Vomitoria

Mr. H_____ and I once postulated that wealthy Romans designated rooms in their villas and palaces to be used for communal puking between their banquets’ monumentally indigestible courses. These rooms, we decided, would have been known as vomitoria. Neither of us were aware that this was a genuine term used for exitways from public buildings…

When one drinks alcohol to excess and with unthinking abandon, one can end up inadvertently creating ad-hoc vomitoria wherever one staggers. Such outpourings were an unfortunate commonplace for me during my student years, a time when I entertained sporadic pretensions of being a big drinker; delusions, alas, which almost invariably ended up with me coughing up some lumps, somewhere inopportune.

My First Hangover

Aged 15, on New Year’s Eve at home with family and friends I tried and enjoyed strong alcohol for the first time in the shape of Southern Comfort, a favourite of my father’s. I drank about half a bottle of it, plus a few beers and glasses of wine. Halfway through some party games in my mother’s friend’s house, I threw up into a plastic bowl. I threw up again whilst lurching homewards up the street, then again on getting home, on getting into bed, on waking, and so on about another six times, dry heaves, throughout the next morning and into the early afternoon. I hardly ever felt so ill: I wanted to die and everyone was laughing at me. I’ve never drank Southern Comfort since.

Peculiar Injuries

My first year at University saw innumerable ugly hangovers full of bad beer and cheap wine. I would wake up with peculiar injuries and indistinct recollections of having leapt off high walls. On one occasion I ‘accidentally’ punched my hand through a window, cutting my right wrist to within a quarter inch of the artery. I continued my carefree revelry with a bloody rag tied around my forearm, until, having certainly vomited at some point, and hence sobered up a little, I was persuaded to stroll to the hospital to get it looked at. I was still drunk enough that I barely felt the needle as the cut was stitched up. The scars have faded, but remain as a tangible memento of my folly.

The ‘Diggers’ Club’ Annual Dinner

The College drinking club to which I belonged held an annual dinner for members past and present to get together and eat, in addition to the usual drinking. The Diggers’ Club was an organisation dedicated to the consumption of as much beer in as many locales as possible. The second such dinner I attended went badly for me. I began my preparations too early and too earnestly, consuming nearly half a bottle of good whisky before even setting out. Barely ten minutes, and a few sips of wine into the dinner, I was overwhelmed by uncontrollable nausea, and hurled over the table, into my soup and that of Mr. G_____, the affable Australian geologist seated opposite me. After that I remember very little, until waking an hour or so later on a tube-train, coated with cooling vomit, in Richmond, many miles from my intended destination of Wimbledon.

The Eyes

After a heavy night’s drinking at a local bar in Roman suburb of Tor Sapienza, celebrating a colleague’s departure, I woke feeling dreadfully unwell, and decided a coffee might make a good start to my recovery. After a few mouthfuls I had to rush to the bathroom, whereupon I vomited with such violence that a great many capillaries in and around the whites of my eyes burst. Afterwards, I looked in the mirror and was appalled by what I saw: the whites of my eyes must have had a faintly poisoned yellowish taint to begin with, but this yellowness had since been overlain with a repulsively blotchy pink patina. Coupled with the pink blotches around my eyes, the result was one that a horror-movie special-effects guru would have been pleased to accomplish. I resembled a diseased albino panda. I took this as a wake-up call, and have moderated my drinking much more strictly since.

The Green Fairy and I

Nevertheless, I still forget myself sometimes. Like a few summers ago in England, after a get-together with friends invited from various parts, having uncorked the wine we went out to the pub, and then the other pub, where there was beer. On coming home it was too tempting to sample the bottle of absinthe I’d bought at the supermarket. Absinthe from Tesco: something was very wrong from the outset and I should have known it. Mr. G______, my colleague, a semi-professional drinker of some repute, had admonished me in the wake of his own encounter with the stuff, concluding that it was a bad poison, best avoided. I found the liquour’s flavour pleasant enough, but shortly after downing a couple of glasses I was sprinting to the toilet on my way to a reprise of the diseased-albino-panda scenario. Green fairy my ass, absinthe is a noxious green troll that tried to kill me…

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* Posted by misteraitch at April 25, 2003 01:36 PM | TrackBack