Kill or cure

Now, if there’s one question I get asked more than any other, it’s “What, in your experience, is the best hangover cure?” Actually, that’s a lie, it’s “Are you sure you’re a qualified gynaecologist?” But that’s not relevant right now.

Hangovers are a bugger. Indeed, the Latin term for hangover is “sodomia summa sodomiae” or “bugger above all buggers,” and I’d actually be offended if after all we’ve been through, you felt the need to check to see that I hadn’t just made that up. Anyway, it’s the second day of January, and if you’re anything like me, you started the year badly in need of a hangover cure.

Usually at this point, someone says that the best cure for a hangover is simply not to drink. This is ridiculous. I mean, would you tell a cancer patient that the best cure for cancer is not to get cancer? In my experience, the fun of an awesome party far outweighs the agony of the hangover. If not, then that was a bad party and you should have left before you got drunk. If you’re having a bad time sober, you’ll have a bad time drunk.

But the fact is that alcohol is a holy thing. What did Jesus turn the water into? Here’s a clue: not Diet Coke.

[PARENTHESIS: Ah, but what about Islam? Well, there has been some debate over what exactly was meant by the prohibition in the Qu'ran. Some scholars have argued that drinking is fine as long as you don't get drunk. Others have argued that "intoxicants" can be taken to mean any substance that affects the mind, which also includes coffee. Admittedly no interpretation really allows you to get roaring drunk, I just thought that whole passage was interesting]

If you want to go further back, you know how we raise our glasses to someone? That may actually be one of the oldest rituals humanity has. You see, alcohol actually dates back to the very early days of civilisation – one theory actually has it that we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture purely so we could cultivate grain and make beer.

Whether you subscribe to this theory or not, alcohol was certainly one of our earliest inventions, and possibly our first interesting invention. To those early settlers, fermentation was a mystical process, not properly understood and believed to be the result of direct divine intervention. Thus, the custom was to offer part of every batch of beer to the gods who had provided it. And that, my friends, is why to this day we raise our glasses when we wish to salute someone.

17th century German hangover cure. Still in use in parts of Slough.

The most obvious religious comparison in the context of hangovers is that of karma. You have a wicked-awesome time the previous night, then you feel like death the following morning. Well, alcohol is technically a poison (so is water if you have too much of it, so there), so it’s probably going to have some negative effects. Your man alcohol is broken down in the liver into acetaldehyde and then into acetate. Once all the night’s alcohol is metabolised into acetate, you’re home and dry (literally). Unfortunately, the process of metabolising alcohol requires an enzyme known as  nicotinic acid derivative, which your body has in limited supply. If you drink enough alcohol to deplete your reserves of NID, you’ll get drunk and then you’ll get sick. Given that the average body can only metabolise one unit every two hours, expect happiness and then sadness if you’re out partying.

Alcohol is a diuretic, and will basically dehydrate you over the course of a night. It’ll also deplete a lot of the vitamins and minerals that the adverts are always telling us we need, and increased insulin production will see that your blood sugar levels will go way down. Your brain will readjust itself to the depressant effects of the alcohol, but will probably not have enough time to adjust back by the morning.

Complicating matters further are congeners – without getting too technical, these are what we’ll call impurities that make it much harder for your body to deal with alcohol. As a general rule, the darker your drink, the more c0ngeners it has. Port is very high, vodka is very low. This is the origin of the dread disorder known as “red wine headache.”

You should by now have some idea of why you have a hangover. Having said that, if you actually do have a hangover, you probably shouldn’t be staring at a computer screen.

Now, to combat a hangover. Firstly, it is recommended to have something to eat before you go out. This should top up your body’s store of what the hangover will take away. Some recommend eating something greasy to line your stomach. My great-granddad used to swear by two pints of milk before going out to the pub.

Then prepare yourself for the return. Do not allow yourself, upon returning to a party, to simply fall into bed. Yes, I know how tempting it is, but keep reminding yourself throughout the evening that you have to take preventative measures. Have them ready by your bed if needs be. The preventative measures I would recommend are:

1. Two pints of water.

2. A glass of effervescent vitamin C.

3. Two ibuprofen.

4. A sandwich, preferably something with protein. Chicken salad seems to work.

The water will take care of the dehydration, the vitamin C and the sandwich will take care of the nutrients your body will lose and ibuprofen is anti-inflammatory. Vitamin C will also take care of the congeners.

Now, if you haven’t done this before bed, you’ll have to do it in the morning when you actually have the hangover, in which case you have my sympathies. I’d recommend if possible doing these things and then returning to bed so you don’t have to think about how dreadful you feel while your miserable carcass mends itself.

If you have to go to work, you’re a bit screwed. Speaking as a hangover veteran, there are few things worse than being at work with a hangover. The classic folk remedy in such cases is black coffee. I disagree – caffeine can constrict the blood vessels. In Scotland they swear by Irn-Bru, which contains caffeine but also the life-giving substances known as quinine and sugar. A full English breakfast is highly recommended by many, but you may find this a little difficult to stomach.

Speaking personally, the hangover cure I favour goes thus:

1. Wake up. Drink two pints of water and take two ibuprofen. Return to bed.

2. Wake up again half an hour later. Have a shower, as you stink.

3. Walk to the supermarket. This will get oxygen moving around the body.

4. Acquire milkshake, aforementioned chicken salad sandwich, fruit salad and can of Pepsi, Cherry Coke or Irn-Bru.

5. Consume slowly.

6. Watch Withnail & I.

The simple fact is, though, there’s no hard-and-fast cure that works for everyone, and frankly a lot of curing a hangover simply involves gritting your teeth and enduring it. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and if you party hard then you’ve got to take the consequences. Sad but true.

One last tip: if you’re going to bunk off work, be creative. Every manager knows that “food poisoning” means “hangover.”

Anyway, assuming you’re feeling better, enjoy 2011. Here’s hoping it ends like 2010, in a drunken stupor.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Drunk

A recent survey among readers of this blog showed that 98% of you would recommend it to your friends*. Good show!

*Survey conducted among fifty readers who were asked the question, “Would you recommend this blog to your friends if the alternative was having every orifice stuffed with broken glass?” Of those who answered, one already had every orifice stuffed with broken glass and said he “quite like[s] it.”

I have something of a Reputation when it comes to alcohol, a reputation which I think is actually largely unjustified. It’s true that I enjoy a drink or two, and often more, but strictly under social circumstances. Remember, kids, it’s not cool to get drunk for the sake of it and if you’re being sick, you’re not having fun. Unless you manage to hit someone you hate, in which case good for you.

Last night, Shoinan and I managed to meet up for the first time in, I don’t know, fifteen years or something? Wait, we shared a flat until last November, so it can’t have been that long. Anyway, we finally managed to find a day that we could both make and headed to the Chandos in Charing Cross, a pub I may have bigged up in the past.

It’s a favourite of ours, because it’s old-fashioned but not scuzzy, respectable but not pretentious and cheap but not a Wetherspoon’s. Everyone knows it, it’s easy to get to and the clientele is a broad cross-section of London society. There’s no music (which I would imagine, with performance fees and all, is partly why drinks are so cheap) and the service is fast, so it’s a fine place to talk toot for an evening. We like it.

Unfortunately, I got confused over the time (not helped by the fact that I’d forgotten my phone, as seems to be my habit on nights when I’m supposed to be meeting people). My Reputation stems from the fact that I can drink really quickly. Not intentionally, not as some sort of macho party trick, I just have this tendency to drain a pint glass really quickly. Which meant, with half an hour to go before we’d agreed to meet, I managed to get a two-pint head start. Not entirely wise, given that I’ve been pretty dry recently and thus become a huge lightweight. Also, a dude standing on his own in a bar knocking back beer like it wuz water and reading Iceberg Slim’s autobiography is not the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen.

Anyway, Shoinan arrived and we performed the mandatory bro-hug and chilled. Much alcohol was drunk, much toot was talked, and at about 10 Shoinan suggested we move on to another pub. The tiny, sensible homunculus that lives in my brain and only appears when I’m drunk warned me that it would be unwise to continue drinking and to stay out late when tomorrow is work, but I rarely listen to that guy.

And so we ended up at the Crown in Soho, surrounded by Dutch people in rainbow-trimmed overalls. I recall discoursing vaguely on the work of Antonio Salieri in response to a drunken chant by said Dutch folk, and we eventually staggered back to the Tube – we were somewhat disappointed to see that our Dutch friends were heading in a different direction.

I stumbled home, but not before getting a kebab at the terrorist kebab shop in Tooting. There is no middle ground with kebabs. They’re either a really bad idea or, after a few pints, a really good idea. I am not the first person to make this observation.

Now, let me tell you that I have experience of hangovers. I’ve nearly had an ambulance called for me before now. I’ve had hangovers to turn bad little boys good. I’ve had hangovers like Krakatoa’s in town looking for the sumbitch who talked trash about his momma. Yet I never seem to learn.

First of all, I never seem to learn that hangovers are deceptive. You don’t know the full extent of your hangover until you wake up. Only then can you decide whether to go into work. The ultimate test is the Tube – if I can get down to platform level and stand in a stuffy, crowded tunnel without my throat surging upwards, I’m well enough for work. Fortunately, I hadn’t mentioned my night out to any colleagues the previous day, so my “recovering from a migraine” excuse for looking pallid and shaky might just hold water.

There are few worse experiences outside of an actual warzone worse than being in work hungover. Your body wants nothing more than to lie down and only get up for the occasional purging session, and there you are forcing it to act like it’s a weekday, you selfish bastard. In my case, I tend to also get a massively raised body temperature, which means that I can be sitting directly next to an open window with the wind blowing directly at me and I’ll still be too hot. Except that I can’t be sitting directly next to an open window, because my colleagues, being sensible enough not to get hammered on Tuesday, would get cold. So in practice I just sit there and sweat and make the occasional hurried toilet visit.

There is one plus. No matter how crowded the Tube gets, a shaking, chalk-white dude, pouring with sweat and with bloodshot eyes will always get some space to himself. Result, I supppose.