Some things take practise

I have a pretty big headache today. I think I need more sleep. Actually, to be honest I think my headache is more related to the fact that I now have a pitifully low tolerance for alcohol than anything to do with the amount of sleep I got. It turns out that drinking takes practise.

It used to be that I could catch up with my best friend (let’s call her Katy, because that’s what the random name generator said I should call her) and we could match each other drink for drink. That was a long time ago though. Over the years, she’s kept well practised at drinking while I have lost all of my drinking skill.
We used to go out and I would drink a half bottle of Jim beam (straight, of course, because mixers are for wimps) and she would drink half a bottle of Vodka. If I drank half a bottle of JB now, you wouldn’t find me asleep on my front door step because I couldn’t work out how to get my key in the lock like you used to – you’d probably find me in hospital having my stomach pumped. Nowadays I’m pretty sure that even after just a few drinks I would just skip the whole lack of co-ordination thing and go straight from silly to comatose, with none of the fun bits in between.

Katy, on the other hand, could now drink an entire bottle of vodka without too much trouble. It all comes down to practise, and I am well out of it.


It makes for a cheap night out usually, and I’m pretty good at knowing my limits, but when Katy is around my self-imposed limits tend to have a way of slipping my mind until we’re half a dozen cocktails and a bottle of wine into the night. After that I can’t even remember what a limit is.

So Saturday night passed in what I seem to remember is quite a fun blur of drinking, gossiping and eating. I woke up at midday on Sunday, and the process started all over again, with my sister in law showing up a few hours in with a couple more bottles of wine and some trashy dvds.

It was a great girls weekend, but it definitely reminds me that drinking needs practise, and trying to ignore your lack of practise is a little like trying to ease back into jogging by running a marathon.