Two Pints Good, No Pints Best

I went out last night for a belated birthday meal and drink. We had main and desert at Simple – a bar and restaurant – in Manchester, then headed a little way up the street to The Millstone, a bit of an old mans’ pub, which nevertheless is the sort we prefer over ‘younger’ models. In the space of a little over three hours I had two pints.

Two.

And this morning I wake up with a head that feels like I’ve been using it for pre-match football practice. Not the whole game, just the warm up session.

I feel sad and let down by my aging body. A little while back I’d down half a dozen pints and wake with a comparable headache. I feel like my headache intensity now applies to a range. Did you drink 2 – 7 pints? Ah, well that’ll be a moderate headache, an extra hours sleep and a general sense of feeling like shit when you wake up, to last no less than the whole morning.

I realise I am getting older, but there’s no reason to be so brutal about it. I suppose I might have a mild allergic reaction to something in the drink that could be causing it. Or, I might have to stop mixing drinks! Maybe Guiness and Lee’s Bitter don’t play well together.

Whatever, I’m an official drinking wuss. If I carry on like this I’ll be getting a fortnight long migraine after sipping from a small sweet sherry in a few years time. Bang goes Christmas cheer for my – or proper trifle for that matter!

On further consideration: Now past 5PM, it’s entirely possible I’m just under the weather.

My headache lasted until early afternoon – despite a couple of paracetamol – and then I took an hour long nap – which isn’t a standard feature of my average Saturday. I rarely engage in daytime sleep because it usually makes me feel worse… generally, ’cause I ignore the Internet-scattered wisdom that anything more than a 20 minute power nap will leave you feeling like crap (actually, they probably used slightly more considered and vaguely scientific terms for that last bit).

Despite earlier concerns, I feel better now and I hope it had more to do with a bug in the system or my considerations on an allergy than just getting too old to handle alcohol consumption. I certainly don’t feel that old.