In the style of Only Connect (which I’ve recently begun catching up on, and Victoria Coren-Mitchell is just ever so fabulous), my post title today is a guess-the-connection challenge.
A fairly poor challenge, given I’m about to explain, but let’s ignore that for a second.
The context is -anuary. Or, January. As in, first month of the year (according to the Gregorian calendar), everyone is sad, everything is cold, and we all have to do work we’d forgotten existed for a brief time over the festive period.
How do we solve the January Blues you ask?
We create ridiculous challenges for ourselves, and give them silly nicknames, that’s what. Following on the heels of Steptember, Stoptober, and Movember, welcome to a whole series of bizarre things you can do in January. To caveat this post, I’m not doing any of these things – not for the entire month at least.
- Veganuary
Ok, so I’ve gotten a bit involved in this already, accidentally. By having vegan friends. And by wanting to annoy the anti-vegan-sausage-roll-brigade because honestly, that just feels like fun. So far I’ve had vegan chili chips, and vegan mac n cheese, and I’ve not hated either - Dry January
I have donated to other people doing this. I have had a number of days where I haven’t had an alcoholic drink. But honestly, it’s just not that huge of a challenge for me since I don’t drink that much anyway, and why do a challenge that’s not a challenge? - Tryanuary
In an unexpected reversal of fortunes, I’ve started to see things around about ‘tryanuary’ which is where you spend this month trying new beer. Which honestly is probably more my speed, if only because the pub is probably warmer than my freezing house - RED January
Wear red in January for mental health. Not a terrible idea. Except that I don’t want to wear aggressive colours right now. I want to wear black, and possibly occasionally grey. I am all about improving mental health, but I honestly think people wearing red around me would be negative at this point - Manuary
In what I consider to be a slightly poor PR exercise, Manuary encourages you to grow a beard to raise funds for head and neck cancer. In Canada. In 2017. Which probably shows that I was surprised at how few January-themed “punths” there actually are. - Janu-hairy
Listen, you’re being silly now
So, I’m not subscribed to any of the above. It’s all a bit much for me, and I feel like launching Elevensanuary, which is where you’re only expected to be places by 11am, because the world hasn’t woken up before then. I think it’ll catch on.