OOH, fancy standing in front of a billboard all day? Saatchi and Saatchi has teamed up with a supplements brand to provide London with “sunlight-inspired, light-emitting” billboards to help us cope with the depression associated with that peculiar phenomenon known as Blue Monday. The idea is that if you stand in front of these things, your serotonin levels soar and you move on with a big smile.
I have a trick to beat that: how about going to the pub with your colleagues and having a nice hot whisky? Then going home for a warming stew? Because there is, I maintain, a causal connection between the latest mad, counter-seasonal trend of January abstinence and the feeling of depression now associated with the third Monday in January.
I refer, obviously, to those hideous innovations, now a decade old: Dry January and Veganuary. At a stroke they make the bleakest month of the year significantly bleaker.
Have you been out today? Noticed the weather? It’s cold out there. Cold and damp. I ask you: is this any time to be giving up drink? Nature is calling out for a restorative. Ditto a nice beef stew with dumplings. This is no weather for kale smoothies; it’s a time to embrace all the good things of the season, to eat, drink and make merry. We used to, you know.
Until the Victorians shrank the Twelve Days of Christmas to three bank holidays, the Christmas season in all its festivity extended to January 6. And properly speaking, the season goes on until Candlemas, February 2. Long Christmas, you might say.
It’s that sense that January is still an extension of Christmas that we need to recover if we’re to get through the month without feeling genuinely sad. Retailers, who never let us enjoy the season we’re actually in, are trying to get us to think Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and, heaven help us, Easter, already (seen the hot cross buns in M&S?).
Well, dump that. Make January a time for self-indulgence, entertaining, enjoying meat and drink. There is a time for abstinence; it’s called Lent, and it happens in spring, a much better time.
It’s no wonder Blue Monday is Blue if we go out of our way to make ourselves miserable. Give up Dry January and Veganuary: trust me, that’ll help.
