Another friend is like the face of British binge drinking. I’ll always have to take her for some food to try and sober her up after a night out. She’ll be eating with her hands, and her face and clothes will be covered in food. I do look at her sometimes and think, How are you the one that’s engaged? How does someone love you so much it’s OK to eat like that?
She always wants to go on to Monaco’s and carry on the night after she’s eaten, but then once we get in she leaves after about five minutes. Sam, Kelly and I are usually the hardcore ones.
Kelly is generally the last person to go home because she’ll bump into someone she knows and attach herself to them. Even if she’s not really good friends with that person she’ll stay out so she can carry on partying.
Drunken collecting
I don’t know why but I seem to collect random things on a night out. I once got home with only one shoe and a ‘party upstairs’ sign. I’ve also woken up with a lot of toilet signs in my bag. I know it’s theft but when I’m drunk it’s just so funny. I don’t know why I do it. I must just peel them off doors. The worst thing I woke up with was one of those massive yellow ‘wet floor’ signs. I left it in the living room by mistake and my parents were horrified. Christ, I’m going to get banned from all the clubs in my area. We’ve got drawers full of them little Argos pencils at home. We’ve even got pens from when they had pens, so it must run in the family.
Taxi bribery
Getting home from my own home town is really easy because I only live a five-minute walk away. I’ll still get a taxi, though. Me dad wouldn’t be happy if I walked home. One thing I do that’s really bad is pay the taxi driver in food. I reckon that happens about four times out of ten. Right near the taxi rank there’s a place called Pizza Zone and I’ll get a slice of pizza, some chips and a tub of garlic sauce, which is £2.50. But you don’t get many chips so I’ll often get another tub.
As soon as I get into Pizza Zone my shoes will come off, and then I get the shock of looking in their mirrors. They’ve got really unflattering strip lighting and giant mirrors so I look terrible. My lipstick will be halfway up my face and my eyelashes will be hanging off and winking at people. Amazingly Sam always pulls in there – I don’t know why because no one looks good in that lighting.
When I get in the cab I’ve usually only got about 50p left in my purse, so say the taxi is a fiver, I’ll offer the driver my chips instead. Half the time they’re starving so they’ll just take them, but sometimes they’re arseholes and they’ll drive me to a cashpoint near Asda to get some actual cash.
The first thing I do when I get out of the taxi is scramble about for my key, and then drop it as soon as I find it. Then I have to turn on the torch on my phone to find the keyhole. I find myself telling the door to be quiet because it sounds so loud when I’m trying to get it to actually fit. I swear the keyhole shrinks or becomes a totally different shape when I’m drunk because I can open it perfectly fine when I’m sober. It’s like trying to fit a giraffe into a bungalow.
If I haven’t already taken my shoes off in the taxi, they come off as soon as I get through the door so I don’t make too much noise. Even if I’ve had a load of food from Pizza Zone I’ll still eat more random food. I’ll eat whatever’s in the house, like Camembert and shit. Who the fuck comes back from a night out and eats a whole baked Camembert? Me, it seems. I’ll also make myself peanut butter sandwiches or drunk toast with everything on it.
Sometimes when I wake up the day after a night out and go into the kitchen I’ll feel dead proud because I’ve managed not to go and get food on the way home. Then me mam will say, ‘Yeah, you did. There was an empty pizza box and some rogue chips on the floor.’ In my mind, if I don’t remember it, it didn’t happen.
The make-up dilemma
I always promise myself I’m going to take all my make-up off, drink loads of water and take paracetamol when I get home, but when you’re drunk that seems like a lot of hard work. So quite often I won’t even take my make-up off, and I wake up looking like Freddie Krueger. Don’t most women do that, though?
I don’t know if it’s a contouring thing or what, but quite often all of the make-up from the middle of my face will have wiped off and all the make-up at the side of my face is still there looking very dark. I’ll have loads of foundation around my hairline and a glowing white patch in the middle.
When I eventually wipe my make-up off I’ll have a really brown body and a really white face because I don’t bother to fake-tan my face. I just use a ton of bronzer instead. As a result I look like I’ve got a floating head. It looks like it belongs to someone else. And that’s pretty much how I feel after a big night out.
I try my hardest not to wake anyone up when I’m making drunk food, but me dad always seems to know when I’m back and he’ll appear at the top of the stairs asking me if I’m all right, which always makes me feel a lot drunker than I am. There’s me thinking I’m being dead quiet like a cat burglar and yet he still hears me.
A lot of the time I won’t actually make it up to my bed because the sofa always looks dead comfy and I can’t be bothered to walk up the stairs. Even if it’s minus ten downstairs I’ll convince myself I’ll be fine, but then I’ll wake up shivering, covered in the smallest blanket imaginable.
Right before I go to sleep I’ll start looking at Sam’s Snapchat. She posts so often I feel like I’m still bloody out! I swear she thinks she’s doing a BBC documentary on one of our nights out. She’ll Snapchat one of us having a drink and I’m like, ‘No one gives a shit.’ She’ll also post videos saying, ‘We’re going to the champagne bar now,’ and I’m like, ‘You’ve got about twenty people on your Snapchat and half of those people are here. Who are you doing this for?’
As soon as I close my eyes and get comfortable it feels like I’m on a waltzer. The whole room starts spinning and for some reason I think if I close my eyes more tightly it will make it better, but in actual fact it just makes it worse. It’s horrible.
I do really weird things before I go to bed too. I once woke up and I couldn’t move my hands and I couldn’t work out what was wrong. I was really worried, and then I realized I’d put socks on them. I vaguely remember thinking I didn’t want my fake tan to rub off, so that must have been why I did it.
10
. . . me head hurts
Scarlett’s Favourite Random Facts
Scotland’s national animal is the unicorn.
You’re twice as likely to be killed by a vending machine as you are to be bitten by a shark.
Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
My hangover will generally last until Sunday evening when I find myself sitting around thinking, What is my life? Where’s it going? For some reason I also think about the past. I mull over things I’ve done and places I’ve been, and I wonder how my life would be if I’d made different decisions. It feels a bit like those Dungeons and Dragons books where you can change the entire outcome of the book depending on which page you turn to next.
If I’m feeling really sorry for myself, I’ll spend the early part of the evening downstairs with my parents and my little sister drinking loads of tea and eating more food.
I like hanging out with my mam and dad when I’m hungover because it’s comforting. That may sound weird but if you get it, you’ll get it, and if you don’t, you’ll just think I’m odd. We all like watching the same programmes, so there are never any arguments over what’s on telly.
Even if I’ve had loads of sleep – which is rare – I still feel like I’ve only slept for about half an hour if I’ve been drinking. At about 7 a.m. my entire family will come downstairs and start banging around (OK, making a cup of tea, but it feels bloody loud) and I’ll be like, ‘Why are you doing this to me? I only got in two hours ago.’
Me mam never lets me sleep in when I’m hungover. It’s like my punishment for getting drunk. She always says that I’m wasting the day, but even if I’m up I’m going to waste the day because I’m n
ot a fully functioning person. I’m much better off lying in bed. I’ve had days when I’ve moved back to my bedroom from the sofa and tried to sleep all day but I still felt bloody awful in the evening. It’s so annoying when you can’t sleep when you’re hungover because you know it’s the one thing that will help you. It’s all that Red Bull in the Jägerbombs.
There’s nothing worse than waking up and literally not knowing what’s going on. I’ve had hangovers where I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience and I start questioning everything. The worst thing I can do is lie in bed thinking, I’m wasting my life. That happens a lot when I’ve mixed my drinks. For some reason that makes it worse.
I don’t mind the hangovers where you feel like you’re still drunk because they can be quite funny, but I hate those ones where you feel like you’re all right and then it creeps up on you. You order loads of food and you can’t eat it, and all of a sudden at 2 p.m. your head starts playing tricks on you and you begin to overanalyse everything. You worry that you’ve done awful things and you need to change your life. I can see why people traditionally went to church on a Sunday – you need a bit of comfort, like. But I’d feel wrong if I went there, cos I can’t be in a place of God when I’m hungover, can I? With the vodka sweats and that. You don’t want to be saying the Lord’s name when you’ve still got the shakes from Red Bull.
What’s in my bedside cabinet?
Fake tan and a fake-tan mitt (I always keep my tanning tools to hand)
A Hunger Games book
A packet of Parma Violets
A lighter for my candle for when I want a bit of ambience while I watch EastEnders
Some circular batteries (no idea where they came from)
Five pens, of which only one works
Hangover food
If the girls and I go out on a Saturday night, we’ll always go for Sunday dinner the following day. I’ll lie in bed and wait for someone to write a message to our Facebook group saying, ‘Who’s going for food?’ Quite often we’ll either go to The March Hare, which does two-for-one Sunday dinners. We’ll get two each and sit there with a topknot and no make-up on, not talking at all. Food gets me through a hangover.
Sometimes if I’m really hungover and I know that Ivo, who is my best boy friend, has been out too I’ll message him and arrange to meet at McDonald’s for breakfast. Sundays are the only day you’re allowed to eat yourself into a coma without feeling guilty.
When I was at uni I never used to get hangovers. We would always stay out until 6 a.m. because that was when the McDonald’s breakfasts started. I’d have one of them, go home, have some sleep, get up and go to a lecture, and even go to work. I barely even knew I’d been out. They definitely get worse as you get older. Not that it seems to be stopping me, like.
Whenever I’m hungover I just want to eat beige food, and when I had a terrible hangover recently I ordered myself a ‘Couples Treat’ deal from Domino’s, even though it was only me eating it. When I told me dad I was going to get pizza he offered to cook me some prawns. Why? Has anyone with a shit hangover ever said, ‘Do you know what I really fancy? Some prawns.’ They weren’t even battered ones because at least deep-fried food is comforting. They were just plain old pink things.
The problem is, me dad is quite health conscious but I’m not, so he tries to make me feel guilty for ordering bad food. I’ll be eating mozzarella dippers and I’ll notice he’s on his phone but he keeps looking over at me. Suddenly he’ll say, ‘You know there are 1,200 calories in those?’ But I just don’t care. Every time someone tells you the calorie content of something it ruins it slightly, and I just want to eat my pizza in peace.
I absolutely have to have garlic sauce with pizza. Garlic sauce says a lot about where you are in the country. Up north it’s proper mayo, but the further down south you go the waterier it gets and it’s really disappointing. I’m genuinely thinking about starting to carry my own around with me when I travel.
I have gone through phases of eating too much pizza. When I was at uni they used to know our order when we phoned up, and last year my family and I got a Christmas card from our local pizza takeaway, which is never a good sign. Melted cheese is amazing on pizzas. In fact, on anything. All cheese is good, apart from cheese in a can. That is the most wrong thing I’ve ever heard of.
Fast food
Fast food is self-explanatory. I hate waiting for ages in restaurants if I’m hungry and by the time the meal’s arrived I’ve eaten so much of the bread they give you while you’re waiting I’m full up. If you go to a fast food restaurant, your order is there in seconds and you’re like, ‘Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.’ I know it’s all processed and there’s about 5 per cent meat in the burger but do I care? No. It tastes bloody lovely. I’m the same with kebab meat. I know it’s a bit mysterious, but so what? I like a bit of mystery. What’s life without risk?
I’m more of a Burger King than McDonald’s girl because their burgers are proper and they do bigger chips, but I do wish someone would deliver McDonald’s breakfasts to my bed when I’m hungover.
Morgan Spurlock did that film, Super Size Me, where he ate McDonald’s every day for a month and got really ill, and it gave fast food a really bad name. But who the fuck would eat a McDonald’s every day? Seriously? If you ate carrots for every meal for a month, you’d probably turn a weird colour. Why doesn’t he try that instead of making us feel bad for eating plastic cheese? Everything in moderation.
Greggs
There’s a twenty-four-hour Greggs in Newcastle airport. I wrote about it on Twitter the other day and Greggs messaged me to ask if I wanted a festive box. All I could imagine was like fifty sausage rolls in a box that you’d have to eat really quickly before they got cold. There are certain sorts of food that you have to have hot.
Ten foods you didn’t know existed
1) Canned whole chicken
2) Squirty cheese (I thought plastic slices were gross enough)
3) Tuna eyeballs (No words)
4) Marshmallow fluff
5) Pork brains in milk gravy (DAFUQ?)
6) Fermented eggs
7) Squeezy bacon (Yes. Squeezy. Bacon)
8) Bacon jam (it exists)
9) Canned fish mouths
10) Cheeseburger in a tin (that’s McNasty)
Coffee shops
I’ve never really got the whole coffee-shop crap. Everything about them confuses me. I don’t understand why people always meet in them? All they sell is sandwiches and bad coffee. And I would never go anywhere where people serve you drinks in a polystyrene cup. They’re dirty, they are.
I feel awkward when I go into a coffee shop. The seats are always dead low so you slide off them, and they write your name on your cup. That’s stalkerish.
Ordering is also really confusing. A medium coffee is called a tall, and a large one is a venti. What the fuck does ‘venti’ mean? Why not just call them small, medium and large? Poor old people when they go in there. They must not have a clue what to ask for. It’s a coffee minefield.
My home town is really tiny and even we’ve got a Costa Coffee and a Starbucks. I don’t understand why they’re so expensive. They must be making a bomb. I’ve got a tip for you: if you’ve got £4, rather than spend it on one coffee in a coffee chain, go to Asda and buy yourself some coffee and some milk, and that will last you a good few days.
My friend Bam told me once she’d got a job as a barista, and I thought she meant like a legal barrister, so I was well impressed. I was buzzing for her and said we needed to go out and celebrate. Then I found out she was going to work in Caffè Nero and it wasn’t quite as exciting.
Eating out
My mates and I really like eating out and we go to Nando’s all the time, because that’s a given. It is basically overpriced chicken, but it’s nice overpriced chicken. I also like a pub dinner. We used to go to steak night at Wetherspoons religiously for a catch-up, but we don’t seem to do that much any more.
If the girls and
I are feeling fancy, we’ll go to Fat Buddha in Durham for dinner because that does really nice cocktails, but normally we’ll go to Mama Bella or Spice Island in Bishop Auckland.
One time we went out for Sam’s birthday and we had our own private room upstairs. We organized a cake with loads of sparklers on and it set the sprinklers off. We were crying with laughter and we had to open the windows to try and stop the water spraying out, but the staff didn’t even bother to come upstairs. When we went downstairs and told them they just shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, it’s not a lot of water, though, is it?’ We were soaked and the cake was ruined, but it kind of made the night.
We used to go to this Italian restaurant near where I lived. If it was your birthday, they’d make you drink those shitty limoncello shots and get you to stand on the table while they danced around you.
Me mam and I always go to a place called The Goodie Box, which does amazing hot chocolate. It’s a cafe but it also sells candles and balloons for any occasion. You can get two main meals and drinks in there for about £7. If you go in there with a tenner, you can get three courses and a bottle of wine. Seriously, it’s crazily cheap.
Something that does my head in is kids in pubs. If you can’t keep your kids under control, don’t bring them out to eat. Don’t ruin it for the rest of us who don’t have kids, or have left them at home. I shouldn’t have to put up with kids shouting when I’m eating my lunch. I’ve had to leave places before because six- and seven-year-olds are running around our table being really annoying. There should be a separate area for kids in the same way they used to have smoking and non-smoking areas.
Another thing that annoys me is people snogging each other over the table when they’re out for dinner. It’s minging. Sometimes people will take a mouthful of their food and kiss each other and I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ If a couple were in a pub together, they wouldn’t start kissing across the table and being all lovey-dovey, but for some reason they think it’s OK to do it in a restaurant. It’s really not. I don’t even like it when a lad holds me hand at the table. We’re not in a movie and you’re not Colin Firth. We can just eat and have a chat, you know.
Scarlett Says Page 16
