by Marama Carmichael

Created on: January 08, 2009

'I am NEVER drinking again!' How many of us have uttered those words the morning after a party? And then uttered them the next weekend, and the one after that. Oh yes, it's easy to convince yourself that drink is evil and that you'll never touch the stuff again. Well it's easy to convince yourself that it's evil when your head feels like it's a building site full of construction workers sawing and hammering away at your brain, or when the most comfortable position is with your head resting on the edge of the toilet seat. But a week later when that's all a distant memory, and you're at a dinner party and someone offers you a delicous glass of pinot noir - then it's not so easy to remember the evils of drink, no then it's much easier to hold out your glass and simply say, 'oh, yes please'.

Many of us will remember that very first hangover. The one that you thought would never pass. The one that should have taught you to never to drink again. My first hangover erupted in a most embarassing way, yet unfortunately it didn't teach me to never drink again, it just taught me to try to make my hangovers more private in the future.

I went to a boarding school in the middle of nowhere in Scotland. We never felt that there was much to do in our free time, so at seventeen we started to experiment. A few times friends managed to get hold of a couple of cans of beer, or cider. And then I had a great idea. In my school holiday I decided to 'borrow' some alcohol from my parents' drink's cabinet, just a little bit, but a little bit of EVERYTHING. I got a water bottle and poured away - whisky, port, gin, sherry, brandy, rum, wine, and even some of the weird things like ouzo, baileys, and archers. I managed to fill it and snuck it back into school with me. That first weekend back my friend and I drank the lot, and we didn't even mix it with anything to water it down. It tasted foul, but in those days we hadn't learnt the art of mixing yet. I don't remember much of that night, and I don't know how we didn't get caught. But somehow we survived till the next day.

The next day I rather wished I hadn't survived. I woke with an insatiable thirst - drank a gallon of orange juice, ate a couple of kiwi fruit, and hurried along to our weekly house meeting. Every week my girls' boarding house had a meeting. Every girl in the house sat in the common room and the housemistress came in and discussed all the issues, problems and everything else that was on her mind. So there were sixty of us sitting in the common room waiting for the housemistress, when I turned green and then created a puddle of kiwifruit and orange juice on the floor. And then the housemistress walked in. Somehow we managed to convince her that I had just eaten something bad, and I got away with it. But it was one of the most embarrassing and public hangovers I've ever had.

Hangovers come in all shapes and sizes - from the monumental 'feel like you're going to die', to the piddling 'oh, I have a bit of a headache'. But the next time you hurt from your eyebrows to your toes, or you can't lift your head from the bucket by your bed, just think at least I'm not throwing up in a room with sixty people watching me!

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