An absolute shocker

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.