When the relationship ended a week before the Christmas before last, she’d already bought my Christmas presents. Instead of posting or burning them, she stored them under the desk in her office, resting her exquisite feet on them during working hours, until three weeks ago, when we finally met again over a tapas in a Spanish restaurant off the Edgware Road, and she managed to hand over, after some 14 months, the carrier bag containing her parting gifts.
One was a hardback copy of Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis. I read it straight off when I got home and loved it. It’s a boozer’s manual, informative and funny. The chapter on hangovers I found particularly fascinating. In it, he describes the various aspects of the hangover and suggests a few strategies for coping with them. As well as describing the physical hangover, which of course he did so brilliantly and memorably in Lucky Jim, interestingly he then goes on to describe and analyse what he calls the ‘metaphysical’ hangover.
The metaphysical hangover, he says, is the spiritual desolation which invariably accompanies the well-known physical collapse. Of the two aspects, he thinks the metaphysical hangover is the uglier customer. Whereas the headache and nausea begin to lessen around mid-afternoon, the terrible depression, anxiety, sadness, sense of failure and fear of the future of the metaphysical hangover seem permanent. His advice is always to bear in mind that this spiritual malaise is merely a hangover and nothing worse, and that it too will eventually go.
He does, however, recommend having ‘a good cry’ at some stage. He also suggests reading the final scene of Paradise Lost, Book VII, and then a battle poem or two, such as Chesterton’s ‘Lepanto’. ‘Try not to mind,’ he says, ‘the way Chesterton makes some play with the fact that this was a victory of Christians over Moslems.’
I have always found my moral collapse during a hangover to be far more horrifying than the nausea and have always wondered whether it was because I lacked gravitas. I was therefore glad to see such an unimpeachable source as Kingsley Amis describing the symptoms so accurately, dignifying the condition with a respectable name, and candidly admitting to a moral collapse as bad, if not worse, than mine.
And what I am getting to, finally, is that I am stricken with one humdinger of Mr Amis’s metaphysical hangovers right now, this morning, as I write.
Last night was Trevor’s 50th birthday party. Before last night I hadn’t touched a drop since the port and Jack Daniels I had with Rod Liddle on New Year’s Day, and I knew I was going to pay a heavy price. As I got ready to go to the party, I looked in the bathroom mirror and apologised to myself in advance for trashing myself after so many weeks of diligent abstinence.
It was a proper party, as expected. The intoxicants available were plentiful and various. When I left Trev’s house at dawn it was still going strong. Everything that one associates with and could possibly hope for at an all-night party happened, with the possible exception of intervention by riot police. Sharon was there. No one had seen her for ages. The excitement generated by her arrival reminded me of a diva coming out of retirement for a special gala performance. She’d been on the wagon, too, for several months and, as we all expected, she didn’t just fall off, she double-somersaulted off with half-twist and pike. Fortunately for everybody present, her usual transition from amorousness to mindless aggression to unconsciousness was mercifully rapid. Unusually for me, I pulled, I think. By the time she comes out of school this afternoon Tory will probably have forgotten about the tearful promises we made to each other last night in the heat of the moment, but if she hasn’t, and she still wants her sugar daddy to buy her an iPhone, I have a new girlfriend.
As metaphysical hangovers go, this one’s a shocker. I’ve taken Kingsley Amis’s advice and had a good cry. And I’ve read ‘Lepanto’, taking into account the surprising fact that, as he points out, the naval victory over the Turks in 1571 was achieved without the help of a single Anglo-Saxon or Protestant. Yes, it’s a stirring poem, but what’s a stirring poem to me when I’m dying of shame and a brain lesion and I’ve come at last to see life as it really is?
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