Why not give yourself a great Christmas present? It doesn’t cost anything – in fact it will save you a lot of money – and it’s really good for your health. The only problem with this present is that you can’t give it to anyone apart from yourself, and that doesn’t really fit with the Christmas Spirit, when we spend too much money on presents for other people.

So what is this brilliant gift? It is simply to give up alcohol for Christmas and New Year (and ideally forever). It is a promise to yourself that you will no longer waste your money and risk your health by consuming a drug that is both expensive and, in the case of spirits, tastes so bad that you need to mix it with juice.

There are so many good arguments to give up drinking and so few reasons to go on a December binge at office parties, Christmas celebrations and New Years. I suspect that most people don’t plan to drink too much at this time of year but we tend to get caught up in the “Christmas Spirit” and allow ourselves to be carried along by convention and custom. And then we wake up in January feeling hungover, bloated, broke and depressed.

Why do we do it? Are we just going along with the crowd? Are we unable to exercise our free will? Do we need to get drunk to enjoy parties? I would like to say this is the behaviour of a herd of animals, but animals are smarter than us; they don’t consume things which are bad for them and they know how to avoid danger.

The best reason for giving up alcohol is that it’s a poison. I had always known this but it was a vague awareness at the back of my mind, associated with people in the pub saying “What’s your poison?” and the kind of bravado that goes with heavy drinking. And how can alcohol be a poison if it’s legal, if it can make you feel good and if we drink it in relatively large quantities without dropping down dead? Poison kills immediatel