How’s your January going?
Wet and windy, freezing cold – but are you having a Dry January? Have you resolved to ban the booze until February 1?
Confession time here: none of us at Serious About Events have any intention of giving up alcohol for the month, on the basis that January is a pretty awful month all round really and we need all the help we can get.
Named after the Roman God Janus, who incidentally is two faced, January is apparently a month of beginnings and endings, gates, frames, passages of time. It’s also the month of tax returns, whopping great credit card bills and regrets about what we spent over Christmas. I can still hear myself saying unconvincingly on the present front, ‘we’re reining it in this year.’ Short Pause. ‘Oh go on then, lets open another bottle of port.’
It’s also the month where gym memberships go berserk and crash diets just..er… crash. You know the old Simon and Garfunkel hit “Hello Lettuce my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.” Who fancies a salad on a freezing day when you could be wolfing down a bacon buttie alongside a bowl of hearty soup. Or better still let’s have a big chunk of Christmas cake. Cheesy chips anyone?
January is all about food, or rather trying to eat less of it. It’s freezing cold out there and we should be comfort eating. Here at Serious About Events, we believe in determination, continuity and consistency when it comes to diets. Karen is delighted to reveal she has renewed her annual New Year Resolution to lose her babyweight. Jackson is now 16…..We’ll just park that one there, then….
Jane our press officer, has resolved to use more Resolva weed killer to tackle her garden/jungle. I gather she’s a bit of a Zena Warrior Princess with her power washer too. She doesn’t currently possess a chain saw, thank goodness.
Meanwhile I’ve got to shape up for my next big Cancer Research UK challenge – I’ll be turbo pedalling in my garage, on Devon’s hilliest (is that a word?) roads getting fit for the Ride 100 London-Essex, part of the route used for the London 2012 olympics by such two wheel luminaries as Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish and Chris Froome. So I have my work cut out for me on that one
But back to the booze. Some important advice here if you are attempting to stay dry in January. DON’T!!!
Some news media insist it’s not a good idea. The Daily Mail, and they’d know of course, warns it’s a bit like a crash diet and that you can’t detox in just one month. Better to reduce your consumption throughout the year. Apparently we’d feel more energised and sleep better. But if you go back on the sauce on February 1, those benefits disappear very quickly. Other advice includes having food with your tipple of choice, and having 20 minute breaks between drinks. A good game of skittles between pints would sort that. Or maybe a chat with your team mates about your next weekend away with us.
One thing that surprised me – figures from the EU when we were still in it, revealed the UK to be well down the pecking order in terms of biggest drinking nations. In 2020 we were 17th with countries like Latvia and Lithuania leading the way. And there was me thinking we were a nation of boozers. Who knew we weren’t quite that bad!
Meanwhile celebrities inevitably cash in on anything involving cash and A-listers such as Kylie Minogue, Katy Perry and Blake Lively are no exceptions. They’re hoping the tills will be ring ing for the traditional January abstinence with their ranges of soft drinks. Conversely breweries produce a range of popular winter warmers, often with silly names and very high percentage content, to give you a bit of a kick start on the alleys.
Which just goes to show how two-faced January is.
