(Tell me Why) I Don't Like Mondays

Most committed drunks have experienced the anti-hangover. Waking up and finding yourself feeling unexpectedly perky - despite the six hour drinking mission you embarked upon immediately on leaving work the previous day. It takes some time for the reality of the situation to sink in. You're drunk, and in a few hours you will find yourself sweating whisky and praying for the sweet, healing embrace of sleep, death or another drink.

Many committed drunks will also have found themselves in this proud mental state whilst at work. In my three year stretch with my current employer, I have experienced this trauma many times. Unfortunately I am not a good drunk. Any night out with my fellow employees will almost inevitably lead to a series of stories of problems I have had whilst in the arms of alcohol. I will attempt to document some of those little faux-pas that can only occur when alcohol and labour meet here.

I have twice been loudly sick in the toilets which are separated from our kitchen by a thin wall when senior members of staff were meeting in the kitchen. On returning to my desk I made it quite clear that this was not due to physical illness.

I once wore a T-Shirt inside out for a substantial portion of the day. This was spotted by a colleague rather than myself. Indeed, I would likely never have spotted this error.

I have pretended a computer keyboard was instead a musical one and attempted to play it, including making appropriate noises.

Checking our office shared calendar one drunken morning, I spotted an entry that had obviously been edited.
"MG in late, dropping kids off at the pool." Sadly, the obviousness of the prank was well beyond my fried synapses. I laughed, then decided my flatmate would love to see what this dumb bastard had put on the calendar. Fortunately for me, the descriptive email was relatively tame:
"Dude, this dude's taking two hours off work to take a shit. Is there something wrong with his ass we should know about?"
Peter hits send. Peter realises he has typed in the name of the person (his manager) who added the calendar entry and sent him the above email. Peter sits trying to find a good explanation for this for an hour until the manager arrives. Peter owns up to his mistake. "I'm a fucking idiot", Peter claims.

Whilst attempting to get some refreshing water from the cooler, I drifted off into creating a survival plan for the day, poured around a litre of water on the floor, then on instinct dropped my cup to cover the error. I dropped the cup around a foot from the large puddle I had already created.

I was once sat at my desk, preparing for a quiet day of pretending to work, when my manager approached:
M: Did we have a drink last night Peter?
PO'P: Yes, a couple. How did you know?
M: You fell over your desk as you walked in.

Arriving at work an hour late and in complete disarray - it had rained the night before and I had tossed and turned my way through a drunken nights sleep, leaving my wet hair in an interesting new style. I had woken up with a T-shirt in a bowl filled with puke next to my bed. As I had walked to the bathroom I had fallen over in the hallway. I could remember literally nothing about the night before. The best approach was to get to work as quickly as possible. I did so, then sat at my desk with my head in my hands.
My technical director approached:
TD: Are you Ok Peter? You look drunk.
PO'P: I'm not fucking drunk.
TD: ....

I have a text message to my flatmate stored on my phone from this morning:
"Dude this is the most drunk I hat [sic] ever been at work. I smell of puke. What the fuck? People are laughing at me."

Once, having had some dodgy pints mixed into the wash and having constant beer farts, I slightly befouled myself whilst sat at my desk. I then say giggling about it for around five minutes before attending to the situation in the toilets. It is a matter of no small pride to me that no one in the office noticed this.

One morning I realised attending work was not an option. I called in sick:
PO'P: <Slurring noticably> Hi it's Peter. I'm not going to be coming in today.
SEC: Ok, are you sick, or...
PO'P: I'm really fucking sick. I've been sick. Erm...Fucking everywhere...
SEC: <Pause followed by a slight sigh> Ok, Peter, bye.

With my inability to learn any kind of lesson, no doubt further incidents will occur. I find it confusing that I have yet to be sacked, have an office intervention, or even any kind of disciplinary action taken against me. Can they not hear my slurred cries for help?

Vodka / Red Bull - A Mutualistic Tale

Vodka / Red Bull is a drink with huge potential for the tired, emotional modern worker. A typical Friday evening sees an epic struggle between two immortal foes - alcoholism and narcolepsy. Alcohol's biggest weakness, however is it's depressant ways - the first steps on the path to responsibility free drunkendom are happily taken, but wait, the lack of sleep from the week's drinking tries to trip you, down into a fitful slumber.

Steps have been taken in the past to combat this - for example, Irish, French, German, Salvadorian, even French Polynesian coffees - any country has it's own spirit which, when mixed with a decent dose of caffeine, steers even the hardened drinker on their way with an increased perk in their step. However, drinking an Irish coffee in a old-man-pub on a Friday evening will get you substantially more beaten up than drunk. The inconvenience of waiting for the drink to cool is also a major negative - unless you cool it with yet more shots of spirit and/or ice.

PO'P Note: Water boils at 100˚C, Alcohol at 80. I'm sure you understand the dangers of drinking a coffee with no alcohol in.

And then there was Red Bull. And it was good. Reasonably acceptable to drink, a 330ml can, containing around five cups of coffee's worth of caffeine. Drunks everywhere cheered loud and long, queried what they were cheering for and cheered again. Some drunks stared at the gaudy packaging - "taurine?" they said. "red BULL?" the said. So the rumour we've all heard swept the pubs and clubs of the land.

Peter O'Phile is happy to recant two urban legends with one swipe - Taurine is found in fish and all kinds of other junk too. Stuff which would be cheaper to harvest than an angry bull. Its effects, while many and great, are not useful to staying awake drinking, sorry. Peter O'Phile is confused by it's presence at all, except for some potential clever marketing on Red Bull's part.

With great power comes great responsibility, as everyone knows. There are several traps that can be fallen into when mixing VRBs outside the professional embrace of your local pub. Get the essential balance of V to RB wrong, and foul demons await you. There are four distinct categories an amateur VRB binge can fall into:

Fear And Loathing
Too much Red Bull leaves you jittery and unable to drink with such fluid ease as normal. People seem to be staring at you and your heart beat seems both audible to everyone in the room and twice as fast as reasonable in any setting. When you eventually try to sleep, prepare yourself instead for a session of lying in the dark pretending to sleep in case the monsters close in.

A Nightmare On Your Sheets
A little too much Red Bull - a subtle error, which only manifests itself in Slumberland. You will be intoxicated enough to sleep with ease, but your mind will not shut down properly as you have 8 pints of caffeine laden blood coursing through your veins. You will dream, seemingly all night. If you are anything like myself, these subconscious slip-ups will be far from pleasant, extremely graphic, violent and bloody, even, and you will wake up in a cold sweat many times during the night.

The Perfect Storm
Everything goes well. Perfectly in fact. You head out to sea, "because that's where the fish are" without regard to consequence. Drinking without the natural warning signs of weariness rules, you'll think. Indeed, you'll be right. The hangover tomorrow won't rule quite as much, but you know how to solve that, don't you?

Titanic
Insufficient Red Bull, and you're back to square one - tired, bored and lonely. Unfortunately, you spent twice as much cash getting into that state as if you'd stuck with lager. A step back to the dark days when a pint dragged on for hours and all you could hope for was Celine Dion's timely death.

Hopefully this guide will set you on your way to caffeine enhanced drinking and long future nights of wild-eyed excitement. Good luck.

You Take The High Road

I awoke on the sofa in my front room one Sunday morning. The lights were all on, as was the television. TMF or similar rubbish if I remember correctly. My first impression was that a substantial amount of me was covered in a substantial amount of mud. My trousers, arms, hands and t-shirt were all nicely coated in flaking, mostly dried up dirt. "Ah. I thought. Never mind."

More pressing issues were at hand. I went to the toilet - a glance in the mirror revealed that my face had suffered a similar fate to the rest of me. Returning to the safety of my sofa, I atttempted to piece together the events that led to my soiled state.

I remembered being in the 2am bar. I remembered losing my coat - undoubtedly I had thrown it on the floor somewhere and forgotten to keep an eye on it. This was something I had done many times before. Unfortunately, this night was mid December and extremely cold. Obviously someone wiser and (suprisingly) less principled than myself had stolen the coat to keep themself warm. I caused some unpleasantness with the bouncer and staff whilst searching futiley for the coat - providing the bonus of allowing me to finish my drink relatively unharassed.

Somehow, myself and my flatmate had become separated the instant we left the bar. Attempting to get a taxi proved impossible with my ailing mindset. There were people everywhere and I was alone and unarmed. The only sensible option seemed a brisk trot home. My normal route seemed dangerous - I could sense They were closing in. One quick diversion later and I was walking alongside the canal which runs past my house. The canal was nice and quiet. Many would have described it as "too quiet.

As I walked, I gradually became aware of two things - firstly that it was far too cold to be stumbling around in the semi-dark and secondly, that I was substantially too drunk to walk safely beside the large volume of water a canal contained. Always one for saftey, I decided to walk as far to the side of the path away from the canal as possible. My occasional misjudgements of direction now limited me to the center of the path - giving me a good 6 feet of error. In one direction.

As suggested, this leeway did not extend in both directions, a miscalculation I was soon to pay for. A short slip on wet grass later, I had tumbled around six feet down a bank into a drainage ditch running alongside the canal. This trench contained around six inches of dirty water. Recognising this as a bad place to rest, I attempted to remove myself from the gutter. My shoes were extremely wet, however, leaving me unable to do anything but slip back down into the murky depths. The only course of action was to climb out on my hands and knees, dragging myself upwards using the grass growing on the slope for leverage.

Having escaped the waters I felt the fun had gone from my walk and hurried on. I assume I was watching the ground rather too closely at this stage, as my next memory is looking at a road bridge which crosses the canal around half a mile past the footbridge I should have used. There was no way up to the road, so I was forced to retrace my steps. Reaching the footbridge sometime later I realised I could not find the path up to safety.

After a nice display of confused wandering around, a group of three or four kind souls came into sight. I approached them with caution.

PO'P: Excuse me - how the godamn hell do I get up there? <Pointing at bridge>
RP: <Laughing at my disheveled state> What the hell hapened to you? Are you alright?
PO'P: I fell. I kinda want to get home now though. Any ideas?
RP: You need to go back over there and follow that path.
PO'P: Cool. Thanks.
RP: Here - you must be cold, have a beer. <Hands over ice cold can of Stella>
PO'P: Godamn. I reckon you just saved my life. See you around.

We parted company. I was substantially buoyed by the beer and wobbled off on my way. Sadly, the path up to the bridge was muddy. For the second time that night, gravity took charge of me and I fell. Around half of a can of lager poured on me and the dirty ground I was lying on. I clambered to an upright position once more and finished my eventful journey home, prepared to wake up the next day in sheer confusion.

A Moving Tale

Peter O'Phile Warning:
This account includes the death of a goldfish.
It is recommended that those of a piscophilic nature step away now.

I have always hated moving house. The only redeeming feature of the stress and effort required is getting to cruise around in a Transit van. The worst of these times I have experienced involved myself and SB's move from our Clifton residence. A trial exacerbated by my being away in some foreign country the week before thus leaving the final arrangements with SB - a task I was uneasily aware of his ineptitude for.

Arriving back in the UK around 5pm the day before our move, I received a text from SB - "house fell through, I'm staying with X". Repeated attempts to get in touch with SB failed. Arriving in Nottingham around an hour later SB revealed that my period of intense stress had been a ruse on his part and the coast was clear for our relocation the next day. I could also see preparations for moving had not gone to plan. A couple of hours of intense tidying later we were in better shape. The destroyed microwave was relocated to the bushes at the end of the garden. A chest of drawers which had become somewhat charred suffered a similar fate after myself and SB had beaten it to pieces with hammers. We hoped to be long gone before autumn, when the leaves would fall and reveal the carnage.

After these exertions we decided the most appropriate course of action was to retire to some bars. Returning somewhat tipsy, SB decided to knock a 2" dent in the bathroom wall. I suspect the hammer games earlier had left a mark on his impresionable mind. I cunningly repaired the problem by covering the mark with badly matched paint. To dispose of the evidence we threw the open paint tin out of my bedroom window, inadvertantly covering the window below in white paint. Our leaving date of August was accelerated somewhat.

The next day we woke bright, early and excessively hungover. We started transporting our various items of rubbish to our new home. Around midday the poor unfortunates who were to replace us in the flat arrived. They appeared to want to move their things into the building. SB gently pointed out that they should return in five hours or so. They wisely removed themselves and the move continued.

Around five hours later all but 20 bin bags full of litter had been successfuly relocated. The new tenants returned and GB arrrived with a van - we decided to take the rubbish to the tip and escape. The new occupiers' first sight was SB ripping a bin bag as he carried it downstairs, spreading its contents down these stairs. He then giggled like an insane schoolgirl for around five minutes. If I had been in a position to take a photo of our replacements faces it would have been well worth the beating I would surely have received for such an action. We agreed that we would keep a key to the flat until the next day, so that we could return and pick up our washing machine, then retired to our new domicile and its nearest pub.

The next day we returned to our flat as promised. It was empty. SB was curious to see what had been done with his old room, prehaps fondly remembering his stay there only 24 hours earlier. It should be explained that two of the new tenants were female, so potentially his mind was swayed by this, I make no judgement. Myself, SB and GB entered the room with trepidation and a weak cover story in mind in case we were caught in somewhat unexplainable circumstances. After sniffing the bed for some time, SB decided to check the new arrangment of clothes in the drawers he never owned. Myself and GB were studying a sickeningly touching montage of photos stuck to the wall. Various people were looking happy in their happy funland lives.

GB reached the same conclusion at the same time as me.

We looked at each other. The one common face in the pictures was that of a young man. The young man whose underwear drawer SB was now rooting excitedly through, like a pig hunting for white truffles or indeed brown truffles. The merciless mocking of SB started and the excited rooting ended.

We picked up the washing machine, broke it when GB cornered somewhat overenthusiastically and called the whole episode to an end.

Peter O'Phile Note:
We later learnt that one of the female inmates was sick in the shower when she first used it and it filled with dirty water. SB's filthy girlfriend had blocked the plughole with her long black grimy hair, we never really cared but apparently her sensibilities were somewhat tamer.

Oh, and my goldfish died a few days after the move. I guess it didn't like moving house anymore than me.