Hangover

While I was in Melbourne I went out for a drink with a friend. And a drink turned into a series of drinks, and by the end of it I was completely legless. I don't drink very much and I have a famously low tolerance for alcohol and it was the most I'd had to drink since.. well, the week after my youngest son was born and I went to Cuba. That was almost 10 years ago.

The next day I was incapacitated by a hangover. I've had hangovers before but nothing like this. I couldn't move. I had had two light beers, three cocktails and a vodka tonic, so it wasn't all that outrageous (I had 4 cocktails one evening with V and wasn't too bad the next day). How bad a hangover? If you've read "Lucky Jim", Kingsley Amis catches it perfectly. And if you haven'y read Lucky Jim you should. Now.

"He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."