January: A survivor's guide

It is a fallacy, put about by TS Eliot, that April is the cruellest month. He thought it mixed memory and desire, and stirred dull roots with spring rain. Well, I’m no gardener (I managed to keep a small hydrangea alive for a while as a child but have never pursued the horticultural arts since then), but I have to take issue with old Thomas Stearns. I have no brief against April, but surely, surely, the cruellest, bleakest, most unforgiving month is January.

It starts badly. 1 January is a hellish day. People are either hungover from the night before, or else unbearably smug that they had an early night and are of a revolting sunny disposish, as Bertie Wooster would have described it. Shops and watering holes are often closed, or open for limited periods, and there is no news to speak of (the honours list is published the day before, as are the documents released under the 30-year rule). I remember wandering the streets of Edinburgh one 1 January many years ago, after a very convivial New Year’s Eve, my companion in arms and I desperately searching for somewhere to perch with a beer or two, and perhaps take on some solids to soak up the previous night’s intake. The only place we could find was a TGI Friday, not normally my venue of choice (apart from that one time in Stockholm, but that’s another story), but we seized upon it like drowning men on a life raft, despite being served by a fat and unprepossessing German called Rolf who had a plethora of lapel badges pinned to his braces and squatted on his not-inconsiderable haunches to take our order.

For those of a religious bent, the beginning of January does at least hold some spiritual comfort. We sing about the Twelve Days of Christmas, but our secular society often has the tree down by 27 December and the baubles and tinsel packed away for another year, forgetting that said Twelve Days don’t conclude until 5 or 6 January (depending on your confessional identity). The Feast of the Epiphany is A Big Deal for those who do, so you have something to look forward to.

Slender comfort for unbelievers. January has little else to recommend it. In the Northern Hemisphere, it is, on average, the coldest month of the year, with none of December’s twinkly (OK, slightly kitsch) appeal of frosty mornings, fogs of breath, holly bushes and nativity scenes. For Americans, it is California Dried Plum Digestive Health Month (seriously). And National Soup Month. Not much there to gladden the heart and see you through the grimmest, darkest time of the year. So, like any difficult venture, getting through January requires a strategy. Have a plan. And watch out for potential pitfalls.

The first and most obvious one is Dry January. There are those who will always expound the virtues of abstinence, and I’m sure in some limitative way they are right to do so. Non-drinkers, or, as the scientific evidence seems to be showing increasingly, moderate drinkers, live longer. Well, it feels that way to them, anyway. (My own views on clean living are largely summed up by the incomparable Bill Hicks’s skit about Yul Brynner and Jim Fixx:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8a3W_LbKc4. Remember that Jim Fixx, who “invented” jogging, died at 52 of a massive heart attack. So, you know. YOLO.) No doubt there is a place for moderation, and I know several friends, a lot of them Olympian topers when the mood is right, who do from time to time give up the booze for long periods. But January? That is surely the worst time. I’m not advocating that you spend the 31 days off your gourd on the cheapest spirits available to man, though if that is your inclination, then I’m not the person to stand in your way. If you enjoy a drink, however – and you wouldn’t be giving up if you didn’t – then a few warming and tasty glasses from time to time are surely an essential way of ploughing through those grim weeks. Take June off instead, or October (unless you’re coming to my birthday party), or May.

Diets are similarly to be avoided. Most of us, if the statistics the Government keeps hurling at us are to be believed, could stand to shed a few pounds. This may well be double (or triply, or…) true after Christmas, which increasingly seems to have become a competitive eating event. Well done you! You’ve eaten Stevie Wonder’s weight in leftover turkey! Have a medal. No, it’s not a chocolate one. Sucks to be you. Again, I profess a degree of Devil-may-care disdain for a healthy lifestyle, but it might not hurt to pass up that third sausage or extra naan bread from time to time. To make December and January into a binge-and-purge cycle, though, will simply make you miserable. And it may not work. How many people tell themselves that they have forsworn a glass of wine so that white chocolate Magnum in the freezer is basically OK? Result – hello, 31 January. I have lost two pounds and I hate my life.

Another thing to avoid is the knotty matter of New Year’s Resolutions. No good will come of these. You can spend as much money as you want on a fancy cross-trainer which monitors your heart rate, tells you how many calories you have burned and gently mops your brow with a damp chamois. Deciding to buy one while half-cut over Christmas will not make you any more likely to use it in the following year than you were before. Here I plead slightly guilty: I once owned such a device (minus chamois), used it once and then for years afterwards employed it as an elaborate and expensive place to drape drying clothes. Eventually I gave it away to my brother-in-law, and I felt much the better for it.

It doesn’t stop there, though. Not only are you no more likely to write that novel you’ve been thinking about in 2017 than you were in 2016, you will feel all the worse for it, because you have Made A Resolution, and, if you are particularly foolish, told people about it. New Year’s Resolutions exist to make you feel bad. If you want to get fit, get fit. If you want to learn conversational Swahili, it is not beyond the wit of man. Don’t be a slave to the calendar and to people’s expectations. JFDI, as the acronym has it.

My final piece of advice is, in a sense, a distillation of all that has gone before. You are in control of your own life but you must remind yourself of that. Scito te ipsum, as poor old Peter Abelard says. You don’t become a different person at 12.01 am on 1 January (unless you’ve been drinking tequila, in which case that can happen). You are no better nor worse than you were before, no more disciplined or motivated, no less debauched or sozzled. You can change yourself – everyone can – but there is no magic formula. Learn to accept yourself, good and bad, and think about changes you might want to make, but do so at your own pace. Do this, and maybe, just maybe, you will survive January. Me? I’m going to write a novel. Obviously.