I’m sober – these are the most annoying things drunk colleagues do ...Middle East

When I first moved to the UK, I kept hearing about a mystical period of time between the start of December and New Year’s in which work is put to one side, Thursday afternoons are spent in the pub and it becomes socially acceptable to be hungover in office guzzling Lucozade and emergency Kit Kats.

I am talking, of course, about silly season, that halcyon stretch of four or so blissful weeks where Britain starts locking in for the festive period and adopts a boozy, devil-may-care, we’re at work but are we really at work attitude to the last stretch of the year.

Unfortunately, I developed a full-blown alcohol allergy a few years ago, which means that such half-cut delights are now firmly in my rear-view mirror – and trust me when I say that the festive run-up to Christmas takes on quite a different sheen when you’re sober.

Take socialising with colleagues. In previous years, I used to love nothing more than piling back to a coworker’s flat after the pub shut to loudly set the world to rights while somebody struggled to connect their Mariah Carey Christmas mega-mix to the Bluetooth speakers. Now I’m more likely to slip away, citing dogsitting troubles, while everyone else is plotting their next move to a “cool bar we can definitely all get into” that will inevitably end up being downgraded to an All Bar One.

I’m not an outlier in calling time on the festivities early. In fact, I’m part of a growing population of abstemious non-drinkers who are more likely to order a lime and soda than a tequila lime at the bar. The numbers don’t lie: these days, 16 per cent of Brits don’t drink, more than double the number of vegetarians. But aside from the flurry of articles about how to survive the festive season if you want to drink less, you don’t often hear from people like me.

Mainly because we don’t want to come off as hectoring killjoys, smugly booking in for morning pilates while everyone else is cradling their heads in bed and weeping over what they said to their boss the night before, but also because of an ugly truth: drunk people are actually very annoying, particularly around this time of the year.

Alcohol and the festive season are a lethal combination – everyone is already feeling exhausted and maudlin as the end of the year approaches, tanked up on wistful Christmas songs and nostalgia. Add booze and non-stop socialising to the mix and you have one of the worst people in the world: the Christmas drunk, whose festive cheer is always undercut by too much drink-induced candour and melancholic regret.

Party season is when your boss tells you how sorry he is that he couldn’t give you a raise. It’s when a colleague lets slip he’s on more money than you after too many Advocaat snowballs, or when a drunk friend tells you you’re spending too much on your partner for Christmas, and that she never liked him anyway.

You might be able to receive all these hard truths in the spirit of well-intentioned goodwill if you were equally drunk, but stone-cold sober? It’s like being slapped in the face with the Feast of the Seven Fishes.

While you can usually slip under the radar as a non-drinker for most of the year, it’s also much harder to get away with during winter. Non-alcoholic beer does me just fine in summer, but I’ve yet to meet an alcohol-free mulled wine that doesn’t smell like wet socks stuffed with cheap cinnamon sticks.

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By now, most people have learnt to be respectful and not make a big deal out of anyone ordering Coke Zero at the bar, but all bets are off during party season and the pressure is officially on to drink. Nobody wants to be a Scrooge, but you’re automatically cast in that role if you’re visibly off booze – your presence alone is a reminder of tomorrow’s hangover. You may as well stick on a Victorian nightcap and start phoning up the Ghost of Christmas Present while everyone gets another round of shots in.

Thankfully, there are sneaky ways in which non-drinkers can make it through silly season with their sanity relatively intact. My number one tactic is to stick to a brand-name mocktail all night to relieve the social pressure – people don’t immediately clock your abstinence if you have something alcoholic-looking in your hand.

Rather than an Irish goodbye, I prefer to actually circle the group, say goodbye to the people I spoke to and then promise to catch up with them in the New Year. This imbues me with festive cheer and makes me despise them a little less for repeatedly telling me the same stories all night long.

But most of all, I don’t force myself to have fun. There’s nothing that curdles festive cheer faster than feeling like you have to hang out with people out of social obligation, especially when they are slurring in your ear.

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