I haven’t had a proper meal, so to speak, since Saturday evening. Until now. So as I get stuck into a great himalayan mountain range of homemade chicken jalfezi, I feel it just to think about, and answer certain life-defining debates over food.

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Yesterday I took part in competitive sport, of sorts, against a large bunch, of what people on the street would call chavs. Or pikeys. Or lowest common denominators. Of course this sounds more middle class than a buttered crumpet whilst planning the village fête, but it’s just that they are intimidating to someone of my lean, brittle, and laughable stature.

I performed well; I did a few ‘trick shots’ and ‘hoofed’ the ball ‘upfield’ a few times. I even slotted a few ‘beautifully strung together passing routines’ together. However after playing for about seven hundred years, two hundred and forty three days, sixteen hours, 49 minutes and twelve seconds, I felt rather tired. This has carried over into today, where I am now too terrified of leaving the bed in case I do a stirling impression of a ming vase and shatter into the proverbial million pieces. There are several ways I feel I could combat this affliction that would be more beneficial than shooting the crap out of Ewoks on a Star Wars based video game. Here are my thoughts.

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Being able to find your way is usually quite a useful skill. You don’t want to be heading for Northern Mallorca and end up in Northern Mongolia. The weather’s completely different, and the duration of the journey is somewhat multiplied.

I like to pride on my annoying knack at knowing the way to places by purely heading in a direction. Of course I’m often more misguided than an upside down Tom Tom Go that fell off the back of a lorry, so when I end up round the back of a block of flats with a chunk of steel for an oesophagus I often think that I should have done what google maps told me to do.

There are of course people who are as bad with directions as I am with tolerating such films as ‘The Notebook’ ‘Remember Me’ ‘Stereotypical Chiseled White Guy and Misguided Young White Girl Engage in an Encounter That Overcomes Initial Hatred Due to Social Class/Social Group/The Hating Father and Ultimately Have Sex and Live for Ages.’ These are the kind of people who will get buses in the wrong direction, or turn up to a party four hours late. This causes them inconvenience but can also cause those meeting them an inconceivably long wait. Of course it’s not like waiting to come out of prison after you murdered ten people, but the circumstances are different; those who are lost have a head full of air, and those who were shot by the criminal in prison have a head full of lead, and now maggots.

I write about this only because I decided to try a different route to the station on Monday. I was required to be there by about 7pm. So I set off from the off license after picking up the relevant materials for a celebratory curry and headed in the general direction of the station. Obviously I was cold because I am an idiot and did not dress appropriately. I don’t mean that I wore flip flops, sun glasses and a mankini, but merely forgot to wear a coat of suitable thickness.

I followed up on forgetting suitable thickness by displaying suitable thickness. I don’t mean I randomly took part in a porn film based on girth on Greyhound Road, but instead I took a possible shortcut. These shortcuts only ever end badly; with me asking an odd woman where to go to get to places. Usually they’re straight ahead on the right, and if I had just been braver would have arrived only a few minutes late and would not feel obliged to tell anyone of my avant garde behaviour.

After the aforementioned curry, I then proceeded to escort Giada home, via everywhere but her home. This was an oversight on my behalf and got me questioning my ability to walk anywhere. It’s only one foot in front of another. It’s not like it’s doing a brain operation while juggling chainsaws and taking LSD so you think you’re on a TV quiz show hosted by none other than Barney the fucking dinosaur, it’s just 1 step, 2 step, 3 step…

Next time I need to go anywhere, I’m going to take precautions. A map of the area, a compass, a flare gun, a tent and a stove may sound excessive when living in London, and I would agree, but because I’m writing a farcical account of my life I would like you to pretend that these are the things I am now going to be taking out of the house with me. This is to give you an amusing picture of me carrying these items to and from the shop at the end of the road when all I want is a loaf of bread. Warburtons Seeded Batch and a cold night spent in the middle of the road, what could be better?

Everyone has their own little systems and eccentricities. Some people like to put their jeans on before t-shirt, others are the opposite. Some choose to by pass this all together and don only a sock. There’s the cleaning teeth before breakfast brunch and the cleaning teeth after breakfast club. There’s the people who use their toothbrush as a sex toy, and there’s the people who don’t.

Nowhere is this more apparent than avoiding something more dreaded than a double dip recession or supporting Aston Villa; the hangover. Some people swear by paracetamol before bed, or a pint of water by the bedside, or several lines of cocaine, you know, to take the edge off it.

When dealing with a hangover that presses down upon your skull more than a body builder juggling a family of hippos it always comes down to what makes you feel comfortable. Not just because of the slight placebo effect, but the state of your breath, your skin and your mood, means you’re so hideous and irritable that you make Jo Brand look like a culthead at an American megachurch. There is no point approaching someone for help, because your friend is probably in a similar position, or wearing an unknown girl’s bra and sleeping with their hand down their boxers. Those are the only possible conclusions.

My personal method is a pint of water before bed, and two in the morning. Accompanied by toast once awakening, or, ideally both before and after sleeping. It’s not definitive, as even I have experimented with it. Doing the same all the time can cause boredom, and trialling such things as doritos and frijj, and masturbation can all help to beat the dreaded morning after. It seems to do the trick. It doesn’t reverse the problem, it’s just a stopgap between me and a liver transplant; it’s the cork in the dam, not a whole new dam, soon the dam will burst, and water will flood the village, killing and maiming and ultimately bring cholera and other waterborne diseases so that even the survivors will meet a decidedly unpleasant end.

I thought once about naming my method. Trademarked and copyrighted. Those kind of pointless tasks in self righteousness. Of course the vanity involved in naming something after yourself is beyond my brilliance, but I still considered it. People name all manner of things after themselves. The Korotkoff sounds for example. For those who aren’t void of social life and interesting interests, these are the sounds a doctor hears when you have your blood pressure taken. Why would you name the sound after yourself, when you have devised, at the time, a whole new technique? Oh wow, a sound, that’ll be much more interesting to have named after me that a technique that’s going to be used for years to come. These days nobody even measures blood pressure that way, they use a machine. ‘I’m doing Korotkoff tests’ could have lasted even that jump in technology, but when you name a sound that is now void of purpose, you are basically condemning yourself to being more outdated than myspace.com playing greensleeves a lute whilst writing a telegram. Korotkoff you’re an arsehole for naming something after you, and for naming something so pointless you’re an arsehole wider than a baker’s dozen of darts players.

So next time you’re wallowing in self pity eating falafel and drinking tomato juice, think to yourself ‘it’s fine’ because it is. You’re beating the hang in your own way. Even if it is the most sickening pretentious and ‘gunshot wound to the head’ inducing way ever. Even dickheads get hangovers.

There is a legal requirement for children to stay in school until 16. This is probably a good thing. Nobody wants their 9 year old brother being mangled in a factory machine, but what more, nobody wants their child to be unable to differentiate an incomplete fraction. Of course I jest slightly, but I do believe education is useful. It’s not the be all and end all. You can live without school, and you can’t live without water. However water’s a lot less time consuming. You don’t need to revise to drink water. You might need to practice if you’re short of experience, but once you get the knack for pouring some liquid down your throat you’ll get accustomed to it. Don’t do it with acid though. Acid is probably a bad idea. Being alive is fun sometimes right?

If I want to get anywhere in my chosen career, occasionally I have to attend things called lectures. It’s like a big room, where someone with a large ego and knowledge of things that nobody else cares about will talk at you for about an hour. Sometimes it can be interesting, mainly because they have a slight speech impediment or are hilarious to observe; not in the way that watching a drunk man try to dance with a sober girl half his age, but in the way that they have an odd mannerism, like Jimmy Carr’s laugh, but slightly more physical.

What I’m trying to say is they might be a bit odd looking. I don’t like to say hideous because it’s in the eye of the beholder, but if a lecturer is 40 stone overweight and has skin as green as the morning after gift you leave in the toilet, then you’re going to have a giggle.

Apart from this, there is very little fun to be had in a lecture, other than learning. Learning can sometimes be fun. Think back to when you were a toddler, and you played with blocks. That’s learning. For my degree, we play with models of brains. Putting them together in record time. It’s like a big playgroup. Except we don’t suck on bits of plastic (in public, be it vibrating or not vibrating) or wear nappies. I haven’t checked the underwear status of course, but assume that bowel competency is a prerequisite of public appearance. If I was afraid I would void the emergency exit at all times I’d not venture too far from something that would accept my problem, like a toilet, or a ditch behind a bush, or your mother’s face.

Occasionally people fall asleep in lectures. This can be an intriguing observation. You have to keep your eye out for the visible wobble. It’s an awkward back to front method, not like wiping I may add, but more like the stereotypical person in a mental health unit wrapped in their lovely white coats. Then, just like dubstep, there’s a sudden drop, and, much like dubstep once more, a headache occurs, not because of constant mediocrity, but because of brain injury as you slam a pencil through your eye socket into your head as you slump towards the floor.

I remember 6th form as a much more haphazard educational time. Occasionally you’d have a free period, to do very little, other than sit and talk about alcohol, sex, drugs, but never do it. Oh, and what the broadsheets are saying about the ongoing financial crisis. For me this was useful. It would give me time to buy milkshakes or say hello to, scarily, female human beings and have fun. It was in no way skins, they’d buy crystal meth and say hello to, scarily, crystal meth dealers, who may or may not be female, in which case they could combine activity three, copulation, and do all three at once. Of course to have your time so well managed is unlike skins, how those teenagers manage to make a couple of days last only forty five minutes is beyond me. Clever bastards.

So next time you’re learning, remember to remove all sharps, all crystal meth dealers, and look out for me, as I sit on the internet throughout.

There’s two things that should never collide, live music and too much alcohol. They always, however, collide harmoniously to produce a rather ‘wonderful at the time’ effect. A bit like when you dick on all your friends to pursue a girl. Bros always come before Hoes, socially, and in the process of coitus.

Last night I went to a Villagers gig with Lianne, which she got free entry too. Little did we know that the bar inside was free. Obviously when presented with free alcohol in London, the first thing you do is buy orange juice. I don’t know why I did this. Maybe I was trying to be a bit Warhol, maybe I was trying to be straight edge, maybe I took one look at the bloke who is Get Cape Wear Cape Fly in the corner and thought, fuck it I need vitamin C. Obviously I then cottoned on to the general idea. Get pissed. Not in the ‘slightly merry after a couple of beers at the pub quiz’ kind of merry but more in the ‘oh look it’s my penis, I should vomit onto it and then rub it in to create a more well rounded effect’ way. So there were three of us getting drunk, and Anna, who was too hungover.

The good thing with alcohol is that you’re more confident, the bad thing with alcohol is that you’re more confident.

Poor Conor. Within four or five beers, my odd ghetto heckles had developed, Jess was barking, and Lianne was swaying around on the spot, oddly out of time with the music. It was probably inconsiderate, but at the time we thought it was affectionate. In the way you think putting your penis in your girlfriend’s mouth to wake her up is affectionate. Of course it isn’t, it’s quite vulgar, and probably a bit sexist. Despite what every fourteen year old boy’s secret ‘film’ collection suggests, women don’t want to suck on a penis 24/7. Perhaps we should, a la the government not selling all our trees because we all got angry and greenpeace on them, have scaled back our drinking and debauchery. Obviously, we did not, we plodded on like Boris Johnson and drank more. The gig was actually very good, got to hand it to Villagers, always a brilliant show, especially in the acoustic guitar & piano only set up.

I guess a lot of music is made under the influence of beer,  drugs, or god forbid, mint aero chocolate, and sounds okay. I’m pretty sure though if you gave the fat greasy man in the backstreet pub a keyboard and a recording studio, he’d either piss on the equipment or start a new BNP riot in there because ‘we should never have let them in in the first place.’ It’s these old hat binge drinkers that give the current crop a bad name. We’re just trying to vomit and steal signs and have regrettable and forgettable sex with people we don’t actually find attractive at all. We don’t want racism, leave that to one eyed idiots named after mythical creatures and Prince Philip, who, should deport himself, the stupid greek waste of space.

The gig itself ended and we departed for pastures new, to buy extra long matches and cigarettes and talk to policemen who got shot and stabbed and were on an excursion to experience the area. I don’t know why they had to make up such an excuse, because everyone deserves a good time, even the police. Just nothing to do with forcing young people into small spaces against their will. There’s a name for that my friend, and it’s definitely not kettling.

Eventually, after yet more alcohol, the night drew to a close with a mad dash through Liverpool Street station to a bus… That took longer than an unelected government to disagree and call for a re-election (still hoping!).

Then it dawns the following morning. I’m too hungover to listen to music. This is the final nail in the drunk music coffin. Mornings are much more tedious without music. Toast is not imaginative. It’s a square, with some butter on it. It’s not going to break into a falsetto middle 8, or a synth breakdown. It’s going to go cold, and soggy. Toast does not get better with age, music often does. Unlike women. 90 year old women, do not tug on my fishing rod. They snap the rod and make it disappear. Sorry love, those breasts might have been good in 1935, but right now, it looks like they’re trying to touch your toes, and are succeeding.

The normal response to passing an exam may be to go out and celebrate near to where you live. Not quiet, by any means, you would normally make sure you remembered absolutely none of it, with no idea where you are when you wake up, why there’s blood all over your face or in fact why you’re now wearing a red lace thong instead of boxers. You trudge home, happy in the knowledge you celebrated spectacularly.

I, however, ended up going to Edinburgh, via Leeds. It was kind of pre-planned. Nobody goes to those kind of lengths on a whim. I didn’t just decide to go to Scotland, much unlike the original inmates of Australia, who went there because they had no choice.

I drank a lot of beer, but more jagerbombs than I could imagine. I’m pretty sure I spent about £30 in jagerbombs and managed to pass out. I truly and utterly fucked over all of caffeinekind and managed to do the opposite of what it’s meant to induce in me. I played god, kind of, and now I feel proud. Of course at the time I had no idea I had been so divine, and felt very much the opposite, as I deposited, what could have been a new life form spawned out of life giving abilities, but is more likely to have been the beer and a burger I had had as a meal a few hours before.

To wake up on a coach at 9am, seemingly without your bag and just a phone and a wallet is slightly perplexing. I looked to my left to see a girl with two buckets of sick alongside her and pen on her face. I decided that, she, like me, had had a good night, then she turned slightly in her stupor to reveal a wonderfully ornate and brilliantly drawn Hitler moustache, at which I point I decided she had outdone me in the fun stakes.

I went whisky tasting, which, don’t get me wrong, is lovely, but essentially, it all tastes the same. ‘You should be picking up the scent of bananas’ she says. No. I get the taste of whisky and the death and decay of the insides of my body, not bananas, and anyway how the hell do bananas get into whisky, you distill it and put it in a big barrel. At no point did you say they put half the world’s bananas into the barrel. Either, you’re lying to me, or illegally importing fruit. If you are doing the second option, why the hell did you decide to import fruit? There’s no money in it. Heroin? Yes. Not plums and kiwi fruit.

As I returned to London yesterday, once more I was presented with a wonderful Hitler moustache, this time, the person involved had tried to take the emphasis away from the moustache by colouring in their nose. An odd tactic, but surprisingly it worked. Then as I sat down next to a man with his hands taped to his balls I prepared myself for the hedonistic lifestyle of home. Students, eh?

I have been a party animal. I know the joys of going out. However, right now I am struggling to enjoy it. Not like someone struggles to enjoy a film, because if you don’t like a film, it is shit, and everyone accepts your view. If you say a night out was shit you feel this ball of guilt wedged in your oesophagus that feels like you’re either going to choke to death imminently or cough up a hair ball.

Maybe I have become boring; maybe I am destined to be Mark and not Jez. Maybe I do enjoy history and geography and being quizzed on such topics. Maybe I do wank over elves while wearing my sexy amulet. The point is thus; what’s the attraction of going out?

People stand in circles like they’re poking a midget just out of view. Saying nasty hurtful things to the poor bugger and then pulling his boxers over his head. An amusing image, but people don’t exactly dance either. They kind of move awkwardly. Like epileptic fits in super slow motion, or a rabbit on ketamine. It’s not the pulsating throng of people that skins has fifteen year olds believe. It’s junior school discos with drugs and alcohol and beer goggles rather than chocolate, diet coke and a fat kid in a tux. There’s nothing skilful about my dancing, so I mostly stand still and sway and maybe do what I like to call ‘throbbing’ where I look like I’m fighting an invisible flighted bird. 

My question is, why a circle?It’s always a circle, why can’t people pair off and dance awkwardly at one another, regardless of ability. Why must it be a public sexual league table of who moves most erotically down to the relegation zone where I sit next to a geek sipping a lemonade talking about astrophysics and a website he made for instant wanking material.

Of course alcohol is a factor. When I’m completely off my tête I become a wheel of flailing limbs like a pair of devout christian on their wedding night. I don’t however see it as an excuse for the venue to be awful. Often alcohol makes somewhere fun, but the King’s Union, for me, reeked of mediocrity from the offset, and I’d had a lot of ale.

The main issue I have is the music. In mainstream culture, the music is more awful than having your parents walk in on you with a girl and then winking. I forget that the music I listen to does not represent the stuff people would dance to. I would dance to it. Not everyone. Who wants to be everyone though? Josef Fritzl, Ian Huntley, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Danny Sturridge, Mel Gibson are part of ‘everyone’, and the only person in the group ‘me’ is me. Current dance music is the music equivalent of Rob Green at a world cup; atrocious.

Company usually helps but it gets to a tipping point of hatred and you can’t take any more, similar to watching Michael Macintyre, or taqaandan. (google it, weird shit)

I’m going to go to an indie club. I need a good night, but then again, some of my favourite nights are when there is a film and a bed and a hot water bottle.

The hangover is the worst physiological invention since the appendix, see hours of agony in an organ that is good for absolutely nothing. Why must fun and antics and ‘banter’ be exchanged so readily for a vicious comedown of regret, self loathing and a desire to rip open your abdomen and watch your innards spill happily from the gaping wound.

Alcohol is on the other hand a great invention. A room of, essentially strangers, would be a bit static. It’s essentially meeting the enemy before a job interview. You want to be nice, but you also, secretly, want them to get killed by a rampaging maniac, who, inexplicably, leaves you with only a minor thrashing. However with the addition of alcohol, and in some cases, lovely little illegal substances, a party can quite happily take place where you talk to an italian person in an italian accent. You think you’re being nice, funny, quirky perhaps, but no, you’re mocking them. You wouldn’t go up to a scouser or a geordie and speak to them in an imitation of their voice for an hour, but with alcohol, it’s the best bloody idea in the world. 

Simulating a sexual position with another heterosexual man whilst sober might come across and brash and a bit odd, especially for the unsuspecting party, however with a couple of cheap premium lagers down your oesophagus it suddenly becomes common place, a nipple in here, a tongue around that, a finger up there, a penis hanging lazily against the wood panel table. It’s essentially vanilla, it’s only when it’s with members of the opposite sex that it suddenly becomes raspberry ripple and urine ice cream with horse manure sprinkles.

Returning once more to the horrible topic of hangovers, why is it that some people get off relatively lightly with an hour long headache? That’s pitifully weak. Hangovers shouldn’t have an array of identities. They’re not Frank Abagnale Junior. They should all be crippling acute illnesses which need prolonged bed rest, copious amounts of water and some overdone toast, perhaps even the help of a loved one to spoon feed you common sense and lost memories of the night before; leaving out the bit where you did a shit in a bin, pulled the dog and pissed on a passed out girl of course, unless they want to induce more pain and, some time in the future, a cripplingly massive brain tumour full of guilt, regret and complete social awkwardness.

Hangovers; the product of a fun filled, hedonistic lifestyle.

Two pints of Carlsberg please, barkeep.