Dry January? This is the worst time to give up booze | Stuart Jeffries
With weeks of misery and bad weather to come, we need comfort and soothing, not military training in the park
A few millennia ago, pagans in northern latitudes realised that a right old knees-up featuring roasted roadkill and proto-Jägerbombs was needed to cheer up the populace during the bleak midwinter. Christians later horned in on this annual shindig, claiming counterintuitively that our Redeemer was born at this special time. Finally, capitalists carved out a piece of the action. And so it came to pass: the season of gorging, gouging and guilting was born. God bless us, every one.
But what none of these visionaries foresaw is that January, February and most likely March are at least as dismal weather-wise and otherwise as December. They couldn’t have envisaged that the need for cheering up the populace doesn’t stop at the conclusion of the three most harrowing words in the English language: Jools Holland’s Hootenanny. They couldn’t have known that, in 2019, rail prices would go up 3.1% from 2 January. Still less did the ancients foretell that Theresa May would postpone parliament’s vote on her EU withdrawal agreement until the week of 14 January, almost as if she and her lackeys had planned to maximise already rampant levels of seasonal affective disorder.