Top Five Mornings After

My most loyal commenter over the past couple of years, JES, kindly sent me a link the other day to an article in the UK's Guardian newspaper on The 10 Best Fictional Hangovers.  (I do read The Guardian online fairly regularly, but this had somehow passed me by.)  All the expected entries are there: Kingsley Amis' Jim Dixon feeling as if he's "been expertly beaten up by the secret police", and Richard E. Grant in Withnail & I announcing, "I feel as if a pig shat in my head."  And there were a few that were new to me, too.  An amusing waste of 5 minutes.

And this got me to thinking, What incidents from my own experience might I compare to these?

Well, the problem is - as any long-standing readers of the blog might just conceivably recall - I don't get hangovers.  Not really.  I had ONE, an oh-god-NEVER-again humdinger after my brother's 21st birthday party (when I was only 14); and I think that set my pain threshold so high that I've never really suffered any post-drinking unpleasantness that seemed worth complaining of since.

However, I have - a handful or so times in my life (mostly in my first year or two at college, funnily enough) - drunk so much that I suffered a near total blackout about what had happened the preceding evening, and had to try to piece together the "unfortunate events" from the fragmentary clues in my immediate environment when I returned to consciousness the next day.  I think I can probably muster a Top Five from those experiences.

My Top Five Strange Morning-After Experiences

5)  How did she get there?

Well, I was a pretty wild drinker on occasion during my first year or two in Beijing as well.  I was too poor to drink anything other than the piss-weak local beer, but I'd often stay up half the night shooting the shit with my two best buddies, drinking solidly for 6 or 8 hours at a stretch.  After one such occasion, I was mildly alarmed - on rising shortly before dawn to stumble to the bathroom for an emergency piss - to discover a naked woman sprawled on the floor of my shower.  (Full story here.)

4)  TRAPPED - in my own trousers!

I had a good couple of years in Oxford in the '90s, returning to the scene of my wild undergraduate days to work as a private tutor for a while (after a nasty illness had punted me out of my schoolmastering career).  Because my old college buddies were not long out of that carefree world of drinking every night (far enough distanced to be starting to feel nostalgic for it, but not yet encumbered with the mortgages and marriages and so on that would get in the way of occasionally reliving it), I became a fairly regular focus of weekend reunions - often having three or four buddies crash out with me in my small (two single beds and a couple of armchairs) flat on Walton Street.  After one of the best of these - the exact details of where we went, and how much we drank, and WHY have always remained foggy; but there must have been A LOT of booze consumed - I found that I had stupidly hobbled myself by attempting to take off my jeans without removing my shoes first.  The jeans were stuck fast, wrapped around my ankles, pulled only a little way past the end of my toes; the legs of the jeans had somehow become so twisted that they were practically cutting off the blood supply to my feet.  And I found I'd given myself horrible rugburns dragging myself to bed.  I rather feared I was going to have to cut open a nearly new pair of jeans in order to extricate myself, but - with some difficulty - I eventually managed to slide a pair of scissors up inside the bottom of the trouser legs to snip through my shoelaces; after which, I was (not without some further struggle) able to remove the shoes, and finally the trousers.  That was probably the most angstful first twenty minutes of consciousness I have known the morning after a heavy night.

3)  Mysteriously neat

After one of the heaviest of my early college drinking experiences, I awoke the next day feeling remarkably tranquil and refreshed - far better than I had any right to, after the excesses of the night before.  Remarkably good physically; morally, I confess, I was a little troubled - there were nagging doubts that I might possibly have behaved badly the night before.  As I looked around my tiny student room, the first indication that something was seriously amiss was my clothes: they were folded neatly on the upright chair beside my desk.  Not casually draped over the chair back (as I'd usually leave them, if I went to bed moderately sober); not discarded in a rumpled heap on the floor (as I'd usually leave them, if I went to bed moderately drunk); not still on my body (as I'd often leave them, if I went to bed very drunk); neatly folded.  Further investigations revealed that I didn't have my room key, either; how on earth had I got to bed the night before??  Well.... as near as I can piece it together, a group of my new friends called down to me from an upstairs room (where they were, I believe, having the also popular but much more genteel tea-and-toast kind of undergraduate party - tea and toast at midnight??  oh yes, we were young and crazy then!) as I returned to the Freshmen's accommodation block after an evening of over-indulgence at some 'cocktail party' or other (all the rage in '80s Oxford, in the wake of the enormous success of Granada TV's adaptation of Brideshead Revisited - and a particularly dangerous phenomenon for the inexperienced drinker, because you never quite knew what you were imbibing or how strong it was; plus, these things tended to be all-you-can-drink deals, and an 18-year-old knows no self-restraint!).  One of them had lost or mislaid her room key, and we had already ascertained (don't ask me how) that her key and mine were a match (there were a lot of these key pairings in that building; not awfully secure, really), so she asked if she could borrow mine.  Recklessly, I tried to throw it up to their window 30 ft above.  Amazingly, I succeeded (though probably only after umpteen botched attempts; this detail is not recorded).  The friend only took a minute or two to open up her room, while I waited down below, in the small courtyard inside the building gate - next to the rubbish bins. Then she threw the key back down to me.  And - unsurprisingly - I had missed the catch.  It seems - although at this point my friends' versions of events became very sketchy, and not entirely consistent - that I convinced myself that the keys had fallen into one of the giant wheelie-bins (no lids on the darn things, or the lids open!!), and so I'd climbed inside it to try and retrieve them; I failed to find them, but made rather a laborious effort of climbing out again, and may have fallen and hit my head slightly as I did so.  At which point, two of my friends from the room above descended to rescue me - escorting me back to my room, undressing me, putting me to bed, and folding my clothes up for me.  Yes, they were  both girls - I blush for shame.  One of them was the one I'd been lending my keys to; hers, it seems, had somehow been locked inside her room, and she'd used them to open my room for me (convenient!).  My keys - which apparently hadn't been in the bin at all, but lying on the ground in more-or-less plain sight - were recovered by someone else, and returned to the College Lodge for my collection later.  Gosh, we were a friendly and helpful community - the joy of being a member of a small college!

2)  You don't want an audience for this

Fast-forwarding several years again to my spell back in that second-floor flat on Walton St in Oxford in the '90s... this was where I first started hanging out a lot with my two good buddies (and occasional commenters on my blogs) James The Nags and The British Cowboy (although he was yet to become The Cowboy), who were both stalwarts of the Oxford Union, and thus regularly managed to get themselves invited to the weekly freebie debauch of the Presidential Drinks (this was nominally a thank-you party for the celebrity guests who'd spoken in that evening's debate; but in practice the star speakers almost invariably headed straight off to a hotel somewhere, or tried to catch the last train back to London, so it was just an enormous piss-up for the Pres, and his friends, and the friends of his friends...).  A few times one or other of my new pals would entice me along to one of these (I didn't require a lot of persuading, truth be told).  And on one particularly extreme occasion... just as I was about to head home, at 1am or 2am, already severely pissed, The Nags lurched up to me, barely capable of speech but with an excited gleam in his eye.  "Look what I've found," he burbled, and produced an unopened bottle of Highland Park whisky from behind his back.  I think we drank at least half of it over the next couple of hours, with only a little help from a couple of other revellers.  In fact, the lion's share of it was mine.  I didn't have to work until the early afternoon the next day (a 16-year-old student was coming to my flat for a private Latin lesson), but, after consumption like that, I slept deeply until very shortly before then.  I found that on getting home I had managed to disrobe, but hadn't made it to the bedroom; I had crashed out in an armchair, wearing only my boxer shorts.  I had only ten minutes or so before my class was due to begin.  And I had a nagging feeling that I must have thrown up somewhere when I got home.  So, I spent several minutes running all over the flat half-naked, madly searching in every obscure corner I could think of for potentially embarrassing patches of vomit.  Mercifully, I appeared to be living in a vomit-free environment after all.  But I now had only about three minutes to spruce myself up and put on some clothes.  It was at this point that I noticed a pair of window-cleaners had been enjoying my strange performance...

And the doozie of them all....

1)  Ships that pass in the night

During my second year as an undergraduate (we don't use that 'sophomore' terminology in the UK, you know), I was very unhappy in my studies, and drinking.... well, for a while, way too much, I admit.  I think I was sort of experimenting with it as a drug, seeing how blitzed I could get with it, rather than just enjoying it as a mild buzz and a social lubricant.  I was - on just a handful of occasions - doing things like drinking a third  or more of a bottle of vodka, and then going down the pub for the night.  On one of these occasions I achieved a complete memory wipe - a blackout period whose contents I was never able to piece together, because I had apparently not been hanging with any of my usual friends (at least, not after the early evening), and so didn't have anyone to give me helpful reminders.  As with No. 3) above, I felt indecently well on waking, positively serene.  But the scene that greeted me in my room was even more puzzling than in that earlier instance.  I was naked in bed, apart from a pair of boxer shorts and my socks (I usually took my socks off, but put a t-shirt on to go to bed).  I was wearing a pair of sunglasses (at night, indoors, in bed??  and I didn't own any sunglasses!).  Two empty bottles of white wine were on my coffee table (I hadn't had any wine in the room, so I must have bought them from somewhere that night).  Strangest of all, dozens of my record sleeves were strewn across the floor; and some of my records were out of their sleeves (I would never, never, NEVER treat my records so disrespectfully!).  Ah yes, and there were two wine glasses on the table - one of them with lipstick on it.  I had evidently had one of the great music-enthusiasm-sharing evenings of my life with an entirely unknown young lady (but a lady, it would seem, of some taste and discernment).  I was very disappointed that I was never able to discover who she was, that she never came back to see me again.  I do hope I didn't do anything to scare or offend her that night.  (I think it's very unlikely; I'm just not that sort of guy.  Anyway, I like to fill in the gaps of that strange night with positive fantasies...)