10 Features FRESHERS’ WEEK SPECIAL
Freshers’ Week, I love you, but you’re bringing me down By the time Freshers’ Week, and the boozing that goes with it, draws to a close there is good chance that most of us will be feeling a little worse for wear. Jamie Lynch turns the back the clock to discover how revellers of the past dealt with the morning after
“Pliny the Elder suggests a stomachturning concoction of owl eggs and raw garlic to be the best cure.”
e’ve all been there. We’ve all wokenup the morning after the night before with a head like a bag of loudly clanging spanners, a mouth as dry and furry as a badgers behind and, in extreme cases, a Hansel and Gretel style trail of vomit leading from the bedside to the bog. These are the first indications that today, or at the very least, this morning is going to be bad. Utilising every last scrap of energy you haul your broken body out of bed and then, once standing, assess the true extent of your “hangoverness” – does the road to recovery merely require a cup of coffee and a slice of toast? Are you going to need a couple of episodes of Two and a Half Men/Gossip Girl/Entourage (delete accordingly) and perhaps a fry-up before you’re ready to attack the day? Or is it, as many of us will doubtless have experienced this week, the sort of hangover that puts you in touch with your own mortality and calls into question your morality? How many people do you have to text to apologise for trying to snog them/ not trying to snog them/snogging their friend (delete accordingly)? How many of your flatmates are you going to have to apologise to for waking them up the day before an exam at four in the morning? How many washes will that t-shirt need to get those flecks of vomit out? And perhaps most importantly, how on earth can I rid myself of this misery? There are of course many modern treatments for this, surely the oldest ailment, which come in the form of handy pills or liquids (I am a particular fan of an Irn-Bru/Ribena hybrid); but such remedies come with hefty price
tags and often dubious success rates. Therefore, if you’re a bit cheap or are such a piss artist that you’ve exhausted all conventional cures, it is worth casting your eye to the bingers of yesteryear whose creativity in this field never ceases to amaze. First up are the lotions and potions of our ancient ancestors who, whilst they might not have been strawpedoing WKDs and banging back sambuca, did like a tipple or two, particularly before and after battle. One particular Roman boozer, Pliny the Elder, suggests a stomach-turning concoction of owl eggs and raw garlic to be the best cure. Indeed, writing in his Naturalis Historia encyclopaedia, Pliny also espoused the mythical quality of eels to relieve the symptoms of a hangover which he “suffocated in wine” before eating raw (others preferred theirs cooked with broken almonds). When eels were out of season (or Tesco had run-out) wellto-do Roman families started their day with a meal of deep fried canaries. The canaries were to be caught by a servant fresh that morning, stuffed with sage leaves and then deep-fried in olive oil.
Greeks, on the other hand, tended to favour boiled cabbage before a session on the cans and raw sheep’s lungs the morning after. Tasty. One hangover nostrum which rears its head throughout history is the “hair of the dog” – a group noun for all cures which entail getting back on the booze. Etymologist seem to agree that the phrase originally referred to imbibing as a cure for a literal dog bite and only changed in meaning after Shakespeare interpreted “the dog” in a more metaphorical sense. The idea is that you must grab the dog, your hangover, by the fur and show it who is boss by having another drink before it dominates you. Such cures are usually spicy (Bloody Marys or Prairie Oysters which consist of a raw egg with Tabasco and Worcester sauce) and weirdly enough often have Guinness as a main ingredient (from the champagne and flat Guinness of Black Velvet to the raw egg, vodka and Guinness of the Black Eye). However, by far the most popular cure offered by history seems to involve neither drinking nor eating. In-
deed, like almost all of life’s afflictions, the pain and gloom of a hangover is, according to many, best alleviated with an energetic session in the bedroom. The writer Kingsley Amis is one such proponent saying, “if your wife or other partner is beside you, and (of course) is willing, perform the sexual act as vigorously as you can. The exercise will do you good, and – on the assumption that you enjoy sex – you will feel toned up emotionally”. Amis is keen to impress, however, that “if you are in bed with somebody you should not be in bed with, and have in the least degree a bad conscience about this, abstain” and above all “do not take the matter into your own hands if you awake by yourself.” So there you have it. Hopefully this brief trip down hangover alley has given you a few new and more adventurous ideas when it comes to getting yourself in a fit state to make those nine o’clock lectures. At the very least it should have shown how blessed we modern folk are not to have to rely on eating raw animal or pickled eel in order to rid ourselves of a headache.
Get your dancing shoes on, you sexy little swine Paralysed with fear at the thought of impressing girls on the dance floor? New research may offer a helping hand. Izzy Cumming-Bruce investigates
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ecent research conducted by the Universities of Northumbria and Gottingen has shown that hip-hop mastermixer Nelly might just have been on to something when he exclaimed the need for males to “shake ya tail feather” in order to attract lady companions. The study, which was published a fortnight ago, asked 19 men aged 18 to 35 who were not professional dancers to dance in a laboratory for one minute to a basic drum rhythm. They filmed the men’s movements with a dozen keenly trained cameras, and then turned those movements into computer-generated avatars, meaning that it was only the lads’ funky moves and
not their appearances that were on display. These videos were then screened to 37 “sexy mamas” in order to find out which moves flicked their metaphorical switches. The compelling results showed that in almost all cases the women found themselves attracted to those blokes that displayed “wide and varied moves” with particular emphasis on “the head, neck and torso” and, bizarrely, “deft movements of the right knee.” Perhaps unsurprisingly the dance moves that received the highest ratings from the gals, the videos of which can be watched on YouTube, seemed to combine the hip-twisting antics of Elvis with more subtle movements associated with, amongst others, Justin Timberlake. Crucial to the
success of these two types of move, according to Dr Nick Neave who headed the experiment, is that they entail keeping the feet in a fixed position and use the hips, arms and neck to create movement. This was beneficial as it allowed women to more easily focus on “the area we know females look to for signs of reproductive capacity”. In other words by limiting movement around the dance floor men allow their potential lovers to get a better look at their “junk.” That said, the success of Elvis does not lie purely in his finding and owning a section of the stage or dance floor. Indeed once they’ve got your slice of the club, would-be John Travoltas should aim to make their moves appear to be “high energy” or, to use a Hebrew phrase, they’ll need some chutzpah. There seem to be two reasons why girls prefer high-energy boys. Firstly, if researcher Kristophor McCarty is to be
believed, highly kinetic dancing with movements of the neck and torso attracts the fairer sex as it simply makes them stand out from the crowd: a lively jiver with large actions will catch the attention of more ladies compared to a corpse-like swayer and therefore increase the chances of scoring. Secondly, the speed and tenacity with which a man dances effectively shows ladies his ability (or lack thereof) to be a healthy and energetic lover: “highenergy dance movements are signals of a man’s reproductive quality,” suggests McCarty, “if you know your moves you reveal good health, vigor or strength.” It will come as little shock that the least attractive dancers are those who walk limply through the dance floor leaving their necks and booties unutilised, the
kind of moves made famous by Steve Martin “dancing like a white guy” in “The Jerk”. So to conclude, when that beautiful babe of your dreams bites her lip and says in an uber-sexy, gruff, Meg Ryan voice “You wanna dance?” follow her onto to the dance floor and find a good spot. Once in position, stand your ground and try to combine the wild gyrating, shaking and spinning of a fouryear-old child after a six-pack of Red Bull with the cool subtlety of a young Sinatra singing “New York, New York” and wait for the magic to happen. The good news for those of you who even after reading this scientifically proven advice and are still petrified of having a boogie is that dance ability plays second fiddle to several other factors when likely gals in nightclubs or bars are looking to find a partner. Appearance, fashion choice and (weirdly enough!) personality are all very important. So even if you can’t shake it like the proverbial Polaroid picture, there is hope for you still.
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