For many of us, our first glimpse of the new millennium will be through the thick fug of a hangover. 'Never again,' vows Mark Porter. Photographs by Simon Brown.
Humans discovered alcohol thousands of years ago. The next day they discovered the hangover, and have been seeking a cure ever since. But like Newton's third law, the consequence is immutable: every action has an equal and opposite reaction, despite the invention of aspirin and the Bloody Mary. In short, enjoy the vice and pay the price.
Only the other day, my ten-year-old son asked me what a hangover is. Quite why he thought I should know is another matter entirely, but here is the answer: hangovers are not caused by alcohol, but by nasty things called congeners, the poisons present in most alcoholic drinks. The basic science goes as follows: congeners are complex molecules containing methanol and acetone. The main culprit is thought to be methanol, a large quantity of which is present in red wine. The body metabolises methanol to create formaldehyde and formic acid - not nice things at all - which are linked to the depressingly familiar hangover symptoms of headache, nausea and fatigue.
But that tells you nothing. It doesn't even begin to describe the real thing. This is what a hangover is really like: it is, according to Kingsley Amis, a summary, forcible ejection from the halls of sleep from whence you are "spewed up like a broken crab upon the tarry shingle of the morning". According to me, it is when, if you can see at all, your eyeballs resemble boiled hocks of bacon, burning in their sockets. Your stomach is a Krakatoa of spuming bile, and your tongue tastes like the inside of a paratrooper's sock. Your brain has spent the night in the deep freeze and is now nakedly exposed to the stabbing air as it begins to defrost. Your mouth has been the overnight latrine for small creatures of the night, your eyelids are lined with sandpaper and your heart is playing an up-tempo rendition of the Maple Leaf Rag.
As if all that were not bad enough, the sun's unbearable light streaming through the unclosed curtains scours like a Brillo pad on an open wound. You are sweating, though at the body's core there is a deep chill. And that's before such feelings as remorse, paranoia, nausea and panic creep in. Many a euphemism has been coined to allude to the condition: the Norwegians say they have "carpenters in their heads"; the French call it la gueule de bois, or the wooden mouth; the Portuguese say their tide has gone out; and the Germans refer to katzenjammers - a wailing of cats. Colourful though these phrases are, none comes close to capturing that very real depth of torpor in body and spirit that the hangover instils, as anyone who has washed down Cypriot gin with Cretan champagne and Welsh-bottled port wine will readily testify. Not for nothing did Dorothy Parker refer to her favourite whisky as White Hearse.
The chef Keith Floyd, himself not averse to the odd snifter, has written a book on the subject of the dreaded hangover. There are, he insists, a few things you can do to improve the symptoms, though not even the most dogged of bon viveurs believe you can avoid them entirely, as Floyd himself knows only too well.
"When you wake up alone after consuming a whole dictionary of cocktails, your body is on red alert," he warns in Floyd on Hangovers. "Keep perfectly still. Imagine that you have a crate of unstable nitroglycerine lodged in your brain and that with one false move you'll be painted over the bedroom walls. It is important to take stock and to use the brain, however impaired, to assess the damage to the rest of the body."
If things are really bad - beyond the help of medicine and common sense, vitamins and mineral water - then it's time for a Corpse Reviver. This comprises a measure of brandy, a measure of Fernet Branca (a disgusting Italian concoction of more than 40 different herbs whipped together in a bitter alcoholic ferment) and one measure of white crème de menthe. Put all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with some ice and get someone to hide your car keys for the rest of the day. Along with a whole gamut of 'hairs of the dog' lovingly compiled by Floyd is an alternative: a five-day detox programme, but we won't go into that here.
Of all Floyd's potent pick-me-ups, perhaps his most radical offering is a white powder called Lactade, an oral electrolyte solution developed to reverse the process of dehydration and the depletion of natural salts and sugars in dogs. This was discovered by a friend of his, a vet, and it is normally used to help canines suffering from parvovirus, a potentially fatal form of gastroenteritis.
The word hangover was invented by an American after the first world war. Americans have worked hard at countering the consequences of their cocktail expertise, and, for the single-minded pursuers of the alcoholic grail, their barmen are psychiatrists, philosophers and alchemists rolled into one. They have endeavoured tirelessly to help those ragged husks of people for whom confrontation with reality is not an option.
They are the inheritors of Pliny, the sage of Ancient Rome. As a hangover cure he suggested "two eels suffocated in wine" along with cabbage and a necklace of parsley. However, most of us would prefer even a Prairie Oyster, a drink devised by the late Harry MacElhone, who ran Harry's Bar in Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, when regulars included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jean-Paul Sartre. "In a small tumbler, drop, without breaking, one yolk of egg, two spoonfuls of Worcestershire sauce, two dashes of Tabasco, a pinch of salt, a pinch of pepper, one teaspoonful of malt vinegar." This was the remedy favoured by PG Wodehouse's English butler, Jeeves, to revive the young Bertram Wooster after his regular beanos at his club, the Drones.
In Puerto Rico, they rub the juice of citrus fruits into their armpits. Indians eat mulligatawny soup, which brings on the sweats and helps to expurgate the toxins present in their strong local spirits. Others even go as far as extolling the benefits of drinking a glass of one's own urine first thing the morning after. Most Russians carry on drinking, the Poles favour the Polish Oyster, which is vodka, egg yolk, salt and pepper, while the Japanese take something called hepalyse: cattle liver and vitamins B15, B2 and E. In Scotland, Irn-Bru has taken over from Alka-Seltzer. It helps restore blood-sugar levels, as any drambo knows.
The simple truth is that there are myriad 'cures' and none of them seem to work - well, not for me, at any rate. Of course, there are many stoical drinkers for whom the occasional hangover is a small price to pay for the pleasure. One such was WC Fields, who famously professed: "A woman drove me to drink and I never even had the courtesy to thank her." So if you're feeling really bad, take the juice of two bottles of whisky...
You'll find even more hangover cures in Ian Wisniewski's latest book, 'Party Drinks', which is published by Conran