until the sun burns out and the stars slowly fade grey to black – whenever someone says they are “saving a load of money” and they’ve “found something else to do with my time now I’m not drinking beer! I’m writing a screenplay!”

Here’s another one with a different jumper/shirt collar combo (Photo by George Redgrave via)

The best people in the world, I think, are those who start Dry January and then fail, because they are making a mockery of the whole institution, tearing Dry January down from the inside out. They start the month with good intentions – “I’m going to try it,” they say, “just to see if I can” – and then wobble at the first temptation.

Someone’s birthday party on the 8th of January sees them lurking by the bar sadly nursing a Coke. A bottle of Prosecco someone forgot to drink at Christmas turns up unopened in the garage, then the tepid little excuses – “Well, I’ve managed ten days,” “Birthday parties don’t count,” “Prosecco has a use-by date” – and then the inevitable fall, Icarus melting his wings on the heat of a flaming Sambuca, and they wake up even more hungover than normal people doing normal drinking – I’m talking a full “feed four for £5” Domino’s-for-one hangover, I’m talking slanket, I’m talking watching Catfish reruns on MTV for like 18 hours straight, entire pack of Anadin just to get the energy up to go and piss – and then, ever so quietly, on Monday morning when the ringing in their head has subsided, just ever so quietly shutting down the JustGiving page for their dry month, slyly deleting all the Facebook updates about sobriety. Those people, truly, are the real heroes.

Obviously it’s remiss of me not to mention that not drinking sometimes is good, so: not drinking sometimes is good.

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But let us mark the fact that the 1st of February is the day we are mathematically furthest away from Dry January, and celebrate it as such. Pubs today will be full of the type of people who think doing half-marathons is good and have arguments on commuter trains about their right to give their folding bicycle its own seat and who didn’t drink all January. People who get the Abel & Cole vegetable box every Monday and actually figure out recipes to use up their black radishes instead of just throwing them away. People who do countdowns to their holidays on Facebook instead of just silently going on holiday. People who have the word “Gin” as an absolute statement in their Twitter profile. The people who do Dry January are propping up the entire detox tea industry and the adult colouring book industry. They go to wedding expos.

Elbow them out of the way of the bar tonight and order your drink briskly and properly. Watch them descend into Monday Night Madness after one white wine spritzer and a packet of nuts. It is 11 months until they can bother you with their worthiness again.

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