SOCO

On the evidence of the adverts, people up and down the country are referring to Southern Comfort as ‘SoCo’, with you unable to go into a bar without being surrounded by hordes of people all demanding a SoCo and coke, or some other similarly unimaginative combination, with the bar staff happily acceding to these impolite demands, even suggesting this drink to their clientele without any prompting whatsoever.

Of course, as the slightly more reliable evidence of real life demonstrates, this is about as much the case as claiming people around discussing how you never hear much about Britney Spears these days. No-one has ever, outside of the world of marketing, referred to Southern Comfort as SoCo. They call it Southern Comfort, although most people prefer not to refer to it all. In reality going to a bar and asking for a SoCo and coke is likely to result in a confused looking barman asking you to repeat yourself a couple of times before you give the drink its full name and he responds “Oh, why didn’t you say?”. Should a member of bar staff or, indeed, anyone else in the world, offer you a Southern Comfort, in either its full or abbreviated form, the correct response is not “Yes please!”, but “Umm, is that all you’ve got? Haven’t you got anything I might actually enjoy drinking?”

The advert also appears to imply that the experience of drinking Southern Comfort is akin to the kaleidoscopic effect caused by having shards of glass thrust straight into your eyeball. In this respect, at least, they are correct.

HANGOVERS

Hangovers are nature’s way of telling you that you had a good night last night, which is quite handy really, as given that memories of the night before the hangover kicks in generally end in blissful, ignorant unconsciousness long before you actually manage to make it to bed, it’s normally the only clue that you did get up to anything last night, and also provides a handy indication that you’re still alive and capable of feeling pain, no matter how much you might wish otherwise.

The hangover normally starts in a deceptively normal way. There’s a brief moment of unawareness when all you’re aware of is a slight dryness to the mouth and a fogginess in the head. Savour this moment, it doesn’t last for long, as reality quickly kicks in, and reality has chosen its best steel toe-capped boots to do the kicking with, and those kicks are aimed firmly at your head. At this point you may be tempted to reach straight for the paracetamol. Don’t. Partly because swallowing headache tablets when you have a raging hangover is about as much help as a small glass of water when your house is on fire, but mainly because you will shortly be making a trip to the bathroom to empty the entire content of your stomach into the toilet so it’s a bit of a waste. That’s if you’re lucky, of course. If you’re unlucky you’ll have emptied your stomach somewhere between your bedroom and the toilet. If you’re really unlucky you’ll have emptied your stomach while lying in bed and before you actually woke up. This is unpleasant.

Unfortunately ‘unpleasant’ is going to be the theme for the rest of the day, as you spend what little hours remain after your comatose slumber interspersing dashes to the bathroom, either for water or to expel the water you’ve previously drunk from system in a less than traditional manner, with lying fitfully in your stinking bed, hoping desperately and genuinely for the ceiling above to fall in and land on you, putting an end to the horror you’re experiencing. Unfortunately this rarely happens.

There are some hangover cures which can make the experience more pleasant, in much the same way as being attacked with a baseball bat is a more pleasant experience than being hit around the head with a length of lead piping. Unfortunately most of them rely on you being suitably unhungover enough to actually face getting up and cooking a fry up, swallowing anything whatsoever or actually leaving your bed, so aren’t really much good for a proper hangover. The only one that does work is to perform some DIY brain surgery and, using the sharpest implement you can lay your hands on, slicing out a large chunk of your cerebellum. While extreme, this does work, and does about the same damage to your thought processes as the cast quantities of alcohol you drank to get yourself into this state in the first place.

GIN

A curious beverage, drunk mainly by depressed middle aged women and those who feel the world needs an extra edge to make it that bit more miserable, gin is made by mixing together baby tears, the sweat from Satan’s armpits and industrial strength motor oil. It’s taste is similar to that of desolation and despair or, if you want to be a bit less prosaic about it, like licking the trainer of a top athlete.

Gin can be mixed with a variety of drinks, although none have a strong enough taste to make the mixture palatable. Despite many gin connoisseurs claiming that the most enjoyable way to drink gin is by adding a ladleful of raw sewage to the glass, along with a couple of blocks of frozen urine, most gin drinkers tend to add tonic to the mix, feeling that straight gin just isn’t an unpleasant enough experience by itself. Some will also add a slice of lemon, hoping that the bright yellow of the fruit, bobbing lifelessly in the glass, will add some sort of pleasure to the experience and trick them into thinking that they’re having fun and actually enjoying the experience. They aren’t.

If they’re conscious then gin drinkers can be recognised by their listless expressions, scars on their wrists and constant exhortations to passers by to “Kill me now, end this pain that others call life”, otherwise they can often be found lying in a pool made up of vomit, urine and depression.

Also available, and many seasoned gin drinkers swear by it, although most right thinking people swear at it, is sloe gin, so called because it’s drunk by slow people. Although how this differs from normal gin is a matter for the experts.