In Competition No. 2512 you were invited to submit a description of a hangover in heroic couplets. I judged the comp after a night’s carousing and your couplets, which were clearly informed by bitter experience, elicited shudders of queasy recognition and the inevitable doomed resolution never again to touch a drop. Simon Machin’s reference to being beaten up by secret police recalls Kingsley Amis’s unforgettable, wince-inducing description of Jim Dixon’s hangover: ‘And body sprawled as if in pained release,/ From being beaten by the secret police’. And thanks to Virginia Price Evans for a vivid description of drunkenness rather than its consequences.
The winners, printed below, get £25 each and the extra fiver goes to Basil Ransome-Davies.
A punk band is performing in my head,
Its fanbase pogoing in boots of lead,
While several mad dictators rant and scream,
Preaching to slaves their cruel, demented dream.
My eyelids have been chargrilled, and my tongue
Coated with creosote and chicken dung.
My hands are dervishes that failed to hold
The cup in which my coffee’s growing cold.
Below the belt’s a planet of distress,
A nether world of pain and queasiness,
Where churning tripes and gaseous currents brew
A sour, eruptive, foetid, noisome stew.
I crave the water closet and the tub,
Yet feel I cannot move; there lies the rub.
And so I idly fester, gross, mephitic —
This morning, as last night, quite paralytic.
Basil Ransome-Davies
The deck-doors in your ferry-head slam shut
And open, slam again. Were you half-cut,
Or wholly? In your brain, the bulbs all break:
Your funeral begins and ends, a wake
To which you wish you’d never been invited.
Three Ibuprofen do not seem to fight it.
Some mongrel brain-cells start to growl, or bark;
Both hemispheres, where anvil-hammers spark,
Are filled with nerve-end messages, in Morse —
Skin: dry; blood: sluggish; tongue and tastebuds: coarse.
Someone’s turned your head into a helmet.
Each eyelid slouches like a broken pelmet.
There’s madder in your bladder; and there’s bile…
Better to lie in bed, though, wait a while —
A stranger lies there, snoring loud applause.
But you don’t know her name. Or even yours.
Bill Greenwell
Slowly, I wake, but ache too much to rise
Some goo holds shut my pickled onion eyes
My joints have been recast as if in lead
By fiends yet working deep inside my head
And when I speak, I think I’ve had a stroke
So tongue-encumbered is my wordless croak.
Pyjamaless, attired in just a vest,
I cannot rise, but neither can I rest,
It seems I must my scattered memories trawl
For something awful just beyond recall:
Something I said? Or threw? Or was it spilt?
I cannot say, but know I suffer guilt.
Aloud, though to myself, I now proclaim
‘From alcohol I shall, henceforth, abstain.’
A half-known voice replies ‘Teetotal, you?’
As Bob’s wife stumbles back in from the loo.
Adrian Fry
A roaring hurricane: you’re centre stage
gripped in its all-consuming murd’rous rage.
It splinters (don’t look!) light to razored steel
in random broken blasts of migraine reel.
One breath, and lorry-loads of tumbling stone
are emanating from your chest alone.
You sniff the air — a choking sulphur fume
from deepest Hell itself pervades the room.
What earthquake off the Richter scale is this
that hurls your guts to such a foul abyss?
What Armageddon? Götterdämmerung?
You probe their syllables with thickened tongue.
Your brain’s inferno burns your head to ash;
An eye lash shifts with thunderous rolling crash.
To speak’s impossible; you cannot stand.
Almighty Hangover controls the land.
D.A. Prince
What fools we mortals be, to choose to sink
Our troubles in a wanton pool of drink,
And thereby add to worry and dismay
Pain and remorse to spoil another day.
Trip hammers in the cranium beat time.
The mouth is furred with charcoal, slick with slime.
The bathroom is a crime scene, and the bed
Is stained with something sticky, foul and red.
Each movement means a sudden, nauseous rush;
The gut complains; the brain has turned to mush.
Perhaps worst are the memories that cling —
The boastful pride, the failed attempt to sing,
The sentimental drivel that we spoke,
The clumsy pass and the offensive joke.
Self-punishing, remorseful, in despair
We grasp the false cure of a canine hair.
G.M. Davis
A sense of deep remorse, a throbbing head,
Vague memories of what I did and said,
The legless stagger home (more wine) and then,
Believing I could write like Pope, the yen
To pen heroic couplets in a flash
(No doubt a pot-pourri of utter trash)
And sending them by email, then and there,
Off to a leading publication where
An editor, with far too much to do,
Reluctantly, today, will scan them through
And, certain that I must be round the bend,
Will never read another word I send.
How sad it is to end up drunk, and worse,
When drunken feel I have to email verse,
And what a sobering thought it is — to think
I’ve lost all hope of pipping Pope through drink!
Alan Millard
Competition No. 2515: Decalogue
You are invited to supply Ten Commandments for a belief system, real or invented, of your choice (150 words). Entries to ‘Competition 2515’ by 4 October or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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