How to Eat When Drunk

By Alex Allen

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Have you ever noticed that when you're drunk, you don't actually care what you eat? You just want something, anything will do. Convenience is really the main factor behind your choice. If you're capable of showing restraint, you can limit your post club eating to something like chips. Chips are cheap, they taste good and they turn up straight away. Chips are the sensible choice (I understand I'm promoting chips quite a lot here, I don't work for McCains or anything, I'm just a fan).

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Pizza is at the top end of the after club food list. Not only is it completely overpriced, but it also takes forever to come. If you stagger out of a club and get a pizza, it's a safe assumption that you're completely off your face. Often, you'll walk in to a place (and it will always have some sort of ludicrously untrue, contentious name like 'World's Greatest Kebab and Pizza House') and see someone half asleep at a booth waiting for their giant pizza to arrive, their friends long gone. During my first year at university, my flatmates regularly used to ring these sort of places to have food delivered and manage to barter with them and get extra portions of chips and other things for free. We'd congratulate each other, thinking that we had better negotiation skills than Duncan Bannatyne. What we didn't realise was that the reason they'd been so willing to sell us food for thirteen pounds instead of fifteen was because it was actually all worth about two pounds fifty, and they couldn't believe their luck that anyone would be stupid to buy their 'party special' or whatever the hell they'd decided to call it. We were putting their children through university, but we didn't realise that because we were completely off our faces.

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Kebabs really fall in the same sort of bracket. To enjoy a kebab, you have to essentially be so drunk that you've lost sense of what different animals taste like, and now just recognise them all under the general umbrella of 'meat'. You want meat, just unspecified hot meat, and some way of carrying it around. In fact, what would be really good is if they could find someway of letting you eat the thing you're carrying it around in, like, I don't know, make it out of bread or something. It's basic, carnivorous human instinct. If you're feeling slightly cultured, you might have some salad, too. If you're not, you'll want for save room for, yes, of course, more meat. The same person that bought the pizza said they were tempted buy a kebab because 'they looked good, they were cooking them from fresh!' This is the kind of thought process people have, what does that even mean? When is that while you're watching that lump of unspecific meat turn round and round on its skewer you think, 'looks appetising that, might have myself a slice'. Sometimes, in a spontaneous spurt of ambition, you'll decide that you're actually so hungry you're going to try and eat a half pound burger, chips and onion rings and then lace the whole thing with ketchup and burger sauce. The strange thing is that you know what you're doing is disgusting, overpriced and generally a low point to your existence, but it's what you want, who are we kidding? If someone offered you a beautifully seasoned sea bass, or a pizza you could squeeze all the oil out of like a sponge at three in the morning, you'd choose the pizza every time.