20 years ago today…

Do you remember what you were doing 20 years ago today ?

Apart from watching events unfold on TV that is ?

What were you doing 20 years ago today as the Chinese Government crushed the student uprising with tanks in Tiananmen Square ?

I remember exactly where I was 20 years ago today…

I was in a small bathroom in an equally small hotel room somewhere in Wiltshire throwing my guts up down a toilet bowl and wondering whether now would be a good day to die.

See, you clicked that “read more” link thinking that this would be something profound didn’t you, how long have you been reading this blog, don’t you remember, nothing profound gets spoken around here.

I was on a training course at one of our suppliers, learning all about RAM memory, smart cards and suchlike, all new fangled technology from America, we’d signed up to be distributors and I was the one shoved forward by the old man to “go and get trained”, so I went, three days in deepest Wiltshire, the Cotswolds, two nights of freebies in a small pub-with-rooms that had been built sometime in the 16th century, thatched roof, wonky floors of wide oak planks, none of which were level, low doors, en-suite bathrooms that had been wedged into rooms that were already small – it must have been so quaint for the two Americans who came over especially to train us, they probably still think we all live like that, the pub had a village green in front of it with a horse trough and a pond with ducks on, all that shit, it was cute, like living inside a jigsaw puzzle.

So on the last night we all decided to see just how much beer we could all drink in that way that males do when they are all on a training course and someone else is picking up the bar tab, well you would wouldn’t you.

And in doing so I suffered the worst hangover known to man at that time, it was only surpassed by the drug induced hangover in Barbados seven years later so its number two on the list now but at that time it was by far the worst ok ?

Well actually there was that time 10 years earlier when I’d drunk home made Cider-and-Brasso  and spent all night throwing up blood, yeah that one was quite bad too, the cider-with-brasso hangover was probably equal with the Tiananmen Square hangover.

It was bad though, boy was it bad.

I knew it was going to be a rough night when I tried to find my room sometime in the early hours of the morning, corridors with low ceilings and low doorways and floors that are not level at all, not even for a few feet, is not the best way to try and find your room when you’re full of beer and several whisky chasers, and when you finally find your room and you can’t put the key back into the lock to lock the door from the inside of your room so you just fall on your bed and sleep with the door open, wide open, all night – thats when you know its going to be a rough night.

So I awoke a few hours later, an early dawn, 4.30 or 5am something like that, door of my room still wide open and I switched on the TV and there was the previous nights news coverage from Tiananmen Square, the iconic image of the student stood in front of the tank.

It meant fook-all to me, I wanted to throw up.

There is one good thing about staying in a 400 year hotel with low ceilings, low doorways and small rooms, its not far to throw yourself when you need to make it to the toilet quickly, in fact I hardly made it to the toilet door before the firt up-chuck erupted, hitting the toilet pan with a perfection that you wouldn’t be able to repeat.

And there I knelt, for three more hours I knelt at the porcelain bowl throwing up everything that was left in my stomach from the night before, and then some  – I was throwing up stuff that I must have eaten seven days previous before long, and then just nothing at all, how weird is that when your stomach over-rides your brain and just vomits as a reflex action while the brain is saying, “theres nothing left surely, why don’t you just stop doing this now ?” its like your stomach has a brain of its own and its trying to vomit the alcohol out of your veins.

By 8am I was able to stand and dress myself, still with the door of the room wide open, I just didn’t care about anything by then, the head was rent asunder as if cleft by a mad axeman, Tiananmen Square was still on TV and I still didn’t care, it felt like that tank had run over my head during the night.

I made it down to breakfast only by virtue of the fact that the floors all sloped towards the breakfast room, walked in, took one breath and staggered back out to the roadside where I dry-threw up again to the consternation of some people stood at a bus stop.

There was a newspaper shop over the road, I made it over there and bought a pack of Paracetamol, took three immediately, crunching them down while sitting on the bonnet of my car, I couldn’t go back in the pub because it smelled of beer and breakfast so when some of the lads on the course came outside I asked one of them to go to my room, bring my bag down and check me out, then I got him to drive in front of me so that I had something to follow the ten miles to where our training course was being held.

Three cans of Fanta Orange accompanied me in the training room and during the next hour I consumed them all and most of the rest of the paracetamol too (don’t do this at home kids) meaning that most of the instruction that morning from the two American lads was interspersed with me belching in a most un-English way and muttering stuff like “Jesus Christ” and “Never again” and “Shoot me now please”

June the 4th 1989, something happened in China, but I had the second worst hangover of my life – so far.