We accidentally had a dry Christmas this year – not a sentence I ever expected to type, least of all without any hint of martyrdom. The reason was not remotely virtuous. I was one of the millions who spent Christmas away from the UK. In the Sahara desert and the Marrakech Medina, the call to prayer punctuates the day – alcohol does not.
There were delicious dates, mint tea and astonishing hospitality. But no prosecco panic, no red wine worries and no Boxing Day bargaining with my liver. And do you know what? It didn’t make the blindest bit of difference to our enjoyment. So, why – especially at Christmas and through to New Year – does everyone give you such a hard time about not drinking?
I lost count of the number of people, both back home and in Morocco, who warned us in alarm to “make sure you buy your alcohol in advance”. This is not me announcing a new life of sobriety, nor wagging a finger. I’m simply noting how much of our festive culture is focused on drinking. Remove it and – apparently – the whole thing should collapse into beige misery.
Well, it didn’t. And you might have thought that, as more young people rethink their relationship with alcohol, the UK had started to get better at knowing when to say when. But my oh my, the reaction when we told people we weren’t drinking, partly out of respect to our Berber hosts, revealed an astonishing amount of judgement still abides.
“Go on, don’t be boring,” is itself perhaps the most boring line in the English language. We have decided as a culture that not drinking requires justification, while bingeing is simply what one does. Sobriety is framed as a moral stance, and drunkenness a personality.
What is especially odd is how incurious we still are about this. Other countries manage this differently. Italians, for instance, drink joyfully, but drunkenness is not an end goal. Wine accompanies food; it doesn’t replace it. Getting smashed is embarrassing, not a rite of passage. The result is hardly a nation of killjoys, but one where alcohol has a place rather than being the central focus.
Meanwhile, the costs of our obsession are impossible to ignore. The NHS creaks under the strain of alcohol-related admissions, from liver disease to predictable and preventable injuries. There are 280,000 alcohol-related hospital admissions a year, and more than one million admissions when secondary alcohol-related diagnoses are included.
Our own health creaks too: sleep that never quite recovers, morning-after anxiety and the creeping normalisation of feeling slightly unwell. We joke about it, because joking is easier than questioning. The UK saw a record 10,473 alcohol-specific deaths in 2023.
This feels like the year to examine our costly relationship with drinking. Not with hair shirts, but a little honesty. Dry January, for example, is still sneered at as a puritanical month of smugness to be endured, so February can be messier. That misses the point. It is not about punishment, but curiosity. What happens if you stop, even briefly, and see what changes?
My accidental dry Christmas taught me that there is little downside. The world doesn’t turn grey. But the outside noise fades: that pressure to keep up, explain yourself, or apologise for opting out.
Perhaps the radical thing we could do this January is to follow the example of our young, who drink so much less than we do – not least to save money. Perhaps don’t drink, and perhaps don’t boast about it – and perhaps don’t sneer either.
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