Is there any respite?
If Dry January wasn’t depressing enough for thirsty chaps like me, there’s another one now: Sober October.
All right, £789,000, at last count, has already been raised for Macmillan Cancer Support by members of the public pledging to keep off the booze until Halloween — abstinence that’s helping to ‘raise vital funds for people living with cancer’.
So there’s undoubted merit in all these people spending a month on the water wagon.
And I don’t need to be persuaded that not drinking makes for better sleep, better concentration, better health in general —one is generally brighter-eyed and bushier-tailed.
But I’m afraid I’m getting fed up with being bossed about on account of these well-meaning campaigns that seem now to be attached to every month of the year.
They irritate me as well. However, I don’t allow them to bully me into compliance. If I drank alcohol or smoked tobacco, I would continue to do so throughout the year according to my preferences, not some virtue-signalling campaign trying to get me to stop. As for Black history month, I ignore it as there is no such thing as black history, just history.
February is not immune either: it is LGBT+ History Month, as I am sure you are well aware.
As with black history, there is in such thing and I don’t celebrate it, I ignore it.
As I say, these monthly campaigns present charities with fund-raising opportunities, which is all to the good. But they wear me down; I can’t avoid the feelings of sin and inadequacy when my honest response to them is a shrug of the shoulders.
It’s not a sin. It’s the most appropriate response and it’s precisely what I do.
And then there’s the puritanical edge to these marketing campaigns. They appeal to our inner Oliver Cromwell.
I don’t have an inner Oliver Cromwell. If you smoke, drink, take weed, then fill your boots. I don’t care because it’s none of my business. Just show me the same courtesy.
One or two glasses of wine usually makes me sleep better!!
Thus I agree with you. Do as you please, and let others do the same.
And I really do not want another try at Prohibition!!!
Sober October doesn’t appeal to me
But going on a Bender in November does.
Probably repeat it in December too
Bender November?
Don’t give them ideas!
That’s already covered by LGBTQI+ February.
In Australia, its Ocsober, has been for a year or two. If I want to donate to charity, I will do so without the need to abstain from alcohol or grow facial hair (Movember). I enjoy the odd glass, particularly red wine and whisky and don’t feel any need to reduce my consumption. I sleep just fine and am still at the top of my game professionally. Most of our circle of friends consume alcohol at roughly similar levels, but our fitness levels and health are vastly different. At 64, despite having asthma all my adult life, I’m the fittest of the lot, typically indulging in high intensity exercise for 1.5-2 hours four or five times per week.
The food and drink I consume depends on my body which I listen to very keenly. I know by now what is good for me and what is not, my body and only my body tells me that. It’s very simple really.
Fund raising sounds very worthy… but how much of the funds raised are used to pay senior executives? We ought to find out before encouraging more grifters to benefit from our ‘charitable giving’.
I enjoy beer mainly. I buy a bottle of decent whisky at Christmas and when it’s my birthday. Usually I stop drinking for a while after those times and at other times when having a few beers on an evening gets to be a bit too regular. This is all for my own health and wellbeing, the nagging busybodies don’t affect me I just ignore them.
If only there was a month which rhymed with uckoff. Or tweleve of them.