by Henry VIII attempts a month without wine and discovers abstinence is a harder campaign than anything he fought in France
I once drank mead by the barrel as a matter of national pride, and considered a man who declined a second cup to be quietly untrustworthy. My manager Dev has talked me into Dry January, and I have never once felt less like myself.
The Pledge
Dev framed it as excellent material, a personal challenge I could discuss onstage each week, tracking my progress like a man narrating a siege, and I agreed enthusiastically on New Year’s Eve, several glasses in, which I now understand is precisely how everybody agrees to Dry January, and precisely why so few of them survive the second week.
The First Week
The first week passed with surprising ease, buoyed by genuine novelty and a fridge full of a beverage Dev introduced as alcohol free lager, which tasted, to my palate, like a rumour of beer rather than the genuine article, though I drank it anyway, out of principle, and occasionally out of desperation.
The Gig Problem
The real difficulty arrived at my first sober gig, standing at the bar afterward while every other comedian on the bill ordered a pint, myself included in the ritual for years without once questioning it, and I found the silence where my usual glass should have been considerably louder than any heckle I have ever personally faced onstage.
The Cravings
By the second week I had developed what Dev called a genuine craving, and what I called a profound and entirely reasonable longing for something I once regarded as a basic constitutional right, a feeling I attempted to manage by drinking sparkling water from a wine glass, a compromise that fooled nobody, myself least of all.
The Social Cost
Friends at the pub quiz, Sandra included, began treating my sobriety with the same faint suspicion I once reserved for courtiers who suddenly stopped drinking around me, assuming, not unreasonably, that a man who declines wine is either ill, plotting something, or both, and I spent considerable energy reassuring the table that I was neither, merely following an app that tracked my streak with alarming enthusiasm.
The Finish Line
I completed the full month, technically, with one small lapse on a Tuesday I have chosen not to discuss in detail, and I emerged from it with a genuinely clearer head, slightly better sleep, and a newfound appreciation for the exact first sip of proper wine on the first of February, which I can now report tasted, after thirty one days of abstinence, roughly as good as the entire dissolution of the monasteries felt at the time. I would recommend the experience. I would not recommend doing it twice.
Sober or not, I have decided I remain, fundamentally, a man who understands the value of a good toast, even if this particular toast was raised, for one month only, with sparkling water and a straight face. This entire ordeal belongs, properly, as a footnote to my diet plan. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: the proper London pub where history finally sat down for a pint, Britain’s traditional and expensive response to any change in weather, the full eyewitness account of how I came back in the first place.
