The Crisis Open Christmas ended this morning and, as is the tradition, we celebrated the end of the week looking after people with dependency issues, especially alcohol dependency, by going to the pub and drinking all day. There's definitely something ironic about turning up to the pub at 9am on a Sunday in order to binge drink under these circumstances.

However, when you've spent a week working night shift, the time-travel that alcohol can afford you, enables you to get through the additional hours of the day after your last wake up and make it to late enough to justify sleeping to get one's body clock back into sync. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Drinks were nice. It was good to get to know people outside of the context of the work environment, and I hope I managed to convey my sincerest of thanks to everyone who had made the successes we'd had possible.

I think this year has been very different and I'm not really in a position to publicly state too much about it, except that I found it in some ways more rewarding than I have done before. Perhaps this is a product of experience and attitude, as much as a product of how things went. Certainly, though, I know we created an environment where we could give people some very personal and very appreciated assistance. That's worth spending your Christmas doing.

I've now done 42 shifts for this organisation and I'm proud to have been allowed to. I do it for my own purposes, rather than to achieve some state of moral high-ground or even fulfil a sense of arbitrary duty. I do have a sense of responsibility to the organisation, but I don't want to be seen as self-congratulatory or indeed righteous in any way. We do things we want to do because it pleases us to do them. That's the human condition. I think, however, that this particular selfish act on my part is probably fairly low damage!