Christmas Cheer

It's all going on chez Sara.

Here I am. It's Christmas, and I'm clean and sober for the first time in years. This is not to say that I've given up the booze as well as everything else, it's just, like, everything in moderation, you know? Kind of a scary thing for me.

Most of the Christmasses I've experienced over the past ten years have been spent in a haze of alcohol, starting with champagne for breakfast, moving on to wine at lunch and a naughty vodka or six before dinner. Last year, if I recall correctly (and my powers of recall are certainly not that reliable) was the year that Helen and I shrugged off our families and had Christmas together; we started with a line of coke each for breakfast and the day deteriorated from there.

So this year has been a bit of a shocker. Just Mum and I in our echoey old house, all glammed up and nowhere to go - my mother being a bit of a stickler for formal dress (her idea of casual is a heel lower than three inches). Turkey for two is a difficult act to pull off at the best of times and resulted in a fist-clenching, gritted teeth show of forced cheer. But we got through the day without killing each other, something I never would have thought possible.

No word from my father and the Ice Queen. I guess they wouldn't want to interrupt their month-long holiday in the Far East to lick a stamp and slap it on an envelope. Oh well, whatever. Merry Christmas, you old bastard.

I spent today being elbowed viciously by the hordes of desperate bargain hunters rooting around the sales racks in Selfridges, in the vain hope of finding something drop-dead sassy for New Year's Eve. Forget it. It's the same thing every year, and every year I neglect to remember all these garments are cut-price for a reason - that nobody else considered them hot enough to pay the full price before Christmas.

I'm seeing in the New Year with James. I'm a bit nervous about it considering that his friends are, on the whole, a bunch of gormless twats. However, it's either that or spend New Year in an orgy of narcotic excess with my friends - not a good idea considering the pain I went through last month to detox myself after years of enthusiastic abuse. So James and I will be swanking around some crumbling country pile for a sit down dinner and God knows what else. And I have to survive the whole thing without the comforting fog of being utterly shit-faced. This promises to be a true test of my resolve.

Wish me luck!