Fit for nothing

I’m writing this in the grip of a hangover so vile that I am seriously considering retaining the services of an exorcist to shift it. It’s not just the headache, although that’s bad enough, it’s the way that, these days, a hangover seems to affect my entire body, it’s like having the flu, indeed it’s so much like having the flu that I crave lemsip and am starting to think that I might actually have the flu, a stealth flu that is concealing itself behind my hangover.

It’s not just the body that feels like one big clogged sinus, it’s the psyche too. Oh, there’s the shame and regret naturally, not exactly on a par with being discovered wanking through the letterbox of the girl you have a crush on, but niggling, nonetheless.

Indeed, I feel I may actually have strayed into the realm of the exo-hangover, a hangover so bad that I actually need to externalise its properties. This would certainly seem to be the case judging from my last visit to the loo. I’m no feaceologist but I’m pretty sure that water is not supposed to react like that when poo hits it.

All in all, I’d quite like to stick a hose in my mouth and turn on the water until every orifice, pore and organ is sluiced clean from within, turning me into some sort of ornamental fountain of virtue. But as that sort of treatment is only available to suspected terrorists, I’ll have to settle for paracetamol and coffee.

Exercise is supposed to be good for a hangover. Possibly this is a reverse of the stealth flu syndrome, where you start exercising and, at some point, your hangover symptoms cannot compare with the discomfort you are feeling as a result of your strenuous activity and leaves in a pouty huff. Apparently if you exercise for long enough, your body releases dolphins or something and you get a ‘natural high’. This is surely tosh; if it were true then pubs would have treadmills instead of alcohol.

Then again, it might explain why people who go to the gym always look so smug, at least the ones who can last for longer than 30 minutes on the treadmill without throwing up.

It might also explain why I was in such a ridiculously good mood at the conclusion of my bike ride this weekend. My pedalling was not a result of a virtuous desire for exercise but rather a need to go to the shops to buy sausage and the car being elsewhere at the time. It’s uphill all the way to the next village and by the time I got there I was cursing Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton for making it look so easy.

The trip back though was fantastic, downhill all the way, over pavements strewn with fallen autumn leaves, it was like gliding through a carpet gold, all the while singing along with George Thurgood ‘One burbon, one scotch, one beer’ and punctuating it with the occasional ‘wheeeeeeeeeee’ of joy for good measure.

The bike is so, so much better than jogging or being a member of a gym. This is because as a bloke it fulfils all your accessorise requirements, you can strap loads of stuff to it, even stuff that doesn’t need batteries. It also fulfils a bloke’s wanderlust requirements: see an interesting side trail, then down it you go. Okay, there’s a danger that you might unexpectedly ride out into mid-air before having an impromptu industrial heritage experience or, as it’s otherwise known, a dip in a canal and there’s always the danger of coming face to horn with a bull, but overall the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

The drawback is trying to convince others that the time you have spent essentially finding a new way to get mud up your back entitles you to tell them about it. People who stopped cycling as soon as they started driving are unlikely to be impressed by tales of off-road daring-do, even when you show them the broken branches sticking to your helmet and the blood and matted animal fur stuck to the pump you used to defend yourself.