Keith “two livers” Richards, has, save for the odd beer, stopped drinking. “It’s been about a year now,” he was reported as saying. “I pulled the plug on it. I got fed up with it.”

I imagine the new situation will have caused alarm in some quarters. Surely there will be job losses as a result of this – in some distilleries, or among Keith’s domestic staff, because he must have had a drinks mixer and fixer: a person who knew the precise ratio of orangeade to vodka involved in Keith’s trademark cocktail (“nuclear waste”, it was called). Or what about the comedians who found a ready source of material in his dissolution? I like this, by Bill Hicks

: “Keith went over the edge years ago, but when everyone looked down over the edge they saw there was a fucking ledge, and Keith had landed on it.”

The announcement certainly disturbed me, coming as it did at the start of the Christmas drinking season. I think about Keith a lot, and now – as I broach my third glass of wine of a festive evening – I will be haunted by chastening images of him doing things other than drinking: Keith carefully and protractedly tuning his guitar; Keith going for a walk; Keith drinking orangeade laced with orangeade.

The trouble is, Keith was always one of my models of insobriety. These people tend to be celebrities who consume a lot of booze with apparent enjoyment and impunity. Ideally they will be old and alive, but it is acceptable for them to be dead if they reached an advanced age, which is why Winston Churchill and the painter Francis Bacon both qualify. Ideally, they should also look good on it, and I think Keith does look really good. He also looks really bad, of course, and one writer put it nicely when he said he wouldn’t mind looking as “good/bad” as Keith.

The role models should be graceful drinkers, and again Keith makes the grade. Yes, he tends to slur. For example, a journalist reported a few years ago that Keith took an inordinately long time to say the words “gymnastics teacher” (and I ought to check any further possible agitation by saying that Keith had not himself taken up gymnastics but was referring to the profession of Mick Jagger’s dad). And he has a track record of falling. On stage in Indianapolis in 2015, Keith simply fell over, but he has also fallen off something (a ladder in his library in 1998) and out of something (a palm tree in Fiji in 2006, resulting in a blood clot in the brain).

Whether alcohol was involved in any of these incidents I couldn’t say, but when I think of Keith I always do imagine him drinking, and in this way I would somehow commune with him at the Christmas parties of my youth. As the Rolling Stones songs blared, I would be drinking and smoking, secure in the knowledge that the co-creator of the party’s soundtrack would almost certainly be indulging in the same way at the same time.

I do think of Keith as a Christmassy figure, since he is, or was, the ultimate good-time guy – and Christmas is the ultimate good-time time. I think the association goes back to Christmas 1978, when I bought Keith’s debut solo single, an amazingly loose-limbed cover of the Chuck Berry hit Run Rudolph Run (and I was indignant at Ian Dury’s four-word dismissal of it on Radio 1’s Roundtable review show: “Leave it out, Keith”.) What bothers me today is the thought that if I was metaphorically drinking “with” Keith at those Christmas parties in the late 1970s, I wouldn’t have been drinking with him the rest of the time. I was a party drinker, but not the regular drinker I later became. If invited to a bring-a-bottle party in my late teens, I always had to go out and buy the bottle specially from that relatively unfamiliar place, the local off-licence, which I recall as being bedecked with tinsel – because Christmas was almost the only time I went there. These days, however, if I’m invited to a party I just reach into the fridge for a spare bottle of white.

Part of my affection for those Stonesy parties is that they happened at a time of relative innocence, but it was a dangerous innocence. I had no conception of a “unit” of alcohol, but if I’d been paying attention I would have learned in 1979 that, as a man, the government was advising me not to exceed 56 units per week, as opposed to 14 today. We Britons drank less in the 1970s, but the curve was beginning its rise towards “peak alcohol”, achieved in 2004 on the back of cheap supermarket supplies and the boom in wine drinking at home. Since then, our consumption has been falling. Well, I say “our” … mine hasn’t been falling to any great degree, and I find myself in the mould of the classic modern tippler: a male baby boomer with some spare cash.

We fancy ourselves sufficiently worldly to be sceptical about government limits, and I have always regarded the alcohol Jeremiahs by whom we are now besieged, as authoritarians, physical cowards or prigs. But Keith Richards is none of those things. I pay attention to Keith, as do many of my cohort. He tends to be right about things: for example Led Zeppelin (“Something a little hollow about it, you know?”)

Not that Keith is making any proscriptive statement about alcohol. He just does things his own way, and a lot of men tend to emulate him. His abstinence might actually prove a turning point for me … eventually. In the meantime, I will feel a little lonelier and less resolute as I uncork the Christmas bottles.

• Andrew Martin is a novelist. His next book, The Winker, will be published in June 2019