Hangover

Drinking on a school night is, I have concluded (and I've done my research) a Bad Idea.

No, that's not quite right. Drinking at any time is a good idea. Having an alcoholic beverage is a conscious decision and one is normally in a position to make the right decision about what drink is suitable for the occasion. Basic rule of thumb is: champagne for celebration, scotch for desolation, wine for embrocation and gin for utter inebriation. And tequila, when not in Mexico, if you're a twat.

So, drinking is always a rational choice. But the second glass and onwards can the subject of clouded judgement. What I'm driving at here is that having a hangover and having to go to work is bad.

I'm currently typing this on a train and I have a dreadful feeling that I'm sobering up. Normally, this is a process that happens overnight. You have a few drinks, fall into bed and wake up feeling various flavours of rough, ranging from a sensation of being slightly crinkly round the edges all the way through to requiring what the Victorians would call a 'purge' and what we would describe as needing a small pine tree shoved up the arse and vigerously twisted in order to ever feel fresh again.

Waking up still drunk, but about to sober up at work, is unpleasant. I have the first indications of an impending headache and am feeling the same sense of trepidation that a Polynesian mariner might if he saw fluffy clouds on the horizon that are the heralds of a typhoon.

And sobering up at work is no fun at all. First of all you can't tell anyone. A hangover is not like a proper illness, with everyone making sympathetic noises and asking if it's contagious. It's something that you want to keep to yourself, like an STD, which, ironically, is something one gets because somebody else didn't. It's also something that you want to conceal, and which you have a little paranoid fantasy about. Has anyone noticed that you are behaving oddly. Well, if you eat paracetomol like smarties and drink three vans of cola every morning, nobody will suspect, otherwise, you're busted.

So, obviously the thing to do is try and manage the situation. First thing first, coffee. Even if you don't actually drink the stuff, simply having it near you to draw strength from is a good idea. Unfortunately the place I stopped in at this morning, which is a fantastic little cafe, has their coffee machine set to 'molten', meaning that the stuff will actually be cool enough to drink in about 2016. The cafe itself smelled at once delightful and repugnant. The wondrous smells of bacon and sausage and scrambled egg, the actual taste of which nobody can really appreciate before the day gets into double figures.

It used to be that my contemporaries and I would sport our hangovers like duelling scars. No longer. Possibly that was because in my callow youth hangovers were the result of adventures, rather then an ageing immune system and reaching for the bottle because the news on the telly was just too gruesome.

What hasn't changed is the search for a miracle cure. Hangovers remain the one ailment that rational people believe can be cured through deep fried homeopathy. There's only one cure for a hangover - don't get up until eight o'clock the following evening.

If you are unlucky enough not to be able to follow that treatment, then the second best bet is a carefully calculated dose of medication of your choice that is just short of fatal, combined with wotsits. Essentially what you're aiming for is enough pills to mute the demonic jazz/funk crossover band that are playing a residency in your head, and a snack that will, if not take away the horrible taste in your mouth, will at least replace it with something less likely to make you wonder if you actually rounded off the evening catching badgers and licking their arses.

Certainly, there's a gap in the market for a hangover cure. A can of cola with a couple of paracetomol already dissolved in it, a packet of wrongly flavoured crisps (pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch?) and, for that homeopathic touch, a mole on a stick to lick, because folk law says that licking a mole is good for a hangover, and it certainly won't make your mouth taste any worse.

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.