My recipe to cure a hangover

Journalists exaggerate, often reaching for superlatives to chronicle mildly interesting events. Even so, there are times when it is necessary to become hyperbolic. 2019 was an extraordinary year. As Chou En-lai might have said, it is too early to assess its significance. We will be doing that for at least the next 20 years. Indeed, it may turn out to be one of the most important dates in our peacetime history.

The new year has also started with a bang. It was cunning of the government to persuade Donald Trump to drive Dominic Cummings out of the headlines, but that will not exhaust 2020’s disruptive potential.

Exhaustion leads one to the end of Christmas. It is extraordinary to think that when I was a little boy, Christmas Day was not a public holiday in Scotland, nor was New Year’s Day in England. Now, the whole country closes down for a fortnight. A chum of mine who runs a big construction company thinks that this is a cautiously good idea. By the end of the two weeks, his employees are fed up with being at home with the family and cannot wait to get back to work. Any loss of output is made up for in no time.

This Christmas, a family I know decided to be original and set the children to do some research on wassailing. ‘Wassail’ is an attractive name, promising hearty Dickensian English jollification, as opposed to the Scots’ ‘Hogmanay’, a sinister pagan word offering a blend of strong waters, Calvinism, deep winter gloom and Walter Scott seeing ghosts in the lightless alleys of the Old Town. Of Anglo-Saxon origin, wassailing had one point in common with Hogmanay. It too involved visits to local households, in this case fuelled by mulled cider.