Hot Times

The only thing worse than a hangover is a heatwave hangover. Already weak, dehydrated, exhausted, nauseous, head-achey, head-breaky, you don’t stand a chance against a quaveringly hot day. Your neighbour gunned the lawn mower at 8 AM, and by 9 o’clock, the preschoolers three houses down were running through the sprinkler and shrieking about poorly shared toy trucks. The family down the block has left their dog in the yard to tragically yelp, and someone, somewhere, is hammering a new roof and sawing fresh planks.

This is a true hangover emergency. The only cure: a cold, cold lake.

Fireworks!

How you can feel bad in the face of fireworks? The answer is, you cannot. The hyper yet orderly flow of the crowd, milling around and gathering together in an open space with no real definition. You all just know that if you stand about here and look up and over there, eventually once night falls there will be something really pretty to see.

It’s not like attending theatre and pointing your face toward the stage, knowing in advance the exact spot to look at.  Fireworks take you by surprise. It’s a little like a concert where everyone clumps closer and closer to the front, in response to nothing but anticipation of the band appearing in due course. Nothing happens, nothing changes, there are no signs or signals that a show is about to occur, but the crowd suddenly packs a bit closer and gets a bit louder and maybe even starts to cheer and clap…for nothing, yet, except their own hopefulness.

Fireworks are a lot like that.

In the throes of a hangover, a little of that hope goes a long way toward mending your aching head. And if hope lets you down and you still feel like crap, there are sparklers. It is a well-known scientific fact that no one can feel crummy with a sparkler in hand.

Vitamin D Overdose

A day on the beach and all it takes to provoke a hangover is an ounce of gin, a few sips of beer, half your glass of white wine, at which point it gets too warm to want it anyway and your mouth has puckered like you’re sucking a lemon. You’ve sizzled yourself like a pancake on a griddle. Hopefully you slathered your skin in butter before you hit the sand…at least you’ll smell good through all that sunburn and dehydration.

Waking up the morning after a day spent lakeside, you are probably greeted by red-hot skin (even if you didn’t burn) and a pounding head (even if you wore sunglasses and a hat). The problem here? Too much vitamin D, which your body doesn’t know what to do with. I could tell you the science, the bit about fat-soluble micronutrients and how they poison you, creating side effects like headaches and nausea and ultra-sensitive skin until you finally use the excess up. But, if your headache is anything like my after-beach headache, the last thing you need right now is textbook talk.

The remedy? Plenty of water, and next time remember shade is your friend, everything in moderation.