Lent couldn't come soon enough after birthday binge (From Watford Observer)

Lent couldn't come soon enough after birthday binge

1:20pm Monday 8th March 2010

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If you are reading this on Friday, March 12, then I’ll be exactly four weeks away from my next glass of red wine - or indeed any other kind of alcohol.

Lent seems to be lasting an awfully long time this year, especially considering the fact that I actually decided to start my seasonal abstinence this year around the first weekend in February.

That was when… ahem, over-enthusiastic celebrations for my father’s 80th birthday found me waking one Monday morning with the distinct impression that a herd of very angry elephants was stampeding across my forehead.

The last time I’d experienced a hangover that bad was back in the early 1990s when Oliver Phillips, at that time the Watford Observer’s sports editor, had challenged all-comers to an informal Calvados-drinking contest at the paper’s annual Christmas do.

In our defence, I should point out that at the point in the proceedings when the Calvados bottle appeared, such a good time had been enjoyed by all that we were incapable of entertaining a rational or cogent thought along the lines of “not for me, thanks. I think I’ll just have a cocoa.“

Considering that Mr Phillips is a mighty 6ft 5ins in his socks and that I’m looking at the under side of 5ft in a pair of stilettos, you’ll appreciate that this was a very stupid thing for me to do.

On the other hand, I think that even Oliver had underestimated my phenomenal capacity - something to do with a lot of Celtic ancestry, I believe.

Even he had to raise his trademark hat to me as I was carried from the restaurant loudly and incoherently boasting that I could “definitely down another one”. How very ladylike, you must be thinking.

Anyway, the day after the Calvados contest, I woke up feeling like death. Not the warmed-up variety, you understand, but rather the sort that you might read about in a short story penned by Edgar Alan Poe - the sort where the main character comes to and finds themselves rigid, nauseous and buried alive under half a tonne of cold, clammy topsoil.

The worst thing was that I actually had to go into the office that day (Christmas Eve) and complete some empty pages that were being prepared in advance for the bumper festive newspaper.

I can still remember the walk of shame to my desk accompanied by catcalls from the junior elements of the sports desk (I think that they were secretly impressed by my stamina) and then the horrible sensation that instead of sitting in front of a computer screen perched atop a desk on the solid ground of an office in Rickmansworth Road, I was actually trying to retain my balance on the listing deck of a fishing smack crossing the Atlantic in the teeth of a force-nine gale.

As I remember it, Christmas that year in Maison Cain was a rather sober and subdued affair - for me at any rate - mainly because even the faintest whiff of a liqueur chocolate sent me lurching towards the bathroom.

It was one of those life-changing moments where you vow to yourself that never again will you inflict such pointless pain and misery upon your body, and I have to say that until early February this year I’d largely managed to avoid the kind of brain-boiling, limb-freezing hangover I experienced for most of the festive season c.1991.

The day after my brother’s opulent home-cooked celebratory family feast to mark my father’s birthday, however, was not a good one for me.

For some reason, my eyelids refused to obey all commands to open and the bed beneath me appeared to be in orbit. When I was finally able to move my head it felt as if Jabba the Hutt was sitting on it.

Trying to reassemble a couple of cogent episodes from the memory soup that passed for the previous evening, I realised that the seeds of my current affliction lay somewhere between the main course (accompanied by a nice bottle or two of Rioja), the pudding (excellent dessert wine), the lull before coffee (rather good port passed to the left, of course) and the post-coffee liqueurs (a bottle of vintage brandy that made several laps of the table before coming to rest empty).

The thought made my stomach do the sort of multiple flippy thing normally associated with honed Russian gymnasts building up to the big finale of their Olympic floor routine. To make matters worse, I was due at my desk in London in less than two hours.

“I look like Oliver Reed,” I wailed to a friend on the telephone several hours later. I’d just been examining my mottled puffy features in the bathroom mirror, paying particular attention to my eyeballs, which resembled a pair of lightly poached eggs with a drizzle of tomato ketchup.

I kept a very low profile at work that day, I can tell you, switching my phone to answer machine and confining myself to the sort of tasks that don’t entail many synaptic leaps.

Never again, I told myself that evening when I was home and tucked up in bed at 8.30pm - the fizzing bubbles of a glass of soluble Aspirin next to the bed going off in my hypersensitive ears like mini hand grenades.

I didn’t elicit much sympathy from my husband, who, quite rightly, pointed out that my state of pain was entirely self-inflicted.

For the last four years I’ve given up alcohol as a Lentern sacrifice with a certain amount of reluctance, but this year I was more than happy to begin the season of denial a week early.

Since the day of the post-birthday hangover not a single drop of alcohol has passed my lips. Even on the very darkest, coldest, rainiest evenings when the thing you crave most on arriving home from work after a train journey of indescribable horror is nice glass of red wine to perk you up, I’ve managed to abstain.

I hesitate to sound smug here, but the benefits are enormous. My blubbery tum has shrunk to the size of a large doughnut (it looked more like a family bloomer before), my skin seems much clearer and less wrinkly, my eyes are definitely brighter and I’m sleeping like a log.

“Have you noticed any changes since I gave up alcohol?” I asked my husband at the weekend. He thought for a moment and then said: “Well, since you’ve been sleeping properly, you’ve started to snore like a warthog.”

It wasn’t exactly the confidence-boosting answer I was angling for.