Taking it easy, taking it hard

Altaa recently told me about the cancer-causing properties of sodium nitrates in processed meats and other meals using such a preservative.  She told me I shouldn’t eat processed meats more than two days out of seven.  I reacted with anger at this perceived infringement of my eating habits on ‘disease-of-the-week’ science.  But, by and by, after I calmed down and did a little research myself and there it was – not a press release printed by a lazy journalist but well-documented, long-term and credible scientific research which has been in the public domain long enough to be peer-reviewed.  I have now fallowed her advice and check packs and jars to see if sodium nitrates are listed in it (to my shock, some pasta sauces also possess this).

That is the way of marriage, a bit of toing-and-froing before a compromise is reached.  This also applied to drinking.  Altaa demanded that I drink alcohol no more than three days out of seven; I countered that this was too restrictive and said five was no danger.  Eventually, of course, we settled on four days a week and as with the sodium nitrates, my alcohol usage has dwindled to less than three days a week, if that.

Last week though was particularly heavy and though I didn’t drink more than three days out of it, I definitely needed a break of 48 hours after it.  Having abstained Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the first night was Thursday.  Normally I would have had a tumbler or two of whiskey, settling down to watch a World Cup match and maybe do a few posts on Facebook and Twitter in the course of it.  However, at around 3 p.m., a round-robin email was sent to the whole centre announcing a charity quiz in a function room at the headquarters of the Royal College of Physicians.  A few people from Buckingham Palace Road had dropped out and so I was one of three from Chatham who went up to London for the quiz, despite the very short notice.

The Telegraph had booked two tables at this event, hosted by Take A Break in support of NewstrAid that helps out news vendors on the breadline.  Once we had reached Buckingham Palace Road, another had dropped out, so it would have been most embarrassing for The Telegraph for one table to have been left empty (four people per team), if the Chatham contingent hadn’t made their way up.

Before the quiz we had a free drink in a library room before making our way to the main hall.  It seemed that this building was bombed in World War Two and rebuilt in neo-brutalist style, partially offset by the august portraits hung on the walls.  We had a meal first – salmon fishcake, new potatoes, carrots and broccoli and vegetable stroganoff (I went up for seconds once everyone had been served), followed by dessert with strawberry tart.

The quiz itself was based tenuously around the World Cup groups and years.  For example, with one round based on Brazil, Mexico, Croatia and Cameroon, one of the questions was “What was the title of the Dodie Smith novel turned into a film by Disney in 1961?”  I kind of already knew the answer but 101 Dalmatians was reinforced because the Croatian coastline is Dalmatia.

We did not bad for a team of three (the seven of us drew lots and I was on the three person team), finishing tenth out of 16 teams and did better than the other Telegraph  representatives who finished bottom (though one of the members did win half a dozen bottles of Rioja, even if he didn’t like red wine).  There bottles of wine as complimentary on the table as well as carafes of fruit juice and water and I was not shy in partaking (my sugar intake must have been horrendous).

The toilets in the building were not located ideally, requiring a mission worthy of Shackleton to locate, round and round the square landings and mezzanines, down about five flights of stairs and finally located at the very bottom next to the cloakroom.  Thus it was always best to start out in advance where possible.

After the event finished and we gathered up the freebies (packs of cards, notepads, pocket keyring torches, Celebration chocolates), we departed into a downpour, but it was all rather refreshing after what I had consumed.

On Friday evening, a work colleague was celebrating his birthday which was the next day.  We started off at our local pub in Chatham, The Prince of Wales, staying their for a good few hours.  Wanting an early night as I had a stag do to attend the next day, I was planning to leave once the party moved on but somehow I let myself move along the road from Chatham to Rochester, sojourning in regular stop-offs along the way, Poco Loo and The Nag’s Head.  The last locale was the final one before we were in Rochester proper and I decided this was an apposite moment to curtail my evening, both in terms of drinking and overall.  Like Thursday, I got back home a little after midnight.

On Saturday, it was the aforementioned stag event of a friend.  He didn’t want anything that was too inconveniencing so  we were not to stray beyond central London.  Beginning in a café just off Southwark market, I was at first concerned as the lead-time for the start was noon to 12.30 p.m. and, getting to the café at 12.25 p.m., none of the group were there.  My phone battery was down to its last 5% and so with trepidation I turned it back on, hoping it wouldn’t suddenly cut out, leaving me high and dry.  Thankfully, I got through to the organiser and he came out of a more accommodating café to find me (the first choice insisted that a full meal be ordered when attending, something not mentioned on their website).  We had some light drinks and moved off as the rain resumed its drumbeat, getting a bite or two in the market (I had a jumbo German sausage).

Heading off to Farringdon, we got out of the Tube station as the shutters were being closed because of flooding and met more of the gang at a pub where, upstairs, we indulged in beer tasting of half a different crafted varieties, lining our stomachs with quality, hefty-sized pork pies and scotch eggs that were provided as part of the service.

Thereafter, we moved to a restaurant in Hoxton famed for its chicken wings.  The stag was forced to do the ‘Hot Wings Challenge’ as we weren’t doing anything wilder than that in the rest of the day.  This involved consuming within five minutes, half a dozen chicken wings coated in the Viper Nega Chilli sauce, the spiciest in the world and 401 times hotter than Tabasco.  Because such a sauce could soak into the hands (making a toilet break extremely painful), the gourmand was given surgical gloves and a close-by fellow given another such glove to wipe the mouth to prevent ‘Joker Lips’ (though this was soon abandoned as a technique in favour of napkins as the glove just smeared the sauce around the face, though the glove remained on).  He managed four and a half wings without any liquid before he crumbled and requested the milk that was on hand.  The staff still gave him the T-shirt out of sympathy.

There was one whole wing left though and as the waiter offered it up, I thought, ‘try anything once’.  Equipped with gloves, I devoured the wing rapidly.  Yet, whereas the stag had profusely tapped off much of the sauce before consumption, I loaded my wing with sauce so that it was dripping off.  The first ten seconds I was fine and then it hit me.  I felt like Jack Bauer in season two of 24, where he is injected with a chemical cocktail that can cause drowning in fresh air.  My airpipe felt constricted and I really couldn’t breath.  Water didn’t help and a glass of milk was set down next to me.  I’m lactose intolerant but I gladly drank most of that.  My own meal had to wait as my appetite was suddenly removed but I resumed tucking into after about ten minutes, though a little more gingerly.  It felt like there was a nuclear isotope in my mouth with imperceptible vibrations coursing through my lips.

After that, we wound up in a bar which had an upstairs akin to a speakeasy, with the 1920s décor and styled in the manner of exclusivity.  The organiser produced a small pub quiz, prefaced with nine pictures of the stag which we were to caption in our teams of two (myself and my confrere were the only team to manage that).  We did middling, but I was pleased when, to the question, ‘In what year did Nokia release it’s first mobile phone’, at answer time, the stag (a computer technician) said, “it’s obviously 1988.”  It was 1987 and that was my educated guess at the year.

Finally, we went to a bar-cum-club in Old Street to continue our drinking.  After the beer-tasting, ordering a measure of whisky to go with beer at the restaurant (it was a special deal or so I thought), another traditional cocktail at the speakeasy, I was slowing down, holding off a while before buying a whisky and coke.   We all broke up at around 11.30 p.m. and after being banjaxed by the Jubilee Line terminating in Waterloo, got the slow train from Waterloo East, getting in around 2 a.m.  Slept until nine before catching another couple of hours in the afternoon.  At no point did I suffer from a hangover the next day, Friday Saturday or Sunday, nor was I sick but I definitely needed to dry out across all Sunday and much of yesterday too.