Susan Morrison: Now I know how living dead feel...

Do you know what time I got in at last night? No, neither do I, but he knows. To the second. He keeps telling me.

Has anyone seen my red jumper?

About half an hour ago, the inside of my head was like the bridge of the USS Enterprise in the immediate aftermath of a sneak attack by a Klingon bird of prey. Damage reports were streaming into the command centre, but the helm wasn’t answering and something nasty was brewing in the engine room.

My head had been swapped for something they might have hauled out of the tomb of Rameses the Second, only heavier.

Rule one of drinking: do not go wine-imbibing with young folk. They still have livers and kidneys that are on speaking terms with the rest of them. Of course, we drank responsibly. Only one glass at a time.

Do you know what time I got home last night? No, I don’t either, but he’s just told me again. I’ve told him he must marry again, so the children can have a mother. He retorted that at least one of our offspring made it to adulthood 
with very little maternal interference at all.

Has anyone seen my red jumper?

He made me drink this fizzy vitamin drink. It was lurid yellow and made the most appalling noise. At least I think it was a vitamin drink. Perhaps he’s decided to go for that second wife scenario after all, but in a cheaper way than divorce.

Nicola Sturgeon, in her days at the health department, could have wheeled me out as a dire warning to the younger generation to stay away from the demon drink.

This is what happens to you, she could lecture. This mad old bat who has passed the half century still thinks she can go out and play like a giddy young thing in her twenties, when all she’s done is kill enough brain cells to lower her IQ to the mid-teens.

Time for a wee lie down I think. Before he tells me what time I got in at last night.

Why is my red jumper under the pillow?

Now that’s what I call a tonic

WE tell each other little fibs, do the ladies who have been imbibing.

We assure each other that we are not really hungover, just a bit tired, two wee paracetamol and a double strength espresso and we’ll be taking the world on in no time.

We insist that we did not have that much to drink. Ladies who have just downed their equivalent bodyweight in Chardonnay will say they stopped drinking about midnight – conveniently overlooking the fact that they curtailed the night’s merriment by falling asleep in the ladies’ loos.

On the other hand, men will cheerfully boast about the 17 pints of Old Viking Bowel Churner beer they downed and be rather pleased about the fact that they can’t remember why they have two sheep and a traffic cone in their bedroom.

Hey. That vitamin drink is kicking in. Brilliant. Who fancies a gin and tonic?

Anagrams are the best cure the morning after

At the risk of making sweeping generalisations, I find that male and female hangovers have two distinct differences. Women have a terrible tendency to suffer from what I call the embarrassies.

I suspect it’s my inner grandmother, who records everything I said, did and spilled to replay for my moral edification the next day. Most women seem to have this.

There’s the danger of a sudden memory playing out before your very eyes. Hideous mad images can reflect in the depths of the toilet bowl, where you have been concentrating all your efforts on being quietly sick.

Here’s a handy tip: to make the time pass in the loo, I find it helps to work out how many words you can make out of the name Armitage Shanks.

I should’ve stood by childhood pledge

Oh yes, a young friend accidentally fell into a few bottles of very nice white wine. I could hardly leave her there alone, so I joined her.

Of course, I’m never drinking again.

In fact, I may even look out that pledge my fearsome grandmother made me sign all those years ago at the Band Of Hope. She made me promise never to touch the devil’s brew for at least five years.

I was five years old at the time. It did make me worry about what she expected me to get up to in primary one.