Believe it or not, I was once every Mother’s dream; a well-mannered wee chap with good grades in school, a tidy bedroom and an even tidier haircut. At some point in my teenage years – like a lot of well-mannered wee chaps – the proverbial rails buckled somewhat and I careered off into a decade of hedonistic decadence and bastardness. Not quite the Mother’s dream at that point, as Ma (and the central Auckland constabulary) can probably confirm.
The details of those ten years are bloody sketchy, and I’m certainly not about to recount those that I can remember here, but it’s fair to say that I spent most of the time either drunk, drinking to get drunk, or trying to scam the money to buy drink to get drunk. Quite a waste when you look back on it, and a lifestyle that, while surely unsustainable in the long term, could possibly have continued up to the present day had it not been for the unexpected yet thankful interlude of Dry July in 1999.
Dry July came about as a result of not being able to scam enough money to buy drink. At the end of June an Australian friend announced she’d be coming over in August for a visit and, knowing I had less than nothing in the bank, I realised I needed to cut back on the booze for a wee while if I was going to have the cash to show her a good time. So I did something I’d never done since taking up the bottle, and that was to put it down. For a month. To be honest ‘put it down’ is somewhat of an overstatement. Looking back now, I can’t believe this was my idea of cutting back, but I promised myself that during that July of 1999 I’d have ‘no more than six beers in a session’. God knows how much I was drinking before that…
Anyhow, the rest is – as they say – history. As luck would have it, July rhymed nicely with Dry (‘Nay May’ will never catch on MC) and a new detox revolution was spawned. I’m happy to say that eight of the last nine years (bar the one where I was moving overseas in August; needless to say that particular July was a rather sodden one) have had a Dry July and – unlike that first pre-Millenium one – all are now mostly booze-free. ‘Mostly’ because I’ve since had the good fortune to meet a young July-born lady and not toasting her good health mid-month would be damn rude.
Despite that little exemption Dry July has become an annual event, and each year the list of detox items changes slightly. Caffeine (oh, sweet caffeine) makes a regular appearance, dairy was out one year, even TV made the cut (was cut) in 2005. Whichever substances seem to be addling me the most, for just one month in the middle of the year they get axed. And while Dry July 1999 was a bugger to get through (even with the six beer rule, good grief) it’s been getting easier with each year since. Because the biggest impact isn’t physical (though the year the Liver Cleansing diet was added certainly was – those of you who’ve done it will know exactly what I mean) – it’s psychological. Knowing you can kick a habit on demand is bloody liberating – and stands you in good confidence for the eleven months of debauchery to come…
haha. I’d forgotten about the "Nay May" call. I believe that came out of the fact that July was smack bang in the middle of the snow season, and the thought of enduring yet another "closed" weekend holed up in an Ohakune chalet with nothing else to do but, ah, "not" drink was too much to bear. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I failed horribly in our first attempt at Dry July, even with the "no more than 6 beers in a sitting" rule. In fact we even stretched the rule to "reset" after midnight and still failed. Thankfully, my drinking has moderated over recent years, possibly in no small part because of that wake up call in 1999. Cheers…. eh. (can’t kick that habit, eh)
There’ve been similar objections to the timing of the Northern Hemisphere Dry July, what with it being in the middle of this glorious summer ‘n all. Personally though, the timing couldn’t get any sweeter – being sandwiched between the excesses of a late-June Glastonbury and an early-August birthday blowout makes you kinda think it was meant to be…eh (yes, you can)…
Well post-Glasto detox aside, I am a proponent of a Dry February for us northern hemisphere dwellers, and I in fact did a solitary dry February this year… It barely caused a glitch in my social calender as for most Londoners December involves heavy drinking and a multitude of xmas parties etc, and January continues in the same vein with New Year catch up bevvies, and general drowning of sorrows after those new year resolutions fail. So we find ourselves in the month of February and thoroughly feeling like a good detox. So whilst I had no official Dry February comrades, there were a heck of a lot of people who seemed to be laying off the sauce, at least in a half-pie manner and the ‘let’s meet at the pub’ invites were thinner on the ground than usual. And to add to this February is the shortest month. What more could you ask for? It’s a cinch. Go dry February!