It’s taken years but I’ve finally found the cure to hangovers
When good friends were junior doctors in the 1990s I used to feel sharp pangs of envy after we’d all been carousing, as they had easy access to a top-notch hangover cure. They’d simply hook themselves up to one of the hospital drips and run a rehydrating saline mix through their system.
We civilians had to rely on a baroque array of old boozers’ folk remedies, which generally involved raw eggs, Tabasco, Dioralyte and the worm from the bottom of a bottle of Tequila. That, or a shot of Fernet Branca, an Italian herbbased spirit so noxious the author Louisa Young described it as “tasting like a Medieval shoe”. These “cures” only worked as emetics, but you did feel better after you’d thrown up.
The modern drunk has a softer option, courtesy of scientists at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai who have analysed the effects of sundry food groups on the enzymes that break down alcohol. The stand-out tonic was a cocktail of pear juice with sweet lime and a dash of coconut water, taken with a side helping of cheese. But closer inspection of the boffins’ work makes it clear they were looking at natural remedies, when most of us reach for unnatural ones.
Nor did they reveal the state of their test subjects. Were they falling-into-aflowerbed smashed, as I was aged 18 after downing a pint glass of nearly neat Pimms at a stranger’s 21st birthday? Did they tell their favourite joke to all the birthday boy’s elderly relatives? Question: “Why do fortune tellers walk funny?” Answer: “Because they’ve got crystal balls!” Were they sick in the host’s bed and then ill for three whole days?
One blessing of age is your body refuses to carry you to the point where you become a potty-mouthed amnesiac who vomits on furniture. But you still need voodoo remedies. Drinkers always did. One ancient Assyrian text recommends 11 plants to be soaked in beer and oil under the star of Gula, goddess of healing – to be downed “before anyone kisses him”. Sozzled lovers can consult the Persian Kitab al-tabikh cookbook, which advises a camel stew with chickpeas, followed by a sweet paste to ensure “successful coitus”. Second World War pilots reported pure oxygen worked wonders – confirmed by a friend who used to take his addled brain to a metalwork sculptor who used oxy-acetylene welding equipment. Even The Archers are obsessed by hangover tonics, running a storyline about a remedy that died with Joe Grundy.
Happily, I can reveal the winning cure in a contest run by the London restaurant St John. A friend was given a shot of a miraculous white elixir in Henley in 1982 after imbibing a vat of champagne. Within 15 minutes he wasn’t only revived, he felt bursting with vitality.
When he asked for more, his friend’s mum confessed he’d had the last dose from a bottle she’d purloined from a hospital some years previously. It was labelled “Brompton Mixture” and was the medicine doctors gave to cancer patients at the end of their lives: “brandy with barbiturates, heroin, dexamphetamine, cocaine and a small amount of LSD.”
In the absence of this kill-or-cure potion I can reveal the two things that work for me and are recommended by doctors: drink two pints of water before bed and sleep when you can, then pee like a stag and curse at the ceiling. Or as the BMJ advised in 2005, after a comprehensive look at all treatments: “Practise abstinence or moderation.”