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FEATURED ARTICLES Hangover Blues You know you were drinking hard the night before when you have to use the walls to negotiate your way to the bathroom sink. It’s a mystery to me quite how anyone who had so much “refreshment” can be so violently thirsty in the morning. Your pounding head feels as if it has been crushed into a different shape, your body the subject of some cruel and meaningless experiment. You only went to sleep five hours ago. Sane members of the human race find a quiet corner in which to curl up and die peacefully, but not you. No, because it’s the first weekend of the new trout fishing season and your brother is threatening to pick you up in ten minutes, hopefully in a more sober state than yourself. It’ll be relaxing, you tell yourself. It’ll take your mind off your pounding head and empty wallet, you tell yourself. Fat chance, says the portion of your brain that isn’t still pissed. I’m barely dressed by the time the doorbell rings, and after a quick cup of tea accompanied by toast and aspirin, we hit the road. Just what a hangover victim needs; an hour’s drive on crooked country roads. For the whole journey big brother talks up the new season, whilst I’m focussed less on textbook spring nymphing techniques than the more pressing issue of holding down my stomach contents. Over every dip and bump I curse the backward peasants whose road building skills seem stuck in the seventeenth century. Finally, the river is there and like the last Pope, I almost want to kiss the ground as I stumble out of the car. I am now demonstrating second phase hangover symptoms. Everything seems immensely funny. From the complete lack of visible insect life on the river to the fact that we just passed a village called “Broadwoodwidger,” it’s all, quite frankly, bloody hilarious. I try to suppress the sniggers. My brother just shakes his head knowingly. A biting wind soon wipes the smile off my face and the only salvation lies in casting out a line, which is accomplished with surprising efficiency, given my condition. Plan C is the dreaded indicator and heavy nymph combination. I tell myself that surely on this cold spring day the fish are lying lethargically on the river bed, like last nights revellers perhaps, and will only respond to something put right on their noses. I pass over all the realistic fly patterns in the box in favour of a gaudy orange bug, expecting nothing of it. It is a true hangover creation, possibly from last weekend’s aftermath, the sort of fly tied on a whim from the materials you never use, just for the sake of something to do on a wet Sunday in the closed season. The next slower stretch I come to seems ideal, slower and deeper, as I run my somewhat ridiculous looking bug through it. Not as deep as I thought it seems- the indicator is dragging under. But then, to my utter astonishment, on the next run it sneaks under again and I lift to feel a jagging weight pulling away. Sure enough, it is a fish- not a trout, but a perfect little grayling that looks as surprised as I am at our unlikely meeting. Once again, the hangover is forgotten for a few glorious minutes as I gently return this out of season but very welcome guest. Slightly further up the run and exactly the same happens - a bigger grayling, just shy of a pound this time, puts another pleasing curve in my carbon. The brace of Grayling gives me a new problem however. Rather than an early return home to recover, the older brother is now unwilling to call it a day. I’d be lying if I said the rest of the day was a pleasure. I’d be lying if I said it was “character building” or that it taught me a lesson. I keep my urging stomach in check and my mouth closed. I have a violent thirst and a fuzzy head. Not for the first time I consider with regret the rotgut combination of booze that has been my undoing, vile spirits and strange ales, another evening of good sense unheeded. I could be a poster boy for the perils of binge drinking. I keep fishing through the hangover almost like an alcoholic stays on the lash- out of need rather than for fun. It is pure endurance for the most part. I discover a new leek in my waders and wish I’d worn another layer. To make matters worse, the inevitable then happens and the bizarre orange bug finds a tree and my confidence disappears with it. Unlike Ben, who always carries about a thousand different patterns, plus spares, to cover every feasible situation, I just have the one box of nymphs and the surprisingly deadly orange thingy was clearly too ugly to merit tying any spares. In any case, whether through cold fingers or poor physical state I can hardly knot on another fly of any description and there is no denying it, I need my bed. My bed and possibly a minister. As the pain killers wear off I close my eyes and try to focus on the soothing sound of the river, but the only rhythm that gets through is the pounding inside my head. I keep praying that a fish, one of any description, will hang itself on my brother’s nymph so we can go home. He too takes an untimely grayling but in typical brotherly fashion feels he has to at least equal my brace. I suppose it would be a downright insult to be bettered by your booze ravaged younger sibling. Rather than my pleas for mercy it is only the foulest possible weather that eventually persuades my brother to stop fishing and drive us home. In the end you’d have to say that stinging hail is more persuasive than any argument I could come up with. I’m pleased to report that I haven’t had a hangover like it since. In fact I’m laying right off the drink. The fishing, on the other hand, is one antisocial habit that I am not about to kick. 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