Hangovers I have known.
Hangovers I have known.
The good, the bad, and the fucking awful.
There was a time when a hangover was kind of fun. You’d wake up, feeling a bit groggy. You’d check your phone for texts you’d sent the night before, just to see if you’d messaged someone you shouldn’t have. Then you’d check in with your mates. “Did you see…?” “Did we really go to….?” “What happened after we…?” This was pre smart phone group chats, so you’d have send multiple messages. Soon enough you’d have rallied the troops, and a post mortem would be arranged. Sometimes it’d be downstairs in the kitchen, in your messy post-uni house share. Sometimes it’d be over bacon sandwiches in the local cafe (Franks in Tooting Bec - the best fry up in south east London). As I got older and marginally wiser, it might be at a spin class or at the local Lido. You’d giggle over the snogging, the dancing, the flirting, the conversations, the silliness. We’d have come home with traffic cones or road signs, or latterly some wine glasses that we thought would look better in our own cupboards. (Sorry. I never said I was well behaved.) Once I came home with a pink wig. Still never worked that one out. The morning-after-the-night-before conversations were fun, bonding, full of laughs and preparation for the next night out.
There were signs, even then. The friend who couldn’t stop crying because she’d had a row with her boyfriend, but neither of them really remembered why. The day when I took my mate to a police station because her drink had been spiked and she’d lost 18 hours of her memory. The encounters with men in a pre #metoo world that had been frightening, sobering and uncomfortable. We squashed them down in our memory, and kept on going out, drinking and having (mostly) fun.
I don’t know when it happens, but there’s a day when hangovers stop being fun. Not in any way. Perhaps it’s when you’ve got an actual proper job, with real responsibility, and you realise that being a GP and unable to concentrate has real world consequences. Maybe it’s when you hurt someone you really love, because you say something you don’t mean, and it escalates, and you don’t speak to them for two years but you didn’t mean it and you just really, really miss them (hi Ellie! So glad we sorted that shit out. And sorted *our* shit out too.) Perhaps it’s when you fuck up a love story, something that could have gone somewhere, but they walk away because they don’t like what you say after a bottle of wine and sambuca shots. Apart from being a GP, these are all me. (Not being able to concentrate in media sales because of a hangover is practically part of the job spec, but that’s a topic for another post.)
Being a parent is part of it too. Parenting small children with a hangover is fucking awful. The mess, the noise, the clamour for attention, when all you want to do is close your eyes and shut it all out. Pete and I once went to a wedding, and he took the morning shift after just 3 hours sleep. I found him asleep on the floor, the baby crawling all over him. The baby was fine. Pete was broken. You can function on limited sleep in your 20s. Not so much in your 30s. Especially with the Paw Patrol soundtrack on repeat.
It *is* possible to leave hangovers behind. To have full and functioning weekends. To operate as you should at work. It might not feel like it sometimes, because the world is obsessed with alcohol, and paints it in a favourable light. But something is changing. Gen Z famously don’t drink as much as their pickled parents. Alcohol free alternatives actually taste good now, and are available everywhere you go. And if you say you are off the drink, it’s an acceptable answer (as opposed to everyone thinking you are pregnant…. particularly awful when you weren’t pregnant, but longed to be.)
I look back on those early hangovers really fondly. They bonded me with my girlfriends, who I still adore now. They were an opportunity to get together over mugs of tea and rounds of toast and squeals of laughter (packs of paracetamol were also present). But fuck me, I don’t ever, ever EVER want to be hungover again. Life is too good, too fun, too colourful to ever go back.
