Hot Flush

Friday, Aug 31

I’m only writing this because I got in at 2am and I’m too tired/massively hungover to sit up and do anything. My 360 is plugged in with super-new-brill-game Bioshock waiting to be turned on, and I’m about as likely to make the effort to sit up, switch it on and play it as I am to drink my own sweat.Good things always come with a price. I need to give up drinking. My body is rebelling. It's moved my head off its 'top friends' list and has turned its back on our friendship. The peacetalks have been severed, and there's even rumours that there is troop movement somewhere in the lower intestine.

I'm at Defcon 1.I don't know what's happened to me. We got on so well.I used to be able to stay up all night and still turn up for my Saturday job at Burton fresh faced in the morning, with a cheeky smile. The only thing that would give away how much I'd drunk to my manager would be the 10 minutes I’d spend at the water cooler, guzzling down water. Now I’m 30 and things are starting to get serious.

My hangovers have moved from “mild/brief”, to “Humpty Dumpty post-fall/epic.”My wife bought me a hot air balloon ride over Hampshire for a surprise birthday treat last week. I had to get up at 5.30 to drive to a wet field and dip my brand new trainers in a bucket. It was full of some liquid that looked a bit like watered-down cranberry juice to stop the risk of Foot and Mouth. It took a while to get me into the spirit of things, but it was well worth it. I’ve never seen anything like it. The balloon was huge, it was like a circus tent once filled with air. Not the same shape though, that would be silly.

The trip in the early morning sunshine was calm and serene, which helped reduce the fear factor of being in a big open basket you can’t steer, 3000 feet above the ground without a seat-belt. It came as a complete surprise too, so I didn’t really get a chance to get scared beforehand. We travelled over the local RAF base, and peered down in amazement at the wispy clouds below us, it wasn't even cold up there.I remember actually thinking “this is easy really, such a piece of piss,” but that was before I contemplated that at some point the thing had to land, and that wasn’t a piece of piss at all.Everything was going swimmingly until we were abruptly told to keep quiet while the guy was trying to concentrate. So that gave me the jitters. We had to silently sit down inside the balloon facing a central partition and away from the direction we were going. I couldn't help but think of the brace position they show you on planes.

At the end of the balloon I could see the ground approaching – at quite some speed – through the footwells. We touched down really softly in the field beyond the one we were supposed to, about 200 yards from a main road. That was the first landing. We were then pulled several bumpy metres across the field. No-one made a sound, perhaps too terrified that we'd be dragged into the next field. The balloonist hit his head. No, I didn’t enjoy that bit, especially when the only air bag available was the one above us. I was so relieved when we finally lay, motionless, on our backs in another dewy-wet field, 60 minutes and 13 miles after the last one. I even found myself whistling when we had to pack up the whole thing like a tent and stuff it into a ridiculously tiny bag while the balloonist leaned against the van watching us. It was just like being back at Glastonbury, only with a very, very big tent.