So it's days like today that I remember why I gave up drinking. Hangovers have been few and far between this year, as I haven't really gone crazy even since I started back on the booze. But last night's champagne guzzling with Britain's best loves celebs hit me hard, at the start of a difficult weekend of traveling and gigging.
I woke up at about 5am feeling disorientated and dry mouthed and unable to get back to sleep. This used to happen to me all the time. I'd forgotten about it. You drink too much, wake up early and then can't sleep for a couple of hours. I was conscious of the fact that I have to do a gig at 2am tomorrow morning and then drive up to Kendal the next day and was hating myself for being so stupid.
Though I did get a bit more sleep after that horrible waking interlude I still felt crap for the rest of the day. It didn't matter too much for the morning as I was doing the podcast and in a way, hungover grumpiness can assist that and post alcohol disconnected brain can be quite amusing, though
if you listen you will hear me struggling to think of words and losing track of what I'm saying. If I wasn't doing it for nothing I would give my money back! There is a smattering of funny stuff in there.
But once Collings had gone, at a time when I could really do with working on the Edinburgh show, I just sat in my lounge, playing internet poker, watching Heroes and eating ginger bread men. That's where drinking really causes problems, because the next day one tries to get back to some kind of normality by stuffing one's face. It's OK every now and again, but I don't want to fall back into the old patterns. Or to waste days away doing nothing, because of self-imposed fragility.
An evening pizza with a friend put me back on to some kind of even-keel, but too late to get any work done and still another seven hours before I can go to bed. And I'll be sleeping in some shitty little service station travelodge.
Maybe I should have another 100 days off the sauce!
