"When I woke up that morning I didn’t feel great. In fact I was hoping I was still asleep, and having a nightmare about the worst hangover in the world. It was the morning after the Beaujolais night party in the village. Nobody ever drinks Beaujolais Nouveau on any other night of the year except the night the new vintage is released, for the simple reason that it’s not very nice. That’s why we feel obliged to drink a whole year’s ration in one go, to keep the grape pickers and vineyard owners in business. It takes about 364 days to get over the hangover, then we do it all over again the following year.
I was finding it hard to accept
that a person of my age and maturity could be stupid enough to make themselves
feel so ill, so I was lying in bed looking for someone or something else to
blame. Perhaps I’d been drugged, or it was the sulphates in the wine. Maybe I’d
had an allergic reaction to the colouring in the one slice of chorizo I’d eaten
during the evening. Perhaps it was the fault of the twenty-something-year-old
longboarder who had insisted on buying me one for the road.
Then the phone rang. It was
Johanna telling me that she and the Mamas Surf Club were heading down to the
bay of Saint-Jean for a surf. I could hear the waves from my window, half a
mile inland, which could have been a warning sign for anyone in the mood to
listen. But I was remembering the theory that fresh air and salt water are a
perfect hangover cure,. I was too hungover to paint anyway. Actually I was too
hungover to drink a cup of tea, which (if I wasn’t suffering from surf
addiction) might also have told me something.
For the second time in twelve
hours I gave into temptation. (Not the third, just for the record.) I couldn’t
feel any worse, I thought optimistically as I went into the garden to get my
wetsuit,which was damp and slightly rigid with frost.
But it’s always a mistake to
think you can’t feel any worse. OK, maybe technically I didn’t feel any worse.
Maybe I felt exactly the same, except that instead of being in bed I was about
a mile out to sea with two-metre waves breaking all around me and a gale-force
wind blowing me out towards the sea wall. It hit me about half an hour too late
that when the world is spinning around you, your head is about to explode and
drinking water makes you feel queasy, it might be a good idea to be lying under
your duvet with an Alka-Seltzer and a phone beside you with SOS Médecins on
speed dial. It might not be quite such a good idea to be sitting in the
ocean like a shipwreck survivor on a nine-foot piece of fibre glass, attached
to your leg by a strip of Velcro. I’ve never thought Velcro was much good as a
fastening for a gym slip or a hospital gown, and now I was relying on it to get
me home in one piece.
I was no longer able to justify
my behaviour by thinking I’m a surfer. I started thinking I’m
completely mad.
It was a very dramatic and
beautiful scene. One side of the sky was bright blue, the other piled up with
black storm clouds. The candy-pink casinos and hotels of Saint-Jean-de-Luz
curved round the bay with snow-covered mountains behind. The waves rolled in
from the Bay of Biscay, crashing over the sea wall and sending plumes of spray
into the sky as they made their way towards me. I kept paddling further and further
from the impact zone, until I could no longer hear my cheerful healthy surf
buddies laughing and yelling, ‘Paddle harder, Wilma.’ I’d given up on the idea
of catching a wave long ago, I was just hoping to get through the session
without embarrassing myself by throwing up in the water or dying.
The icing on the cake was the
guilt trip I was putting myself through wondering what would
happen if I did die of alcohol
poisoning out here. I would leave three motherless children to fend for
themselves in a harsh world, just because I got carried away chatting up a
Californian longboarder half my age. I could see the headlines in the local
paper: ‘Englishwoman Wins Posthumous Bad Parenting Award’, ‘Selfish Cougar Lost
at Sea’.
The swell was building and I
didn’t seem to be able to find a calm spot. When I almost got hit by a dead
cormorant I decided it was time to call it a day and paddled into the beach.
It’s a bit of a cop out to go in without even trying to take a wave, but
sometimes its better to cop out than cop it. I made it back on to dry land, but
I was so cold and weak that I couldn’t get my wetsuit off and I had to ask the
Mamas for help, which was a bit pathetic and humiliating. I don’t think I’ve
ever appreciated a bubble bath so much; it was a bit like a back-to-front
Badedas ad.
But the surf cure worked, even if it was a bit extreme,
because a few hours later I felt energetic enough to go to a Zumba class. And
of course the next time I had a hangover, I did exactly the same thing and I
was fine, so now I’m thinking that perhaps it was the additives in the
wine after all.
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