The grand hangover guide

There are types of hangover we all go through, each associated in the main part with the alcoholic beverage we have consumed in the most part the night before. Or the day before. Or the entire week before. Depends on your level of commitment, really.

The wine hangover brings with it a dull, irritating headache – ever-present and not the sort of thing that lends itself to any air of flightiness or the ability to move much. At least in the morning. But it’s tinged with hope – and with the air of class that comes from getting rat arsed on something a step or two up from meths.

There’s the beer hangover, which brings with it the intense feeling you are about to die from a headache. It is a dirty, filthy, horrible hangover that seems to know exactly what to do to you to make it a bad follow up day to the drinking. Mainly: make your head hurt and, as a result of your head hurting, make you not be able to sleep.

And, in my experience, there’s the vodka hangover. This, if managed well enough the previous day – water consumption before bed and a chicken product to aid with its magical curative properties – can be the best of the hangovers. It can allow you to be sprightly and active the next day, barely even recognising the fact you drank enough to kill twelve children. But it teeters on the brink, and one drink too many plunges you into the absolute worst of the hangovers: nausea, sleeplessness, headache, loss of appetite, need to eat everything anyway, more nausea and a profound melancholy.

Well, I thought it was the worst of the hangovers. Then I tried to combine all of the above elements last night and discovered a new plane of hangovertitude. And I still feel like I’m suffering now. I couldn’t even focus on Match Of The Day because it was making me feel sick by moving too much. My reactions are so dulled I’m fucking bollocks at pinball. I should not have drank all of those things.

It’s a hangover so bad I’m considering dropping the whole drinking thing. And that’s something I’ve never considered before. Siiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

Today, I didn’t hate McDonald’s

Hey look, it’s the blog that was predicted by Ryan “Ryan” King earlier today. Miraculous and unexpected!

Basically, I went to McDonald’s today. For the first time in years. And you know what? I had a massive hangover. I had a massive hangover, and I wanted shitty food. I’ve been eating a lot of shitty food recently, and I should stop. But I had a massive hangover and I wanted shitty food.

So I had some shitty food.

And it was good.

I mean, it was terrible. It tasted like fat and salt. The chips were a weird mix of too soft and too sharp and crunchy. The coke was iced up to the tits. Gherkins still exist, as do onions. Objectively speaking, it was a pile of shit.

But in my rather confused state it was probably the best thing I could have done. As a result I am an instant convert to the world of Maccy Dees, to the point where I will rescind everything bad I ever said about the Evil Empire and its shitty food (that is shit).

I take it back about the stupid claims as if it’s a good thing that the chips are “100% potato”, or that just because it says “pure beef” it doesn’t mean the burgers aren’t made from ground up anus and cow toenails. I take it back about their horrible, horrible ‘common man’ poetry adverts being terrible – I was clearly wrong and they’re actually brilliant.

Though my version was still better.

I might be in the throes of some kind of McDonald’s-inflicted mania, by the way. In fact, I hope I am, because I can’t live with myself liking that place. Going to have to suicide it up. Or have another one of these delicious beers.

The salty hangover

I awoke this morning with something I haven’t knowingly experienced before. I have experienced it, as… well, I just clearly have. There’s no way I haven’t. The more I think about it, the more I realise that yes, I did experience it but I always ignored it, didn’t notice it or it just didn’t generally register because I felt so shitty all the time anyway.

The pizza hangover.

I did not drink yesterday. It’s why I’m so thirsty all the time (copyright Rik Mayall). But I had no booze. I had some coffee, some tea, some Diet Coke (sorry), but no alcohol. I had a pizza, as I had forgotten to bother cooking (Skyrim) and Papa John’s had mailed me some stupid offer (marketing works).

I had a massive pizza.

I have been eating healthily for the last year – at least in general. I have lost over three stone. I do not now have takeaway three nights running, as I might have done on more than one occasion in Leeds. And Preston. And Manchester.

And Bournemouth.

As such, I have been what some might call ‘reasonably healthy-feeling’, to the point where it’s just normal to feel normal now. Eating a full pizza to yourself, apparently, has some negative effects come morning time.

I awoke feeling genuinely like I had hangover, sans-nausea. The incredibly dry mouth, the painful head, the lack of balance (less hangover, more natural Dransfield) – it all pointed to a night on the tiles.

But it was just a pizza. A mere (massive) pizza (also some potato wedges because SHUT UP THAT’S WHY).

To be honest, it’s done quite a good job of convincing me to not do that again. I mean, if they make you feel like that just by eating one, what the fuck is in them? Pizza people: start lacing your food with something like heroin and we can talk again.

For now? I’m off them. Until next time I go to Leeds and get a Cano, obviously.

0 of 14 catch up entries to go. Thank fuck.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes (“only”? Sounds like an absolute to me, Obi-Wan) – also: someone with a hangover does too

I am often amused by how much a simple hangover can change my personality. While in sober-time I am capable of rational, almost normal thinking and vague (very vague) planning, when it comes to post-booze days I become a gibbering wreck of irrational thought processes and a confused pile of… umm… confusion.

My brain goes from subtle, nuanced approaches to life to some idiotic, chirruping fool that deals only in absolutes. Basically, it starts acting how Daily Mail readers’ brains act all the time – IT IS RIGHT OR IT IS WRONG, NOTHING INBETWEEN. For example, right now I am playing a game for a freelance review. It is based on a Japanese anime series, so is backed up by an incomprehensible and ridiculous story. Rather than chuckling along or forcing myself through it, my brain has decided it is literally the worst thing I have ever heard or seen.

A couple of hours ago I was tempted to buy some takeaway as I am re-fatting myself and I couldn’t be bothered cooking. Would it be something to fill the hole in my belly or would it be ALL OF THE FOOD? Fortunately I managed to see sense there and go for NO FOOD AT ALL. Absolutes, see.

Same for emotions too – when I’m hungover I get REALLY MAD at people for no reason*, or I get REALLY SAD at something that wouldn’t even register on the sad-o-meter at any other point. I don’t just feel a ‘meh’, I feel ALL OF THE MEH.

It’s quite interesting, really. To me, at least. Oh, and ignoring the headache, lethargy, inability to concentrate, dehydration, liver damage, memory loss, temptation to eat all the fatty food in the world, the fact that I nearly cried watching Avatar earlier and that I haven’t bothered showering today. Obviously.

Anyway, back to the Gundam game.

*I am aware I do this when not hungover too.

The hangover NOT THE FILM HA HA HA

I find the stages you go through when suffering a hangover to be quite interesting. While I’m not sure we all suffer them the same – in fact, I’m quite sure we don’t suffer them the same – I do know there is obvious common ground we share.

This morning I awoke, it may surprise you to learn, with a bit of a hangover. Last night was a reasonably-sized event in which we all drank a lot, and I didn’t want to be the odd one out as I’m all about fitting in. So I woke up with the usual drained feeling, the massive headache and the general malaise that comes with the post-booze period.

By the time I’d dragged my carcass to the train station – off to sunny Guildford – I’d reached the second stage: nausea. Sitting in a slowly rocking train carriage, not being able to concentrate on the book I’m trying to read and pretty much on the heater, things didn’t look good. Fortunately, my iron constitution prevailed and the icy air of Woking helped me survive.

When I arrived at my destination, after what seemed like four months of travelling, I approached the reception. Just before my brain formulated the answer to a question I was asked, it pointed something out to me: I hadn’t yet spoken aloud, in the way one usually does to rub out any vocal cobwebs left over from the night before. My answer to what my name was went a little like this:

“NNNNHEEn Drld.”

By the time I was on the train back, I’d hit the stage of pure, unadulterated hunger. I was hungry enough to eat anything, and eat anything I did – I bought a packet of bacon flavoured McCoy’s. Now it turns out that bacon flavoured McCoy’s, rather than being bacon flavoured like they claim, are actually the flavour you get when you pour petrol on a Frazzle. And as for the aftertaste of bacon flavoured McCoy’s? It’s like heaven, except the heaven that’s really shit and horrible.

When I got home and after I’d eaten some real food, the feeling I currently have now set in. This is the part of the hangover I actually like a bit: things are like a dream, I’m tired but not knackered enough to pass out, the headache is gone and I’m not hungry. I’ll laugh like a knob at anything right now, and it seems I can write 400-plus words on a hangover. Hangovers are great.

When are you at your best?

When do you write your best stuff? Blogs, emails, things for work – whatever. I do a lot of writing, as I may have mentioned (via writing, hilariously) so I tend to be able to judge when and why I’ll be at my best, my worst or my least enthusiastic.

Strangely, being drunk doesn’t actually hamper my ability to string together something half-readable. It does impair my ability to hit the right keys, naturally, but I’ve re-read things I’ve written when three sheets to the wind and a fair few times they’ve turned out to be okay. It must be the removal of internal barriers – less inhibited writing leads to more openness and honesty. And as we all know, they are good things.

Similarly, writing when hungover (hello!) can have a positive effect on the wordage. While there are times when the headache has been too great, or the nausea has been too much to successfully concentrate on writing more than a token couple of hundred words, there are times when it comes out okay. It’s another case of being in a more open, honest state. Though more guarded than when drunk, I find myself being more reflective and talking about more emotional things than I do at other times.

Sober? Well, then I write how I write. It can be okay, it can be good (rarely) and it can be bad. To be honest it’s not often that bad when I’m sober. Unless…

I’m tired. When I’m tired it goes either one of two ways: I cannot write, as my brain will not fill in the words. Or I will write tripe, as my brain can think of some words, but none that apply to what is actually being written about. I used the same phrase two or three times in the space of one paragraph a while back when writing something on about two hours sleep, such was the inability of my mind to bother trying very hard. Or even to keep track of what I’d written the sentence before.

I’m sure there are other states of being I could go into, but I’m a combination of hungover and tired right now, so I’m going to think of some inward-looking, emotional words to write, because I’m a combination of hungover and tired right now.