The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

1. The first time I drank alcohol

The first time I drank alcohol was on a family holiday in Greece. I was fifteen and my dad bought me a pint of beer, perhaps hoping it would help turn me into a real man.

Well, it didn't. I drank the pint, sat there, and watched the night's entertainment. I didn't feel drunk. I felt no different than before.

Then my dad bought me another pint. So I drank this one too.

Then I began to feel strange. Colours were brighter and sounds were more intense.

I got scared. I'd never felt like this before. So I didn't tell anyone.

Anyway, the feeling went away after a couple of hours. It's lucky I didn't embarrass myself by puking in my dad's lap or by falling down the stairs.

2. The birthday party

I was seventeen when I got drunk for the first time. Two kids at school, Oliver Golding and school captain Tom Wallis, were turning eighteen and had hired a function room in a pub in the city centre.

Oliver Golding gave me an invitation ticket. I should never have been invited to this party. I was unpopular at school. In fact, I suspect that I was the least popular kid in the school.

My dad drove me to the city centre. He stopped the car on New Street at the bottom of the pedestrian ramp to Pallasades Shopping Centre.

Two Muslim women wearing hijabs walked past. "Fucking packies," he said in disgust.

"Alright Paul, call me and I'll give you a lift back," he said. Then I got out the car and he drove off.

I felt nervous. I clutched my invitation ticket like Charlie Bucket holding the golden ticket that lets him into the chocolate factory.

I walked up the ramp to the pub. The pub was called The Newt. Tom Wallis and a bouncer were standing outside the door.

I looked up at both of them.

I showed them my ticket.

Wallis laughed. "He's brought his ticket."

But Wallis let me in.

Loads of people from school were already there. Some were drinking pints of beer. Many of us were seventeen. I was seventeen. But the pub was serving them beer.

I bought a pint of beer and began to sip it. It tasted bad. All beer does, when haven't associated the taste of beer with the good feeling of being drunk yet.

I sat by myself. Then a kid calle Michael Wedderburn came over. He had a girl with him. Her name was Ruth Trude. Ruth was attractive. She was short and cute.

"Ruth, this is Paul," said Michael. "Paul, this is Ruth." He left us alone.

I couldn't think of anything to say to her. Not a single word.

It's a weird affliction I had back then. Extreme shyness around girls. I couldn't think of a single thing to say to them.

My mind was blank. Ruth and I sat there in silence. I tried my damndest to think of something to say, but everything I thought of - "So what courses are you doing at school?" sounded lame, so I said nothing.

Ruth eventually got up and walked away.

I finished my pint, so I bought another. Then I finished that one too.

But, then suddenly, after the third pint, everything changed. My god, what a transformation. I was EUPHORIC!

i needed a piss. I walked to the toilets. But on the way there, I threw up on the floor. People cheered. There was my vomit, on the carpet. The vomit was chunky and yellow. I'd thrown up right in the middle of the pub. But I didn't care. I was drunk for the first time and everything was great.

I went into the toilet and took a piss.

When I came out the toilets, I saw that the puddle of sick was magically gone. Now there was only a darkish patch on the floor where the sick had been. I pointed at the patch on the floor with surprise.

The manager came up to me and said, "Was that you?"

I shook my head.

"Then why were you pointing at it just now?"

I shrugged.

"I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

The manager walked me outside the pub and left me there.

I stood there outside the pub, looking out at Birmingham in the dark. The buzz of the alcohol was fresh in my head. I became excited by the idea that I could go anywhere I wanted. A casino. A club. Out there were the endless possibilities of the night stretching out in every direction.

But the place I really wanted to go was back inside. My friends were in there.

But there was a problem: a bouncer was blocking the door.

"Can I go back inside?" I asked.

"You threw up on the floor," he said, amused.

"No, it wasn't me. It was someone else."

He didn’t believe my ingenious lie. But he took pity and let me back in anyway.

The rest of the party was great. I hugged people. I danced. I was extroverted. A schoolfriend said, “Petey, (for that was my nickname back then) is that you? I’ve never seen you like this”.

I even danced. I looked like a fool but I didn't care what anyone thought about me. The only thing that mattered was the alcohol flowing through my brain.

I would say, without a shadow of a doubt, that that was the happiest night of my life. It was by far better than the birth of my son or anything like that.

3. Kicked out a bar

My friends got together in a bar to celebrate my birthday, but my birthday had been a month before, so really they were just getting together as an excuse to drink alcohol.

We started the night in a pub on the canal called the Malt House. Then we went to a club. I had no ID but the bouncer looked at my worn face and said, "You're definitely old enough," and let me in

I got drunk. I saw a woman sitting by herself. I sat down opposite her. I spread my legs wide open as a rudimentary seduction technique. I sat like that for ten minutes, with my legs splayed open towards her. A bouncer came over and kicked me out.

4. The prom

Prom night was the very last event of school, ever. There were no more lessons or exams after this. No more detentions or bollockings. Most of us would probably never even see each other again because we were all off to different universities, scattered across the country. We were about to begin our adult lives and the prom was the final farewell.

In hindsight, it seems unbelievable the school would organise an event like prom night. It was not just unbelievably kind - they had provided a disco, a bar and a three-course meal - but also unbelievably naive if they thought we were going to behave responsibly around alcohol, especially me, someone already had a track record of drinking too much when the opportunity presented itself.

Prom night was to be the night when all my troubles at Vesey would come to a head. The night when all the years of bullying, loneliness and fear would finally materialise into physical form for everyone to see, like when a student in Buffy the Vampire Slayer has so much internal rage and suffering that an actual physical demon manifests out of it.

It all started during the dinner. The guy next to me had snuck a flask of whiskey into the party.

"Can I have some?" I asked.

He poured some of the whiskey from his flask into my cup of tea.

I took a sip of the tea. It didn't taste any different.

"Can I have some more?" I asked.

He looked at me in annoyance. But he unscrewed the cap on his flask and poured some more into my tea.

A few minutes later, I asked, "Can I have some more?"

He sighed. He poured more whiskey into my tea.

"You're an alcoholic," he said. I couldn’t see why. It seemed like he was only pouring me a little alcohol.

I had never drank anything as strong like whiskey. I didn't know whiskey will get you more drunk than beer.

Then I started feeling drunk very quickly.

I needed a piss. There were no toilets, only a portaloo outside. So I went into the portaloo and locked myself inside. I got out my willy and pissed into the toilet bowl. I managed to splash urine on my shoes and the walls and floor of the portaloo.

I was feeling numb and spaced-out. It was like everything was distant. Real and unreal at the same time. And the feeling was only getting worse. Was this what it was like to get really drunk? If it was, then I didn't like it. In fact, I was terrified.

Then, someone banged on the door of the portaloo. You would think the sudden noise would have made me jump but no. Such was my drunken state that I was almost completely numb to the external stimuli.

"Is anyone in there?" someone outside shouted.

I kept silent. I was scared to talk because I thought my voice would come out weird and drunk.

The portaloo started moving. A group of guys outside were tipping it from side to side. I was still inside, and all I could do was hold onto the sides and wait it out. Again and again, the group of boys assaulted the portaloo, tipping it from side to side. They roared with loutish laughter as they did so.

Eventually, they stopped. I opened the door. Outside the portaloo were a group of guys, and they all burst into renewed laughter when they saw me. I was too drunk to talk, so I just walked back to the tent with an angry expression on my face.

My memories after that are hazy. I remember buying four drinks for myself at the bar - four drinks in one go. I also pretended I was a Dalek, shouting “Exterminate!” at people.

Then I marched up to a girl. Her name was Ramandeep. She was the nicest girl in all of Sixth form.

I grabbed her arm and tried to pull her onto the dancefloor.

She pulled her arm back and said, "Get off me!"

So I went and found one of the four pints of beer I had bought earlier. Then I went back to Ramandeep and threw the pint of beer over her. All over her face, hair and dress. I probably ruined her prom night. I don't have any memories of doing it. A friend told me about it the next day, via MSN messenger.

Her friends then wanted to fight me. That might have been okay if her friends had been girls. I could have survived the beating and I might have even got to glimpse their underwear while I lay on the ground being beaten with their handbags.

But no, all her friends were boys. And not just any boys - they were all muscular alpha males. She was friends with some of the hardest kids in the school.

I was outnumbered six-to-one, while blind drunk.

But my friend Sunil intervened.

"It's not his fault, it's not his fault," Sunil was saying. "He drank whiskey earlier. He's drunk."

Raman's friends let me go. Sunil is the reason I'm still alive today to tell this tale.

Sunil took me outside, took my phone from my pocket and then used it to call my parents on their home phone number. Then told them I was drunk asked them to come pick me up.

My dad arrived up twenty minutes later in his car. Sunil and my dad bundled me into the car, got my seatbelt on, and then my dad started the drive back home.

At some point during the drive, I threw up on the back seat of my dad's car.

When I got home, I couldn't make it up the stairs so I fell asleep on the sofa in the living room. I was too heavy to lift so my mom put a sheet over me and I spent the night sleeping there, as soundly as a baby.

I woke up and it was morning. I was sober. I was also hangover-free, which is a benefit of being eighteen. You don't get hangovers at that age, just dehydrated.

My dad must have had to scrape the vomit off the seat and floor of his car. He must have recoiled at the sight of bile and bits of food, gagged at the smell.

Photo of the prom

Here's a photo of some of my buddies at the prom. I'm not in it because my dad had already taken me home at that point.

Dancing by myself

I started university. I made few friends there. I had no one to drink with I often went out drinking by myself.

But getting drunk on my own was depressing. I was always trying to recreate the joy of the first time I got drunk, but never could, because the first time I got drunk, it was in a room full of people I knew. Now I was getting drunk in rooms of strangers.

I'd sometimes break into a random group of dancers just to have people to dance with. Sometimes they would accept me in a drunken friendly way, but most of the time they thought I was strange. I remember once I went into a circle of dancers and just span around. When I'd finished spinning, the group of dancers had run away. It makes me cringe thinking back.

The sex-themed fancy dress party

I remember going to a fancy dress party, alone, dressed as a knight. I learned I could waste a lot of time by queuing up at the bar. I'd queue up at the bar (it'd take 10-15 minutes to reach the bar), buy a drink, go upstairs, and queue up again at a different bar, sometimes still holding the drink I'd just bought. I must have appeared quite strange, even though in my head what I was doing was my best to be normal.

The time I got mugged

I went out drinking by myself. I was trying to recapture the joy from the first time I got drunk. I was in a bar on Broad Street. There was a competition on a stage. They needed contestants. I went up. A bouncer pushed me back. Then he turned and saw they needed one more contestant. He let me up.

I was on stage with four guys and five women.

There was a guy with a microphone. "The team who takes off the most clothes within a minute wins!"

"No! That's not fair!" said one girl.

The minute began. One guy took off all his clothes, went to the front of the stage and shook his willy at the audience in a grotesque manner. He was naked. This was one of the main bars of Birmingham Broad Street.

People were laughing and groaning in disgust. While he was shaking his willy at people, I took off my shirt, shoes, socks, and trousers and lay them in a pile on the stage. The others were doing the same.

The minute was over. The guy with the microphone looked us over. "And the winner is... the guys!"

Our prize was a free drink from the bar. They never did give me that free drink though.

I blacked out. The next thing i knew, I was outside, on the street, shouting "I'm not scared of you!" to a guy and his girlfriend. The guy pulled out a knife from his pocket. My eyes popped wide open in fear and his girlfriend laughed. I span around and ran home.

The next morning, all my money was gone from my wallet. I'd had fifty pounds in there. I assume it was stolen. To be fair, maybe I had spent it all on alcohol.

The coat

This one time I got drunk in a club. The next thing I knew, I was walking around Birmingham city centre, lost, and without my coat. I had left my coat behind at the club. It couldn't go back to get my coat because I had no idea where the club was. Or any idea where I was for that matter. The streets looked unfamiliar. It was snowing that night and I stumbled around the city centre wearing just my trousers, shoes and shirt, but thanks to the alcohol I didn't feel cold.

It must have been around 3 am by this point. I was walking around, drunk out of my head, no idea where I was. I tried opening the doors of apartment buildings for somewhere to sleep but all the doors were locked. I sat on the step of an apartment building and decided to just stay there and try to sleep. For the first time, I could see how homeless people must live. It scared me. I've had a fear of homelessness from that day on.

I couldn't sleep there in the doorway so I got back up. I tried to think. I had a phone. But I couldn't call a taxi as I didn't have any taxi's phone numbers. I thought about calling my parents for help but I was afraid they would be ashamed of me.

I kept walking. I saw someone – I hadn’t seen anyone else in ages. She was a young women standing on a street corner, wearing a short black skirt, a coat, and high heels.

I walked up to her and said, "I need help. I'm lost."

She laughed. "Where do you live?"

"Aston University campus. I'm a student there."

"Okay, give me your phone and I'll call you a taxi."

I hesitated.

"Don't worry," she said. "I'm not going to steal it."

So I handed over my phone. And she called me a taxi.

I stood there, waiting for the taxi to arrive.

"Do you want warming up?" she asked with a devious smile.

"No thanks," I said in a small scared voice. I didn't want to lose my virginity. I just wanted to get back to my bedroom.

The taxi came. [taxi driver desc?]

"Where you going?"

"Aston University?"

"Oh yeah, I know that one. Jump in."

So I opened the door and got in.

"Sorry mate, but do you mind paying now? Sometimes I get runners, so..."

"Oh. Yeah, no problem." I pulled my wallet out my pocket. "How much would it be?"

"Five pounds mate."

So I handed him a five pound note. Five pounds was a bargain if he could get me home.

Off we went. We drove in silence. A few minutes later we were on the university campus.

"There you go mate."

"Thanks."

I was so drunk that I pulled out another five pound note and tried to give it to the driver.

The driver looked confused and said, "You already paid me mate."

I put the five pound note back in my wallet.

I went into the student apartment building - there was a special door at night for which you needed a key, and I was sober enough by this point to get the key in the lock on the first try - and rode the elevator to my dorm. I opened my door and there was my bed, my sink, my desk. I was back. It was wonderful. I took a piss, drank some water and went to bed.

The story doesn't end there though. Another day, when my mom asked me where my coat was, I was ashamed to tell the truth, so I said a paramedic had requisitioned it because a girl broke her arm in jujitsu.

Meanwhile, I tried to pick it up from the club but I went at 8 pm when the club was still closed.

In the end, I told my mom the truth, that I had left it in a club. my mom phoned the club and they said they threw lost things away after thirty days. I went to collect it on the 30th day, I think Dad drove me there.

The escape

I lived in Lincolnshire at the age of 19 as I had a placement working at a chicken factory. My job was to open packets of chicken and test them for salmonella.

One night I went drinking by myself because I had no friends. I got very drunk and eventually, I ended up stumbling around a supermarket car park at 2 am. I had no idea how I got there and I had no idea how to get home.

I blacked out. The next thing I knew, I was standing in some guy’s house, listening to him talk. He said he was 25. He talked and talked and talked, about his job and his mortgage, and it was 3 am now and I just wanted to sleep. He had a dog too who would come into the room occassionally and try to lick me.

"So where do you work?" he asked me.

"Moy Park," I said.

"Oh really? I used to work there too. I was a consultant. Easy job. They paid me five hundred pounds per day. I'd never work there any though. Too many wankers there, ha ha ha."

This went on for some time until eventually he said I could sleep on the sofa in the living room. I lay down on the sofa and fell asleep.

I was woken up by his hand on my forehead. It was still night. He was standing over me.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

It was just like a scene from Catcher in the Rye:

I woke up all of a sudden. I don't know what time it was or anything, but I woke up. I felt something on my head, some guy's hand. Boy, it really scared hell out of me. What it was, it was Mr. Antolini's hand. What he was doing was, he was sitting on the floor right next to the couch, in the dark and all, and he was sort of petting me or patting me on the goddam head. Boy, I'll bet I jumped about a thousand feet. "What the hellya doing?" I said.

Instead of saying "What the hellya doing?", I muttered, "I'm fine," and went back to sleep.

I woke up again. Now it was morning. I was sober. The man was asleep in an armchair opposite. Why didn't he sleep in his bed? I don't know.

I wanted to leave without waking the guy up. Partly because he was annoying and partly because I suspected he wanted to have sex with me. So I got up veeeery sloooooowly, at a rate of one centimetre a minute. I didn't want to make any noise that would wake him up. I had to time my movements with the noise of the occasional passing car – every time a car passed, I moved just a little bit, so the car would cover the noise of the sofa creaking when I moved. Inch by inch, I got up, and then crept to the back door.

I opened the back door. There was his dog, in the garden, already awake. I petted the damn dog as enthusiastically as I could, urging it to be quiet. Thankfully the dog didn't make any noise.

Then I walked down the garden, climbed over the fence and onto the road. From there I walked to the train station and got the first train of the day back home, very much hungover, but with my arsehole virginity intact.

Bournemouth

I once got drunk in Bournemouth. I must have had a bottle of whiskey or rum because I got pretty drunk. While drunk, I went to a Wetherspoons, drank a quiet pint and pulled a book off a shelf. I wrote in it something like "Paul, I'm so sorry. You are too intelligent for this planet".

I snuck into a construction site by climbing over the fence. I stole some architect plans as proof I'd done this.

Then I went home.

The head injury

One night, at a house party, I had a 350-millilitre bottle of Barcardi. It was about the size of a hip flask. From my calculations, this bottle contained fourteen units of alcohol.

The NHS says to drink no more than that in a week. I decided to drink it in thirty seconds.

I wanted to be cool, so I climbed up on the table in the living room and I held the bottle in the air for everyone to see. Everyone stopped. Then, instead of trying to stop me as they should have done, they started chanting: "Pa-ul, Pa-ul".

So I put the rim of the bottle to my mouth and began to drink. Glug, glug, glug, glug. Christ, the taste was awful. No offence to Barcardi, but their rum tastes like oven cleaner. Maybe that's because it's 40% alcohol. Anything that's 40% alcohol is going to taste awful. The bad taste is your body's way of trying to stop you from drinking it.

But I kept going. I wasn't going to let my body stop me from poisoning myself. Stupid body, I'd show it who's the boss. Glug, glug, glug. The rum burned my throat as it went down.

As I was neared the end of the bottle, the chants became louder and more excited: "PA-UL! PA-UL!"

Glug, glug, glug, glug.

After the last glug, I triumphantly held the bottle in the air. It was empty. Everyone cheered.

Let it be known that on the 15th of March, 2012, at 9:30 pm (Ontario time), I drank 350 millilitres of rum in one go. And I didn't even throw up.

I climbed down from the table. People shook my hand and slapped me on the back as if I was JFK on a presidential election tour or something. For those brief moments, I was a hero.

As the excitement dwindled off, a girl came up to me and said, "I'm drunk!" She plainly was drunk: her eyes were unfocused and she was smiling a lot.

I didn't know what to say. So I just said, "Oh."

Then she turned and walked off. Thinking back, maybe she wanted to make out with me. Then again, maybe she just wanted me to tell me she was drunk.

My memories are hazy after that. Though I'm not completely certain, this may have had something to do with drinking the 350-millilitre bottle of Barcardi a few minutes before. It turns out that alcohol in Canada has exactly the same effect as alcohol in the UK.

I remember starting a fight with a Chilean worker called Ariel. I'd heard him refer to Tony as a "maricon" several times (actually, come to think of it, I think it was a different Chilean worker; Ariel was totally innocent) and now I was finally standing up to defend Tony. By starting a fight with Ariel.

Now, I'm not very good at fighting. This was why, very quickly, Ariel had me pinned down to the floor. I struggled to escape but he had a firm hold.

"HEY!" I shouted.

Ariel shoved my head down onto the carpet more. It should have hurt, but was I too drunk to notice.

Suddenly, the next thing I knew, I was prowling around the house, collecting empty beer bottles. Why I was collecting empty beer bottles? It wasn't to recycle them. It was to smash them on Ariel's head.

You see, I had lost Round 1 with Ariel. But there was still Round 2. And in Round 2, I'd have the upper hand! Because I would jump on him and SMASH BEER BOTTLES on his HEAD! It all made sense.

But before I could get around to this, the next thing I knew, warm sunlight was shining on my face. I was in bed, in my bedroom. The sunlight was filtering through the thin, cheap curtains. How did I get here? I thought. One moment I was at a party, and the next moment it was morning. The effect was like a flashforward from Lost.

(If you want to save yourself the cost of a Lost boxset, get drunk on cheap alcohol instead.)

My head throbbed from a hangover. The time was 09:51. My shift started in ten minutes!

I dragged myself out of bed and started pulling on my uniform.

That's when I saw it. That's when I looked in the mirror and saw the bright red wound on my forehead.

My hand went to my forehead. It felt sore. It looked like someone had held an iron against it.

Now, there are several ways to burn your forehead. You can:

• be careless with a curling iron
• inspect a campfire too closely
• accidentally pull the trigger of a flame-thrower while you look down its nozzle

Since I hadn't used a curling iron or a flamethrower recently, nor had I seen any campfires, the cause of my injury was a mystery. Though maybe it was from Ariel pushing my head down into the carpet the night before.

I arrived late for work.

"What's wrong with your head?" said one of my colleagues, an Australian guy called Al. "It looks like you burned it."

"It's a long story," I said. I told Al about the fight I got into the night before.

"Man, you should get some cream for that. Otherwise, it could turn into a scar."

A scar? A SCAR? I didn't want a scar on my forehead. I was already ugly enough as it was. I didn't want to become Quasimodo. Kids would call me "Scarhead" and throw stones at me.

"What cream?" I said.

"There's a special cream that prevents scars, ay?"

"What special cream?"

"I don't know. Ask at the pharmacy."

I knew I had to get some of this magic healing cream, and fast. So I went to my manager, a woman called Jenna, and said, "Can I please go to the pharmacy to get some cream for my forehead?"

"Um, I'm not sure," she said. "If you go then we'll be short-staffed."

She cared more about the cafe being short-staffed than the possibility of me being permanently scarred!

"I'll only be gone fifteen minutes," I said. "I could go on my break."

"But your break only lasts fifteen minutes. What if you're not back in time?"

"The pharmacy's just down the road," I said. "I'll be quick."

"Look," she said. "I'd prefer if you didn't go."

Fuck that. When my break came, I went down to the pharmacy and got some cream for my forehead. It's called Polysporin and it's an antibiotic cream for cuts and burns. I don't know if it prevents scarring, but over the next few days, I used that cream liberally on my forehead.

The red mark on my forehead slowly began to fade, thank god. I had learnt my lesson: don't mess with guys named after Disney princesses.

The worst hangover ever

One night I went out drinking with a bunch of French people from the hostel.

Then the next thing I remember was cradling a bottle of rum in my arms as if it were my baby. Someone tried to take the rum from me and I screamed, "MINE!" and yanked it back. I pulled it back too hard though and all the rum spilt out onto the floor. I frantically got down on my hands and knees and started licking the rum off the floor while other people watched in disgust.

Then it was morning and someone was shaking my shoulder.

"Paul, wake up."

I reluctantly opened my eyes. A guy called Norbert was standing over me.

"Uhhhhhgghh," I said.

Norbert looked happy to see I was alive. "Paul, you should go to your room," he whispered.

I pulled myself up and peeked over the sofa. Guests were having breakfast. I felt bad because these nice people were just trying to have breakfast and here I was, a near-lifeless body on the sofa, scaring them. Also, technically I was a member of staff and I wasn’t exactly fulfilling my duty of promoting the hostel’s image, so I managed to stumble upright and trudge over to my room. I must have looked like a zombie from a George A. Romero film. I fumbled the keycard out of my pocket and pressed it against the lock. The light changed from red to green and the lock opened with a thunk. I stumbled into the room and collapsed on the nearest of the four bunk beds.

It must have been around 7 am, which meant I'd only had about four hours of sleep. So I tried to go back to sleep. But I couldn't sleep. I wished Norbert hadn't woken me up. Why did he have to wake me up? Why couldn't he just left me to die, the selfish bastard!

Bright sunshine was streaming through the window. "Fuck off, Sun," I said, but the Sun didn't fuck off. The Sun stayed where it was. I added "the Sun" to a mental list I had just started of personal enemies, along with Norbert.

I recited my list of enemies, the same way Arya Stark recites the list of people she's going to kill, but a list only consisting of "Norbert, the Sun" wasn't long enough to make me feel better, so I stopped.

I had been hungover before but never as bad as this. I felt hot, thirsty and tired.

The day was already blisteringly hot. You'd think Canada is cold all the time, but it's not. In summer, there are some hot days when the temperature goes above 30 degrees Celcius. Today was one of those days.

I lay there in bed for hours, too weak to move. I would say I felt as weak as a kitten but even kittens have more strength than I did at that moment.

The heat was unbearable. All I could think about was getting into a cold shower to cool down. So eventually, after unsuccessfully trying to will myself into the sweet oblivion of sleep, I dragged myself out of bed and out of the room. I was now in the common area.

Luckily there weren't many people around so I didn't have to talk to anyone or explain why I was shuffling around like a zombie.

To get to the shower, I had to go down some stairs and then up some more stairs, and then through another area. All this was easy when sober. Now, however, it was like Edmund Hillary trying to climb Everest while going through heroin withdrawal. Each stair made my head throb. I thought I was going to collapse on the stairs and fall down them to my death. In a way, this was welcome because it would have put me out of my misery at least.

Then I had to go up some more stairs. I finally made it to the bathroom. This was fortuitous timing because right at that moment I needed to puke. So I threw up into the toilet, and then again for good measure. That made me feel a little better. Then I locked the door and turned on the shower. It took me a few minutes of fumbling to get my clothes off. Then I stood under the shower. The water was wonderfully cold. I stayed there for a few minutes and then got out. I was still hungover but at least I wasn't in danger of heatstroke anymore.

I got dressed and made it as far as a sofa in the living room nearby. I collapsed there and tried to will myself into sleep. It didn't work.

I had my eyes shut when Joelle the hostel cleaner walked past and tickled my outstretched foot.

I had no energy to say anything. Joelle left me alone (she had to go clean the toilet as someone had puked in there) and my hangover lasted until the end of the day. It took me until around 8 pm for me to feel remotely normal again.

Getting drunk with my brother and sister

One night, my brother, my sister and I went out drinking in Birmingham. I tried to chat up a woman at the bar.

"So, how old are you?" I asked her.

"Thirty," she said.

"Thirty? Oh right. Well, that's not too bad."

She shot me a cold look.

"Did you know you're still young enough for a working holiday visa in Canada?" I asked her.

I expected her to ask me for more information about working holiday visas in Canada, or working holiday visas in general, but no. Instead, she just glared at me.

So I carried on regardless. "I've been to Canada," I said. "I've been living in Montreal for almost two years." And I told her all about my time in Canada.

I expected her to be interested. I thought she'd find my worldly adventures impressive. After all, I'd been all the way to Canada, lived there for two years, and then come back. That must have given me an automatic free "Interesting Guy" card.

But no. Instead she rolled her eyes! She wasn't interested in my travels. Not in the least.

I thought my travelling had made me attractive. But in reality, I was still just the same boring fuck I'd always been.

This was a real shock. If my travels in Canada didn't impress women, then had my entire time there been pointless? Why had I gone there in the first place?? The only reason I'd gone to Canada was to find a girlfriend. I mean, technically I had found a girlfriend: Girlfriend. But still.

"Well, gotta go," she said

"Well, nice to meet you," I said.

"Yeah, whatever," she said and walked away.

I leaned over a railing. Then something down on the floor below caught my eye. There was a bar down there, glittering with bottles of alcohol and beer. The bar was closed and unattended. For a moment, I thought how easy it would be to steal beer from the tap, and I smiled.

The next thing I knew, I was trying to steal beer from the tap.

"Stop that," said a bartender.

I tried again.

"Stop that or I'll have to make you leave," said the bartender.

I tried a third time to steal beer.

"Right, I'm going to have to ask you to leave," he said.

"Yehawlesh I aboutleaveanywayze," I slurred.

Adam and Lisa came out of the bar looking for me.

"I saw you, Paul," said Adam. "Everyone saw you."

"Whatch?" I asked.

"You were stealing beer from the tap!"

"No I watchnunt," I slurred. Then I said, "OH," and I was almost sick on the pavement.

Then we went to another bar. There, I found myself talking to an Asian man with a big purple turban on his head.

"Hash you nerd of warking holidays vezas?" I slurred out to him. He didn't say he had. He didn't say anything in fact. So I tried to explain working holiday visas to him in detail, even though he looked fifty and would have been too old for a working holiday visa anyway. Then I realised he'd gone and I was just talking to myself.

"Come on, Paul," said my sister. "Let's get you home."

Alcohol depresses the brain's reasoning skills but it heightens emotions. When I got home, I felt miserable, so I called Girlfriend on Skype on my laptop. It was 2 am for me but only 9 pm in Canada. Girlfriend picked up.

When I saw her pixellated, semi-frozen face on the screen, I broke down into tears. I tried to talk but I was too drunk to form words. I could only make crude vocal sounds like "Ahhhhooooo".

Out of my laptop came her voice, tinny and distorted: "Hello? Paul? Are you okay?"

I just sat there, drunk and crying, with the laptop balanced precariously on my knees and Girlfriend's face on the screen. Tears fell down my cheeks. Some went in my mouth and these tasted salty. Snot was coming out my nose. Every now then I tried to talk but all that came out were things like "Ooooruh" and "Aaaarah".

"What's wrong?" Girlfriend said. "What's happened?"

She must have thought someone had died. She didn't know why I was crying so much. But I knew. The reason I was crying was that I was going to dump her. I was going to leave Girlfriend.

(And I did break up with her, a few weeks later. But she changed my mind and we're still together today.)