​Dry January is not all it's cracked up to be for resolution addicts - Vladimir McTavish

Many people who resolved to stop smoking will already have had a sneaky fag, trips to the gym will be tailing off and for many of us Dry January will already be as wet as the current weather.

The trouble with New Year’s resolutions is that tend to be thought up in a state of drunken euphoria at Hogmanay.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet that, in the course of my adult life, I’ve made all sorts of resolutions on New Year’s Eve that I completely forgot about in the haze of next day’s hangover.

I have made one resolution which I have stuck to. Back in my student days, I vowed to become a vegetarian at the start of 1982 and I haven’t eaten meat once in the last 40 years.

However, before then I wasn’t a big fan of steaks and I hardly ever ate bacon so it was no real hardship. I had been gradually weaning myself off meat for a long time and giving it up completely was a logical next step.

I did The Dryathon ten years ago, which was a sponsored challenge for Cancer Research UK. People were paying money to charity so I had stay off the drink for January.

Dry January tends to attract three very different types of people. Those who barely drink at all, for whom forsaking the booze is no sacrifice, and utter dipsomaniacs who figure their system could do with a rest.

And, most of all, people who love nothing more than boring the pants off their friends on social media.

The world would be a much better place if these narcissists took the resolution to stay off Facebook for 12 months.

The trouble with doing Dry January is that many heavy drinkers take it as carte blanche to go totally off-the-rails for the rest of the year.

I have a couple of acquaintances who did Sober October, only to follow up 31 days of sobriety by a whole month of binge drinking, which became known to their friends as Can’t Remember November.