January is a grey and miserable month

Bloated from festive over-eating and disappointed by a lack of Dickensian snow, we count the cost of that huge pile of presents, desperate for a pay day that never arrives.  We are forced from our beds each day by a shrieking alarm clock whose only job is to remind us that it is still pitch black outside; not that daylight would be much help, revealing as it does another twelve hours of bleak and freezing drizzle.  God I’m depressed.

Since my experience of January is a universal one, you would think that at the very least I could rely on a group of girlfriends to get me through.  Grimly determined to battle out this most miserable of months, we will huddle in pub corners, eat hearty puddings and commiserate over bottles of wine; we might even console ourselves with the January sales.  When at last we come up for air, it will be February and we will congratulate ourselves on having yet again made it through the worst month of the year.

Alas, this has not come to pass, and my so-called friends are instead bent on spending the month “improving” themselves.  They have become the very worst of people.  Exercising, detoxing, re-evaluating and meditating.  My God. Just getting out from under the duvet each morning is hard enough.  What on earth possesses them to then enter a gym, or start a run, is just beyond me, and it’s not as if they look any better for it.  Grey, sweaty, and chilled down to their bone marrow, I can’t imagine what they’re so bloody pleased about.  You won’t catch me running for so much as a bus until at least May.

The ones who aren’t ruining their joints with expensive gym equipment have opted instead to restrict their diet to one not dissimilar to that offered to my children’s guinea pigs.  Those best of chums with whom I used to share a coffee and a cake now sit opposite me sipping their warm water and lemon and nibbling furtively on a granola bar.  I don’t know if you’ve tried enjoying a natter with a snooty rodent but it isn’t much fun.

The only way through this utter hell is to drink, although again this is eschewed by almost all of my former friends.  They parade their new year’s sobriety as though it were the very highest of virtues. Well it bloody well isn’t.  There’s nothing clever about refusing a drop at the start of the year when I know damned well you’ll be an old soak before the end of Valentine’s Day, and all you’ve done in the meantime is make my misery that much worse.  Giving up drink for a month, and this month in particular, shows just how little our friendship actually meant.  Bastards.

So this month I’m accepting applications from new friends.  I welcome the fat, the pasty, the unhealthy and the down-right miserable round to my place for caffeine and chocolate and alcohol and moaning.  And my old lot can sod off until they are as unhealthy, tired and gin soaked as me. 

Happy New Year