Attack of the Wooden Mouths (or, how hangovers are different in your 30s)

By ori2uru - originally posted to Flickr as champagne tower, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5236607

On Sunday morning, I opened my eyes very slowly.

I was expecting the terrible sensation when your eyelids are stuck together and you forgot that they might be, and then you realise they are and your body half-heartedly tries to prepare itself for bright lights and the onslaught of gravity, while your brain attempts self-preservational shutdown by refusing to find out what might be going on behind all the blurry vision-fog and eye-glue.

You see, on Saturday evening, I went to two parties. Two parties. This is not the sort of social gallivanting that I generally get up to (query to self: have I ever done it?).

The first was my Work Do (very Parisian, in the sense that there was very nice free champagne until it all ran out and was replaced with questionable white wine), and the second was the Christmas party of my lovely Italian/Canadian friends (very Parisian, in the sense that there was very nice champagne all night. The sort that comes in the incredible extra-large bottles that are my favourite, but that are also very heavy and difficult to pour out of, so it’s altogether better if someone else does it).

Now, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t sink 15 glasses of champagne and get completely hammered, as the Jen at Christmas Parties of Yore would have done. These days I am (mostly) civilised and a grown-up. (NB. We won’t mention the Negroni-fuelled fiasco the night before these same Italian/Canadian friends got married in July).

But over the course of a delightful evening, I did drink quite a lot. And I probably deserved at least a bit of a hangover. Or, as the French so aptly put it, a gueule de bois, a mouth of wood.

Yet on Sunday morning there was not a headache or a spinning room in sight. I got up, ate porridge with seeds and goji berries, and smugly went about my day. This is fantastic, I thought; I’ve finally cracked it. Champagne is my drink. I’m never going to drink anything else again.

Unfortunately, that is not the end of my story.

It turned out the gods of the Wooden Mouth had other plans for me.

First up, I went to a lovely fancy oratorio choir concert that my friend Pam was performing in. I sat with two other friends, we enjoyed the beautiful music, and then we all went off to get the Métro together, feeling wonderfully cultured and stuffing our faces with mince pies as we discussed which station we hate the most. For me, it’s Châtelet Les Halles, hands down, which was ironically the station we were heading to.

And that’s where my troubles began.

My magical Métro pass, which I love and which makes my life reasonably-priced and easy, didn’t work. The gate didn’t slide open when I beeped, so when I re-beeped, I initiated the angry-sounding DOUBLE BEEP ALERT noise. Leaving me trapped on the wrong side of the barrier to my friends.

My brain could not handle this unexpected development at all. It was Sunday, so naturally all the ticket booths were closed, and there was not a single staff-member to be seen. My subconscious started heading towards a group of camo-wearing machine-gun-toting soldiers as the only available figures of authority in the vicinity before I stopped it. What did I think they could do, shoot the barriers down to let me through?

I wandered aimlessly around the station for a bit, and then sent a pathetic ‘Save yourselves. Go on without me’ message to my friends, before realising I no longer had any idea which of the 94 different barriers I was supposed to be trying to get through (there are many excellent reasons why Châtelet is the worst station).

Eventually, I beeped my way through 3 different barriers at random and I think the system let me rejoin my friends out of sheer pity.

To recover from all this, we went to have a festive drink and a welcome sit-down at Starbucks. Where I forgot my own name.

I was busy practising saying ‘gingerbread latte’ in my head in a French accent so that it would be intelligible for the nice French barista (it didn’t work; I had to repeat it six times before we got anywhere). And when she asked my name, poised to write it on my cup, I went completely blank.

Most of my students believe I’m called Jan or Jane, so part of me was excited to rectify things ever so slightly and get this right. And then I heard my friend Jo somewhere to my right declaring that her name was Hélène, and I realised it would be simpler to just say a more normal French name. But I couldn’t think of any of those either.

I said Jen. She wrote Jan. I said, No, no, with an ‘e’. So she wrote Jane.

My friends went on to have dinner that evening, but I decided to quit while I was (not at all) ahead. As I was walking home, a group of people asked me the way to the Opera House. They spoke French, but with Spanish-sounding accents, so I was overjoyed to not only understand but also to be able to answer their question. Of course, I declared confidently, it’s down that street. About 10 minutes’ walk. You’re welcome.

It isn’t. It’s precisely the opposite direction from where I so airily pointed. I’m sorry, Spanish tourists. Please google a picture of the Opera House; it really is beautiful, and well worth a visit.

I’m self-imposing a one-party-per-night limit from now on.

Croatia: Spellbinding. Intoxicating. Hysteria-inducing.

In September, I went on holiday with my friend Daisy. It was a fun trip, so I thought you might like to hear the highlights. I’ve been trying to write the opening paragraph. My notes read as follows:

Punched in neck. Larry Grayson. Wine under fluorescent strip-lighting. Leaky shampoo.

Hmm. I’m suddenly concerned that the trip might have been more traumatic than I recall. Especially given that all this happened before the plane took off.

The plan had been simple. Take backpacks to show everyone how young and intrepid we are. Get to the airport nice and early to smugly enjoy over-priced pre-holiday we-deserve-this drinks.

The reality had not quite lived up to this. During their affectionate farewell at the train station, Daisy’s boyfriend somehow punched her in the neck. The check-in man had inexplicably felt the need to say, ‘Shut that door,’ a reference both Daisy and I were mortified to be old enough to recognise. The ridiculous queues at both Security and the Terminal 2 bar were so upsetting we ended up knocking back vile white wine under the oppressive glare of canteen lighting at the airport equivalent of a truck-stop. And the less said about the toiletry explosion in my luggage the better.

Not the most auspicious of beginnings to our adventure. Positively rocky, you might say. Don’t worry; it picks up later on.

We started with a few days on Korčula, a beautifully picturesque island off the Dalmatian coast, followed by a 3-night sojourn in Dubrovnik. Let’s start with Korčula. First, the history. Marco Polo might have come from there. Well, he definitely visited once, and there is a family named Polo who have lived there for years. And apparently, that's proof enough.

And now the culture. Korčula Old Town is a mini-Dubrovnik. We wandered the narrow streets, marvelling at the stunning buildings of butter-coloured stone. We swam in the clear calm waters of the Adriatic. One evening, we climbed up an erstwhile wartime lookout tower that now serves great cocktails. Oh, and then Daisy fell off a commemorative cannon.

The next day we got caught in an almighty downpour over lunch. Naturally, we did what any self-respecting Brits would do, pretended it wasn’t raining and carried on eating. It’s a shame we didn’t notice our guidebook swimming in a nearby puddle. The pristine guidebook Daisy had been lent by a kindly old professor colleague. I can only imagine his pained wince when she returned it to him.

And then on to Dubrovnik. Ah, Dubrovnik. If you haven’t been, go. It’s great. There is seafood. There were peacocks. Ice-creams are apparently bigger there than anywhere else. In the evenings, live music plays in the square, inspiring couples to spontaneously begin dancing. One night we were taking a turn around the port and were delighted to hear some kind of male-voice choir taking advantage of the acoustics inside an old stone bastion to sing Croatian folk songs. We rounded the corner to find the a capella group was made up of youths in hoodies, bewitching an audience of middle-aged tourists. A magical moment.

And that’s the thing. Croatia was full of incredible enchanting moments. We were sipping prosecco one afternoon at a bar ingeniously carved into the rocky walls of the city, taking in the sunset and watching dolphins plashing in the sea below. Daisy was so overwhelmed she proposed to me. Well someone should, she said. It feels like the thing to do.

It was an idyllic week, albeit one that occasionally seemed to be masquerading as a farcical comedy of errors. I leave you with the final episode of our adventure. We called on the owner of our rented apartment to return the key. A mysterious character, she seemed to spend her days chain-smoking, incessantly laundering towels and buying up Smurfs 2 merchandise for her grandchildren. Unexpectedly, she invited us in to try a cake she had made.

Ooh, what kind? asked Daisy, politely. You will see, she muttered darkly. And see we did. It was rum cake. Or Rhum Cake, as I prefer to imagine it spelled in Croatian. And more rum than cake, if you ask me. British to the end, Daisy and I both studiously powered our way through the rum-soaked confection that resembled flammable custard more than anything else. And then happily tripped off to catch the bus to the airport, slightly drunk and inadvertently interrupting someone’s wedding photographs on the way. Sounds about right.

Work Do or Work Don't?

I’m starting a new work thing next week, and so it was quite nice yesterday to receive a couple of emails from my new boss and another soon-to-be colleague confirming a meeting this Friday.

Great, I thought, they seem to be a nicely organised and efficient outfit, and these emails strike a thoroughly friendly and convivial tone. I’m looking forward to working with them. They seem like lovely people.

So far so positive.

I then checked my phone a while later, and was surprised to see a calendar invitation from a woman I have never heard of, with the vague and innocuous-sounding title ‘Dinner and Drinks’. That’s odd, I thought, probably a mistake.

And then it started.

A barrage of messages relating to said calendar invitation from what seemed like thousands of strangers. Who are these people? I shouted in my head. Why do they want me to have dinner with them?

Eventually, I figured it out. This was the arranging of a Work Do. I had been invited to a Work Do. Next Thursday. For a job I haven’t even started yet.

How did this make me feel, I hear you ask. Keen to get my social butterfly on and make some new friends? Sure, a bit. Slightly worried that this level of advanced planning was a tad over-zealous and looked suspiciously like organised fun? Yes, certainly. Struck with a weird sense of impending doom and deja vu? Most definitely.

For this isn’t the first time that this situation has arisen. This exact scenario occurred in 2003, and it did not go well. Curiouser and curiouser, I hear you observe, intrigued.

Back in my first real job, when I was a young whippersnapper fresh out of university, I worked in the cut-throat world of academic bookselling. And on Day One of this exciting employment, it transpired that the ridiculously early Regional Christmas Do was coming up that Thursday, and two people were mysteriously unable to attend at the last minute, and would me and the other new kid Kris like to come along?

Kris, lucky bastard, had a prior engagement, but I foolishly accepted the offer. Indeed, I was quite looking forward to it. Isn’t it funny that sometimes you can be so wrong?

The whole thing was a mad nightmare.

It took place at a pub in Nottingham which has a real barge and part of the canal running through it like some kind of water feature. In my experience, open water inside public places filled with drunk people is a whole list of accidents waiting to happen. Several poor staff-members spent the whole night patiently steering said drunk people away from the barge. Apart from the one who seemed to be running a book on which inebriate would be the first to fall in.

The Do itself turned out to be one of those awful all-inclusive affairs, where several companies each book a table, and you get your seasonal festive dinner and an evening’s ‘entertainment’ (for this, read crap crackers, crap DJ and crap dancing). Although, it was quite fun to bond with 2 of my colleagues (both named Sarah), as we slagged off the other companies’ dance-floor activities and took advantage of the open bar.

I learned an eye-opening amount about my new colleagues that night. There was the unfortunate lady who had cycled 20 miles to get there in the pissing rain, because her partner Colin, a mean crazy hoarder, had gone back on his promise (made 3 months before) to give her a lift.

Then there was the muppet Trainee Manager, your basic knobhead whose personality was a rubbish combination of sinfully boring and inordinately bossy. It’s true; the next week, he insisted we spend an entire afternoon adjusting poster positions until he considered them satisfactorily perpendicular.

And then there was Julie.

I had spent a pleasant afternoon with Julie earlier in the week, labelling sale-stock and building vast pyramids of cheap art books, during the course of which I learned quite a bit about her holiday home in the Dordogne, her grown-up sons, and the best place to get a manicure in Nottingham. She seemed a lovely woman, who worked a few afternoons a week primarily to fund her trips to the nail-salons of the East Midlands.

And yet she chose to spend this evening drinking her own bodyweight in Sauvignon Blanc and getting impressively, uproariously, shitfaced.

She went to the Men’s toilets. Several times. And told us all about it. Every time.

She accosted our Manager, backed him up against a wall, and then railed at him for 40 minutes about how he was basically the worst manager in the history of the world and was solely responsible for running the company into the ground, prodding him forcefully in the shoulder all the while.

And then she cornered mild-mannered, ex-RAF pilot Toby, the strapping 25-year-old delivery driver, and tried to take him home with her.

Like I said, impressively shitfaced.

Eventually, Toby apparently poured her into a cab and, we assumed, she went home.

But that was the last that anyone ever saw of her. She evidently came round the next morning, could remember enough of the night before to be completely mortified, and couldn’t bear to see any of us ever again. We were quietly informed in the next week’s staff briefing that Julie had decided not to pursue her career in part-time bookselling.

So, you see, this ‘Dinner and Drinks’ that I’ve been invited to next Thursday, seemingly a friendly and happy little get-together, is fraught with dangerous possibility.

I’ve tentatively accepted, but if a barge is even remotely involved, I’m leaving.