The Hangover

It was somewhere about 4pm when the weariness and the ennui washed over me in a great grey dreary wave that nearly had me retreating off to my bed.  As bank holiday weekends go it hadn’t been a bad one up until that point.  No one had forced me to attend a rock festival, the garden was looking presentable enough for me to justifiably neglect it for another week and a major European war hadn’t broken out.

The best way to see London is from riding on the top deck of a bus and, as there was little point in getting to Holland Park before 10am on Saturday morning and every point in setting off out early, before the cheap-ticket buying families filled up the trains, I caught the No.10 from outside St Pancras and relaxed as it bore me across Bloomsbury, along Oxford Street and Park Lane, through Knightsbridge and on into the easy affluence of W14.

Leighton House, former home of the artist Lord Leighton RA and now a National Trust property, is well worth a fiver and an hour or so of your time, most of all for the Arab Hall, festooned in the plundered tiles of Syria and Mesopotamia.  The rest of the house is interesting enough, as an exhibit of late-Victorian taste, a theme which was sustained as I detoured off from my walk back through The Park towards the West End to admire once more the unashamed garishness of the Albert Memorial.  The sun had emerged from behind the clouds by this point and was beating down so fiercely by the time that I got to Hyde Park Corner that I boarded a bus again rather than face the slight but steady slope all the way back up Piccadilly and Shaftsbury Avenue to the cinema.

Take This Waltz, by the Canadian director Sarah Polley, is hard to categorise.  Perhaps it’s an anti rom-com, being about infidelity and dissatisfaction and with an (implied) unhappy ending.  It is almost very good.  There are some wonderful scenes of the intimacy of the marriage between Michelle Williams and Seth Rogan and of the burgeoning attraction between Williams and neighbour Luke Kirby but these are let down by some unsatisfactorily slip-shod plotting.

I had intended to meet up with an old pal but he was otherwise occupied with an outbreak of, literal, madness in the family and it seemed as though I may as well head off back home when I bumped into a friend of a friend outside the British Museum and we adjourned to a nearby hostelry where one pint turned to two, then three, then four…

All the same, I got myself into a reasonable gear on the Sunday morning, read the newspaper over coffee, went around the shops, had a light lunch, came home and baked a lemon cake and did sufficient housework to make the place vaguely presentable in advance of my visitors.

Absinthe has got something of a bad reputation, not least for tasting like a particularly unpleasant medicine.  “This is the real stuff, with wormwood in it,” said A, as he gleefully burned a mixture of spirit and sugar in a spoon.  It looked like the preparation of Crack to me and I did voice a mild objection that maybe it was a little early in the evening to be getting quite so hard-core.  In retrospect he was right and I was wrong.  I wouldn’t have cared to have anyone trying to go through that performance of flame and spoon later on, after all the brandy and vodka and beer and limoncello of this ‘Gentleman’s evening’: bits of the house would have quite likely caught fire and I wouldn’t have cared for that at all.

It was a fine night of conversation and intoxication, of tall tales and a setting of the world to rights through to the wee small hours of the morning and me kicking the Dorian-Grey-portrait-in-the-attic (i.e. haggard) D’s feet and telling him to “Wake up and fuck off.  I want to go bed.”

The next morning wasn’t half as bad as it might have been.  I was hardly full of beans but I didn’t feel as dreadful as I righteously ought to have done.  It was only when a sudden rain shower sent me scurrying back inside from the presentable enough garden, where I’d breakfasted on strong tea and muffins in my dressing gown, that I realised that this was because I was still mildly pissed.  This is a state of affairs that I usually try to avoid getting into when I have to go to work the next day: last night’s still-active alcohol can, I think, act as a terrible truth serum and there are very few workplaces that thrive upon the expression of unvarnished truth, least of all mine.  As it was, a wet Bank Holiday Monday allowed the re-entry procedure back to sobriety to take its own unforced course and it was just a matter of trying to cushion the landing as much as possible, through showering and snacks and small but somehow pleasing chores easily broken down into chunks such as washing up and drying and putting the bins out and the one (absolutely singular and wholly medicinal) beer to ease the pain.

Kingsley Amis memorably described the early stages of the hangover in Lucky Jim:

‘Dixon was alive again.  Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection.  He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.  The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eye-balls again.  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.’

Amis also philosophised, in his collected On Drinking, on the Metaphysical Hangover and on hangover reading and listening:

‘I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. Its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will tell you that there are plenty of people who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate in no mood of self-pity’.

As I happened, I turned to a recent purchase: Roger Lewis’s splendidly curmudgeonly What Am I Still Doing Here and chuckled my way through the day, and even through the 4pm crisis of faith, with this to the accompaniment of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens, recordings that it are simply impossible to be unhappy to.  Curmudgeoning apart, Lewis’s manifesto, Now here’s what I call poetry, from when he stood as candidate for Professor of Poetry at Oxford, is featured in the book, though he erred seriously in omitting Armstrong.

Dr Lewis is also the author of biographies of Peter Sellers (1000 pages of what a completely maniacal shit he was), the immortal Charles Hawtrey, and Anthony Burgess.  I gave up on the Sellers half way though, confounded by the unrelenting shitty-ness of the man, but the Burgess biography (again, a madman) is a laugh-a-minute favourite that I’ve returned to again and again, each time an utter joy. 

And so the long day waned…