Laura Craik hails the end of 'Stoptober'

Stoptober is over and everyone is drinking again.

Only they’re getting even more drunk than before, on less booze, because their tolerance has plummeted. ‘I feel so pissed!’ they exclaim after a mouthful of Rioja, knocking over a vase. I never do Stoptober. It’s too drastic. Instead, I follow the 4:3 diet, which is like the 5:2 diet only with portion control replaced by alcohol control. Every week, I have four evenings off booze completely, followed by three evenings on, which means I spend 57.142857 per cent of the year sober, or, to put it another way, 42.857143 per cent of the year drunk.

While a man will drink six pints then have a hangover, a woman’s trajectory is less straightforward. If you were to play #WomenDrinkingTogetherBingo, you can probably bet the following phrases would feature heavily on any given night. 1) ‘Just a small top-up, honestly.’ 2) ‘I really can’t have a hangover tomorrow — I have way too much to do.’ 3) ‘I don’t feel pissed at all… [five minutes later] I’m hammered!’ 4) ‘Put that Justin Timberlake song on again.’ We also like to discuss the finer details of our consumption on any given night. ‘Bottled beer only — that punch is lethal,’ we’ll say, before being spotted three hours later drinking straight from the pitcher with a straw.

November and December are the booziest months of the year and while party season isn’t upon us yet, it’s looming.

Spare a thought for the people who don’t drink (Blake Lively, Eva Mendes, Jennifer Hudson and Kendrick Lamar among them — who knew?) yet have to listen to the rest of us wanging on about how we ordered gold flares off Asos like nobody else ever drunk-shopped but us. Also, don’t pressure people into having ‘just one more’, for not everyone’s relationship with alcohol is straightforward. Between abstinence and alcoholism lie a thousand shades of grey. Drink because you want to, not because you have to, and always reserve the right not to drink at all.

SLY OLD PROXY

Fashion flipping is nothing new: when it comes to designers’ limited-edition collections for H&M, it’s standard to see the thing you really wanted selling on eBay for several times the price shortly after launch. Browsing on eBay the morning after the Erdem frenzy (below), I spied a new development. ‘I CAN GET YOU ALMOST ANY ITEM IN YOUR SIZE FROM ERDEM COLLABORATION!’ claimed one seller. ‘100% genuine, I will be able to provide receipts if required.’ How? Even the VIPs invited to the pre-launch aren’t guaranteed this privilege. Another listing described an ‘H&M x Erdem Proxy Service’ costing £768. ‘Getting to the collection at 3am… proxy fees depend on items’ retail and hype,’ it said. We’ve all heard about being too posh to push, but too posh to queue? ‘Proxy buyer’ — it’s a strange way to make a living, but apparently a lucrative one.

#stopskirtingtheissue

A YouGov poll asked 2,775 adults what constitutes sexual harassment and found that ‘a man trying to take a photo up a woman’s skirt’ was deemed the most offensive act, with 96 per cent of respondents agreeing. More vindication, if any were needed (which, duh, it isn’t), for Gina Martin, who has been campaigning for ‘upskirting’ to be made a sexual offence since July, after a stranger stuck his hands between her legs during a music festival in London, took a crotch shot then sent it to his friends who were standing nearby. Martin managed to snatch his phone and find a nearby police presence, but was told there ‘wasn’t much they could do’. Search #stopskirtingtheissue for details on how to sign her petition.