Even in the best of times, I’ve never been much of a fan of Dry January, despite it becoming so fashionable of late. But this year in particular, giving up drink altogether feels to me like the very last thing we need.
Thanks to Covid, we have so far endured one all-but-cancelled Christmas and are just coming out of another that had a big shadow hanging over the festivities. Why choose more abstinence when we have had so little chance of plenty since March 2020?
Dry January began as a public health campaign about (very sensibly) dialling things down after too much Christmas and New Year partying. If there is one thing the pandemic has done its best to stop, it is partying.
In its place, lots of us have adopted a steady-as-we-go, not-too-much-not-too-little approach to everything in life that has kept us sane during the huge domestic, social and economic disruption of this Covid emergency.
And that is what I am planning to carry forward into 2022. So no Dry January for me. And there will be no hair-shirt-wearing at my pub and restaurant as we keep on doing our best to keep standing. In previous ‘normal’ years, we have closed The Fish House for a few weeks.
The staff could do with a break, the customers are few and far between and there is maintenance to do. This year, though, the bookings are unusually strong and the bank balance is low, so the maintenance is going to have to wait.
We did have cancellations over Christmas but compared to reports from friends in the business, especially up in London, they were remarkably few. The fact that we are set to be busy all through January – restrictions permitting – tells its own story.
There remains, even with omicron now threatening all the progress we have made, a real appetite for going out, not to a giant party, but for a meal or a drink where the health risks can be sensibly managed. For a few hours people want to be able to forget the blues of the past almost two years.
Instead of a Dry January, we have decided to offer our own antidote this month to any creeping gloom. We are staging the first of our ‘meet-the-producers’ events in the pub with the local Black Cow vodka distillery.
They are the neighbours, you might remember, who have been providing the old military tent that sits on the village green outside The Fox and have, since last spring, been giving us somewhere to serve food outdoors even on the coldest of nights.
If Covid has thrown up many stories of individual resilience in the face of something that has at times seemed to block every path onwards, it has also shown me that in this globalised, online, supply-line world, there remains, behind the veneer of our me-me-me society, a real and enduring value of what and who is local.
Without the mutual support of other local businesses down here in west Dorset, mine and many others might well have gone under in this storm we are living through.
Plenty has been said – much of it prematurely, as it turns out – about the many ways in which Covid will leave us changed when it finally relinquishes its grip.
I can, however, confidently report that it has already reinvigorated local networks and local communities like my own by reminding us that, when we are all in a mess together because of something that we individually have precious little control over, we can find a solidarity on our doorsteps that had been under-appreciated in recent decades.
Now, before you get the wrong impression, I am not against health initiatives. So whatever named storms blow in from Lyme Bay this month, I’ll be taking my daily constitutional on the beach, just as the doctors recommend. And the menus are going to have lighter options for those who have eaten too much over Christmas.
But my strong instinct is that this will be an unusual January, not the usual quiet period of reset after Christmas and New Year, but one shaped by the continuation of that trend we saw through much of last year, with people keen, sometimes even desperate, for some form of pleasure and enjoyment in testing times.
So, as long as I continue with my new habit of not listening to the news, I am anticipating the best of all worlds is round the next corner. What other choice have we got?
As told to Peter Stanford
