Thursday 10 June 2010

Hello Hangover, How Nice of You to Visit Again

I like a drink. I am not an alcoholic.

I have thrown up in public from drinking too much. I have never been arrested for being drunk and disorderly.

Bar staff in my local know my drink. I have never been so drunk I can’t find my way home.

I have fantastic memories as a result of going on some amazing benders.

I have many, many scars and injuries that hurt more the next day than they did at the time of the “incidents”.

Alcohol is not bad. People that can’t handle their alcohol or have issues that they haven’t addressed when sober are bad.

There are good and bad things about pretty much everything. Drinking is a prime example. I don’t like drunk, letchy old men any more than the next person trying to enjoy a quiet pint in a beer garden, but sadly such people are a fact of life around these parts.

I myself have been less than classy when drunk on more than one occasion. Certain friends have witnessed things I will never tell my children, or any other impressionable youths that are unlucky enough to have me present during childhood. Then again, I have started sharing these experiences with my mother recently, and have come to found she decided on the same tactic when raising me, and there’s quite a lot I don’t know.

My most recent drunken error was at the end of March where I ended up in the local A&E on the Sunday morning with my good friend Karlie after a 14 hour drinking session.

Just a word to the wise: showing up at A&E on a Sunday morning while still slightly drunk, being told you’ll be waiting about 2 hours, and the hangover kicks in about 45 minutes into that wait is NOT nice. Especially when you have screaming babies, pikey parents unable to control them and most people talking loudly in the most common of West Country accents.

Luckily the nurses were very nice about my foot injury which occurred at hour 8 of the 14 when I decided jumping off a high kerb in kitten heels would be a great idea. I ended up flat on my face, while my friends roared with laughter before helping me up off the ground and making sure I hadn’t ripped a hole in my leggings.

The nurse who saw to me took my forms, checked my name and date of birth, the standard stuff, and then went onto the important questions:

Nurse: “Do you smoke?”

Me: “Nope”

Nurse: “Do you drink?”

Me: “Erm…”

*Karlie starts to laugh*

Nurse: “Take a look at this. (hands me a laminated sheet of all different types of alcohol, defining what a “unit” of each one is) How many units would you say you drink in a week?”

Me: “A normal week or this week?”

Nurse: (trying not to laugh) “I do need to make you aware that excessive drinking causes…”

Me: “Yep, heard it all before…”

Only in the last couple of weeks have I been able to wear heels again.

Anyone else have some excellent “drunken injury” stories?

While writing I listened to:

Alanis Morissette – Not the Doctor

The Cardigans – Erase/Rewind

Aswad – Shine

Sheryl Crow – All I Wanna Do

The Dandy Warhols – Bohemian Like You

The Zutons – Valarie

The Fugees – Ready or Not

3 comments:

  1. top marks for the first photo - I to am not a classy drunk at times and I may have gone down the wrong street once, but its everything in moderation (sometimes excess) I was wondering why ther was no mention of things lost whilst under said influence though?

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  2. also sorry for the spelling mistake in there... stupid computer

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  3. I have a certain drunken story that involves a certain friend on a birthday out around the Sham, losing a certain sibling, witnessing something that has burned into my retinas and resulted in my drunken running away screaming "my eyes! Oh god my eyes!!!" followed by tripping over my beautiful baggy jeans and rolling my drunken ass down a hill :-)

    Ahh memories...

    Luff you! Loz x

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