James Crouch gives a word of warning from the other side of the bar
When you find yourself slowly waking up at lunchtime, with a crinkled wine -stained shirt and a small army marching through your cranial cavity, you start to wonder “what on earth happened to me last night?” Over the next few hours you find embarrassing Facebook photos, texts you don’t remember sending and disgruntled housemates who only got a few hours sleep because of your inability to use door keys in the conventional manner. If most of the above applies to you, you drink too much.
Before the shock horror in reply to that statement breaks out amongst the student readership, remember that not exactly every morning is like this. Feeling groggy the morning after is usual, but feeling like you need a half-day to re-enter the human race and pin down your worrying 90 minute meander between Mega Kebab and Mount Pleasant is not.
It’s an important distinction between being drunk, and being smashed like a piñata. To not know why you have a bruise, who you spoke to, where you went, or what you threw up on is really so dangerous and terrifying when you think about it sober. I quite frankly am amazed that my only injuries from four years in Exeter amount to a burn mark on my hand and some slight scar tissue on my elbow – from when I used it to break a fall and, unsuccessfully, save my chips.
I know most who know me will say I’m the pot calling the kettle black, but I know whereof I speak. No one sets out to get “crunk” really, because when we all say that, we do so forgetting something crucial. We say it not just forgetting what that stage feels like, we actually forget that stage exists. We mean: get so drunk we don’t have a care in the world. We don’t mean: get so drunk that the link between you and reality becomes drowned by eight sambucca shots and a Jaegerbomb chaser.
Although, I’m still guilty, I think everyone who gets seriously trolleyed (as in, needs to be carried out in a trolley) on a regular basis should probably keep a drinks diary, so they try and guesstimate what their limit is. The top benefit being it’ll save you money, we all know that the black hole your memory was sucked into happens to also be repository for your missing cash as well.
Alternatively, if financial renuneration doesn’t quite grab you, think of all the near misses you had with cars whilst crossing Sidwell Street, the countless dodgy men you’ve probably almost been mugged by but somehow got away unscathed, or (for me) that time I ended up in the park at the end of Priory Road almost in tears at three in the morning completely lost. Embarrassing, mostly because I live not two minutes from where I was standing. But seriously: get drunk, have a great time, because you’re never going to have a better place to do it. But if this article is testament to more nights out than not for you, then just think about safety a little bit, because the last thing you want to do is not be able to drink another day
James Crouch
Lifestyle Editors remind you to drink responsibly
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