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.

Comment on: 'We're in a right state'

Comment on: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/12/disability-britain-society-lucy-mangan?commentpage=last#end-of-comments

Partial repost.

Society ascribes a sliding scale of deference to illness and infirmity. If your inability to rise from your bed is caused by, for instance, that genius idea you had at half nine the previous night to switch to shorts, and your symptoms include headache, nausea, 40% proof perspiration and the nagging thought that you did something dreadful in your left shoe last night, you are unlikely to get much sympathy. Consideration for others should, however, be extended to those who have trouble getting about, ranging from those struggling with three bags or more of rebellious shopping, through those with sticks or crutches and wheelchairs, all the way up to speeding ambulances or creeping hearses.

The possible exception is when one sees a tanned, fit looking sort with a colourful cast on his foot and you briefly wonder how deserving of sympathy is somebody who may have just stubbed their toe when pissed out their skull on schnapps during their recent skiing holiday.

Social attitudes towards illness and infirmity have changed significantly over time. A hundred years ago, there was a simple scale; standard-issue ‘healthy’ was upright and able-bodied, but afflicted by any number and combination of maladies that stunted your growth, gave you sores, caused you to walk funny, caused you to look funny, or caused people to look funny at you, throw rocks at you, or in extreme cases hound you out of the village with pitchforks.

If you were ‘poorly’ this normally meant that working eighteen hours a day in a factory or down a coal mine had left you with the sort of cough that would shake a lesser man apart at the seams and a talent for producing different coloured phlegm to order, including multi-coloured on bank holidays.

‘Badly’ was a description of the after-effects of a threshing accident. Today we would say ‘in a critical condition’ or ‘has anybody found his head yet?’ In the huge open plan mills of the industrial revolution, being caught in a loom and accidentally woven into the pattern of a carpet was so common that the drama was downplayed. Likewise, farming and industrial machinery consisted of overheated boilers, spinning flanges, swooping sharp bits and, of course, flywheels driving exposed belt-loops designed to catch not just extremities but bonnets, frilly shirts and other stunningly impractical clothing of the age.

Luckily, we now have advances not just in health and safety, but tight clothing and, of course, medication. But even the cure can be tricky. For instance, not long ago I decided to treat a sniffle by trying an allegedly ‘non-drowsy’ berry-flavoured drink. What I remember is a sensation of hot ribena and then waking up at two in the afternoon feeling a bit queer and not at all surprised that housewives get hooked on painkillers, it makes the dull bit of the afternoon go quicker than two sherries and an episode of ‘antiques roadshow’.

But at least it was a proper chemical cure. When faced with a complex problem or illness there’s nothing worse than these quack cures that homoeopathists peddle - shoving a banana up your arse to cure a headache or whatever (peel it first - you don’t want to look stupid). The purveyors of quack cures should, at least, be honest in their trade, possibly by ditching the white lab coat and simply rolling into town in a horse-drawn wagon, pulling up in the town square and putting on a medicine show flogging ‘Professor McTeeths all-nachural-snakebite-liniment’, a patent cure-all for warts, coughs, lost limbs, teenage boys playing with themselves and, if you drink the stuff, sobriety.

Of course there is a school of thought that you can treat just about anything with alcohol. For instance the belief that a ‘hot toddy’ can have a positive benefit on a cold is so widespread that it’s a wonder you can’t get Glenfiddich on the NHS. Certainly there’s a time and a place for alcohol in the treatment of illness; having a drink to celebrate your hangover dissipating or knocking back an enormous gin while you tell your friends the tale of how you came to lose your arm, while standing on your brand-new tiger skin rug.

(Painful pelvis sounds like a right pain in the arse…and hip, and whole pelvisish region. Hope you are once more able to frolic like a spring lamb on speed soon).