Happy new hangover to all who celebrate! I trust your decorations are up, the wreath of tins, the decorative cigarette butts, the thick yellow air of a night well had. I don’t drink much these days, so when I do it is an occasion: a celebration of friends and liver function. New year is one of those occasions, a boundary of time which we cross with alcohol and sorrow. Unlike when moving house or having a baby, beyond the bottles we wearily survey in the morning there is no sign of anything having changed when the year turns – instead it is a celebration of time itself, a chance to note its strangeness and speed, the way we carry it behind us like the train of a dress, and a chance to brace for the oncoming year. Vodka is advised, sometimes necessary. But over the course of a life, its effects and textures evolve. So far, I have witnessed the following ages of hangover…
Teenagers: a teenage hangover hits like a water balloon, equal part exhilarating and maddening. Unpeeling yourself from a schoolfriend’s sofa, there is an air of slapstick hilarity as you spin in yesterday’s T-shirt through their sleeping house to find a receptacle for your cherry-flavoured vomit. This is sick like you’ve never sicked before – some Alice in Wonderland sorcery here – with the first sick you get bigger, a thousand feet tall and grand like an adult, with the second you shrink down to the size of a thumb, specifically your own thumb, which in a lamentable moment last night you raised when you passed Bethany Kim outside the Nisa Local oh God oh God. But when the vomit has been evacuated, so has the hangover, and you return to your body with new wonder at the world, and the infinite freedoms it contains.
