I awoke in the early afternoon of 31 December 1995 face down on the carpeted floor of a mansion house flat in Notting Hill with the worst hangover I have ever had.
It is customary when writing about hangovers to quote the best description of the condition – by Kingsley Amis: ‘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.’
And there’s also, of course, P.G. Wodehouse: ‘I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover – the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all.’
As the cold intensified it started to produce a very thick, ghostly white fog. This crept in fingers along the ground until it covered the whole park in a blanket. Everything had turned black and white, as if I was inhabiting a Victorian photograph
But Amis and Woodhouse were describing the physical effects. What made that New Year’s Eve 29 years ago so excruciating was that my hangover would become more metaphysical, not so much a headache as an existential crisis.
I was entering the final year of my twenties, a decade which had by then begun to feel endless – there had been pubs, parties, clubs, raves, often several times a week, for weeks, months, years on end. It had become horribly exhausting. I was sick of my lifestyle and sick of myself. And all the dissolute years together seemed to catch up with me in this one single moment as I came to – staring at a beige carpet and trying to work out where I was and what had happened to me.
I can’t now recall where I’d been the night before. In fact I couldn’t even recall then where I’d been the night before. The evening had probably started in one or two of the usual pubs in those parts (The Westbourne, The Walmer Castle, The Portobello Star or Finch’s) before going on to somewhere that stayed open later: Angelo’s on Westbourne Grove, the Mas Cafe on All Saints Road or Subterania under the Westway. Perhaps a combination of any of these, perhaps somewhere else entirely. But, wherever I had been, it seemed I had finally made it back to my friend Rick’s flat on Kensington Park Road sometime after 3 a.m. where I had collapsed just a few feet from the more accommodating sofa I had apparently intended to sleep on.
I was alone. Rick had already got up and gone out, leaving me on the floor with my demons, yesterday’s crumpled clothes and not much else. Arguably it would have been sensible to go home and go to bed. But I lived miles away, in Walthamstow. I simply could not face the prospect of getting on the Tube and looking at other people’s faces in its lurid light. There was also the unavoidable fact that it was New Year’s Eve and I had arranged to have an even bigger night out that very evening… in Notting Hill. So I somehow had to pull myself together and get through the afternoon. I didn’t have a key so once I’d shut the flat door there was no going back – but there was apparently no coffee and certainly no cigarettes so I had little choice.
I spent the day in a sort of limbo. After stumbling into and out of a supermarket and a cafe to address the cigarettes and coffee issue, I found myself staring into the window of one of those Record and Tape Exchange shops that were clustered around the top of Portobello Road in those days. ‘I’ll buy a book,’ I thought. ‘That will pass the time.’
I went in and chose from the second-hand paperback shelf a novel, Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney, and took it with me as I trudged forlornly out of Notting Hill Gate and into Kensington Gardens. Still feeling as if I might actually die at any moment, I sat on a bench as soon as I was away from the traffic noise and started reading. It was already close to freezing. The day was still and hung in gloom. And as the afternoon drew on, it grew colder still and darker and the park, which had hardly been busy in the first place, grew emptier.
But I found that I was getting caught up in the book, a New York-set divorce novel, and it seemed that as long as I was reading, focusing on the book, the hangover and its dread were being kept at arm’s length from torturing me further. So I ignored the increasing cold and sat tight and read on. And on.
As the cold intensified it started to produce a very thick, ghostly white fog. This crept in fingers along the ground until it covered the whole park in a blanket – but only up to waist height. Emerging out of the thick white rose statues, the trunks of big bare trees and the occasional dog walker. Everything had turned black and white. It was as if I was inhabiting a Victorian photograph – or an 1980s goth-ish pop video. The spell was so intense that time itself seemed suspended. So much so that it was only when there was no longer enough light to read by that I realised I had been locked in the park. I had to climb over the railings to get out.
And in doing this, and breaking the spell created by the fog and the book, I found that the cold had got into my bones and fused with my still raging hangover to make it worse than ever. I felt as though I was going to collapse. But I reasoned that, if I were to collapse, I should probably try to do it in the place where I was meant to be later. So I steeled myself to walk the half mile from the park to Westbourne Grove.
This walk would prove the nadir of my worst hangover ever. I was so cold I started recalling Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s horrifying account of the Captain Scott Antarctica expedition in The Worst Journey in the World. This was certainly my worst journey in the world. And it ended, like Scott’s, in tragedy: The Westbourne was shut.
I almost fell to the pavement in despair. But then I looked up and saw The Cow just across the street glowing like a Bethlehem stable. ‘That’s a nice pub,’ I thought. ‘They’ll have me.’ I lurched to The Cow’s door, one final push before I could die in peace. But a bar manager blocked my way. ‘We’re not open until seven I’m afraid, sir, we’re still setting up.’
If you think I’ve been exaggerating my account up to this point, here is the proof that I haven’t been: this man took in my physical reaction to this rather bad news (I think I slumped and possibly even began crying) and what he saw evidently moved him to pity. ‘OK, if it’s just you and you don’t make a fuss you can come in,’ he relented. I could have kissed him. But I was too cold. I simply did exactly as I was told, sat where he indicated and waited quietly until he returned with a pint of perfectly poured Guinness. Zoe Strimpel, writing here recently, was wrong to disparage Guinness. This was the finest drink I have ever had. I was saved.
All this came back to me a few weeks ago when I was reading Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head, which also features a hangover scene: ‘I woke up shivering. It was dark. The blankets had fallen to the floor and the camp bed felt damp as well as very hard and cold. I had a sharp pain in my stomach, doubtless the result of drinking a great deal the night before… My jacket and trousers lay in a heap where I had drunkenly fallen out of them. The half empty whisky bottle stood in the corner. There were various cigarette ends.’
Not quite as memorable as the Amis, I concede, but what was extraordinary for me was that Murdoch’s hungover character then does almost exactly what I did, in exactly the same place to the same effect: ‘I spent the day in a sort of limbo. I could not eat anything, nor could I rest because of a dreadful aching and tingling in my limbs. I walked about in Hyde Park… The misty park was desolate as a moon landscape but at least there were forms of human beings upon it here and there.’ This passage brought my own version of the same experience almost 30 years ago back as vividly as if it happened yesterday. Though thank goodness it didn’t.
So how does the story end? I expect you can guess. After that Guinness, I had another, and then another. And then feeling warmed up in every sense I went across to The Westbourne, met my friends and had another big night out.
But it was the beginning of the end of my full-on party years. Six months later I bought my first flat, a year later I was married and children would follow. Single life and the debauchery that went with it had begun to wind up. I was ready for settling down. No morning after was ever quite as bad again.
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