The ups and downs of Dry January

The first week of Dry January was relatively easy. Not falling asleep in front of the television was a pleasant change, as was waking up in the morning with a clear head. I started to remember things I usually forget, such as where I’d left my keys, and began to work through my “to do” list, getting round to jobs I’d been putting off for months. It wasn’t that my willpower increased. It was that making myself perform tedious administrative tasks took less effort. My inner clerk woke up.

Two weeks in and I’m beginning to get bored. High on the list of benefits of being teetotal, according to the finger-waggers, is that your mood stabilizes — and I’ve definitely noticed that. But the novelty of being calm and even-tempered wears off pretty quickly. When I’m drinking, my mood doesn’t just change from one day to the next, but over the course of 24 hours. I wake up full of self-loathing for having overdone it the night before; I then expiate my guilt by putting in a solid nine hours of work; and at 7 p.m. I have my first glass of wine, which I feel I’ve “earned.” Though clearly I haven’t done enough to earn all the subsequent glasses, since if I had I wouldn’t feel guilty again the next morning. Indeed, the self-disgust usually kicks in before I’ve finished the bottle, so my day is bookended with remorse.

You’d think this routine would itself get boring — and it does, but not quite as boring as “one mood, all the time.” It’s as if I’ve been hit over the head with a cosh or dipped in a vat of Prozac. I feel a bit like Stephen Fry says he feels about taking bipolar medication: yes, I welcome the absence of the lows, but I also miss the highs, and on balance I prefer careering between the two. Thinking about it, this may be why I’ve ended up becoming so attached to QPR. I could support a football team like Bristol City that always hovers around the middle of the Championship table, but it’s more exciting to be a fan of a team like QPR. We failed to win a single home game in the first four months of the season; since December 7, we’ve won five on the spin. It’s the difference between being on a harum-scarum rollercoaster ride and being pulled along by Thomas the Tank Engine.

Then again, there is my family to think of. I was recently asked by the Sun to comment on a story about the staff at addiction clinics in Hampshire being told they couldn’t use phrases like “mentally ill” and “alcoholic” out of consideration for their “clients.” Instead of “substance abuse,” they have to talk about “non-prescribed use” of drugs, and when patients fall off the wagon they can’t use the words “relapse” or “setback” but have to say “currently using substances.”

“Shouldn’t the emphasis be on asking alcoholics and drug addicts to be a bit more considerate towards loved ones and local communities?” I said. But if I reject sobriety on the grounds that it’s a bit dull, am I not guilty of being equally selfish?

In my defense, alcohol doesn’t make me angry and I don’t drink so much that I can’t pay the mortgage or put bread on the table. I’m not great company first thing in the morning, but I’m quite chatty after I’ve uncorked a bottle — more entertaining than when I’m not drinking. I remember an episode of Friends in which Monica gets back together with an old boyfriend known as “Fun Bobby,” But in the course of their relationship he becomes clean and sober, at which point he turns into “ridiculously dull Bobby” and Monica starts drinking just to put up with him. Would Caroline have a similar reaction if I permanently swore off booze? To her credit, she’s keeping me company during Dry January, knowing how much harder it would be for me if she was draining a glass or two every night.

I hope I’ll be able to keep it up until the end of the month. The real test is not drinking when I go out, and to date I’ve only spent one evening away from home since January 1. That was at the Garrick and it helped that the person who’d invited me, Christopher Silvester, was also off the booze. Keith Richards once said the thing that helped him stay off drugs during his sober periods was the sense of superiority he felt when friends offered them to him and he declined. I can’t say I get a similar thrill from turning down a glass of good claret.

I’m resigned to falling off the wagon on January 28 since that’s the day I’m being introduced into the House of Lords. I’ll have managed four weeks by then, which is surely long enough, and I’ve got a 2009 bottle of Domaine de Chevalier that I’ve been keeping for a special occasion.