Fit and 40? I’m working on it

This is my first time doing Dry January, and I don’t know how I feel about it. I’ve never done it before, because my enjoyment of wine is handily buttressed by a distaste for doing something everyone else is telling me to do (unless it’s drinking wine). I’ve also never really thought of my drinking as problematic. I don’t go to the pub very often and almost never binge or hit the spirits. Sadly, this doesn’t really mean much. The NHS insists that any more than 14 units of alcohol per week will damage your health. As such, the two large glasses of red wine I drink with dinner each night – a dosage which seems modest, even rabbinical, to me – are, by themselves, more than triple the UK’s recommended drinking levels for an adult, before I factor in whatever other drinking I get up to.

Not that there haven’t been other signs that I overdo it. Last week, we passed a wine shop and my son said, “Look Daddy, wine!”, in the same the way I used to point, for his delight, at passing fire engines. I’m 40 now, a little overweight, and having young kids means I do think about remaining active as they get older. Every Derryman I met in childhood sported a paunch by the time they reached their mid-30s, and cast the silhouette of a pantomime dame by the time they were my age. I don’t know that I ever saw one of them eat a vegetable. Portly relatives dying of heart attacks in their 50s was a tragic but commonplace occurrence, in a way that seems alien today, a feeling borne out by statistics that say cardiovascular deaths in Northern Ireland decreased by 76% between 1979 and 2013.

The idea of an “active dad” was so absurd that I can think of just one example from my entire childhood – my friend Paul’s father, who occasionally dropped in on our weekly five-a-side game. At the time this was so novel as to be miraculous, as if we were playing with someone who had been exhumed from a bog, his face purple, his knee wrapped in tape. He swore a lot and never seemed to be having a particularly good time, but we put this down to the fact that old age had turned his blood to dust, and he was likely confused and distracted by the appearance of electric lights and overhead planes. He was, I’m now forced to realise, 43 years old.

If I’m honest, though, all such considerations of health and fitness, noble as they are, remain secondary to pure vanity. I don’t really consider myself image-conscious and entertain only modest goals for my personal appearance. I have no use or desire for a stomach you can bounce pennies off, nor those muscles some guys have behind their necks that make them look as if they’ve put on a shirt without taking the hanger out first. No, my sole objective is to reach a stage where my first reaction on seeing a photo or video of myself isn’t, “Ah fuck.” Photos like the ones I have taken for this column on a semi-regular basis, for example. Photos in which my children appear more beautiful every year and I attain a greater resemblance to what I call “the beast who ate Séamas”.

So, following a particularly heavy Christmas and New Year, I decided it was time to get with the herd and see what sobriety was offering, if only for a month (with one allotted break for a pre-arranged event). The answer is: I don’t really know. Dinner times were boring at first, but after a few days I stopped missing or even noticing the absence of booze. I’ve lost a bit of weight and I think my energy levels may be up, although this could just be the bodily effects of all the smug particles I’m feeling from the rare and valiant act of denying myself something I love.

It’s only in the mornings that I feel particularly confused, even mildly annoyed. My tendency to wake up feeling groggy and slightly sore has continued, and the 20 minutes it takes for my brain to enter anything approaching human levels of cognition remains. These were all symptoms I used to put down to my drinking habits, but which I am now forced to blame not on hangovers, but on the irreducible effects of middle age. It’s a new dawn. It’s a new day. And this, it turns out, is just what waking up feels like.