Here’s to Bill

Often, Christmas is a time for moaning after the night before, when the seasonal drinking is remembered (if remembered at all) with bewilderment and a degree of guilt. The illusion of drink-fuelled happiness — what James Joyce called ‘tighteousness’ — is familiar to most of us, even if the hangover seems a cruel price. The most effective remedy for a thumping head is to take a hair of the dog that bit you. Eddie Condon, the jazzman, recommended two quarts of bourbon; Samuel Taylor Coleridge swore by a breakfast of laudanum and fried eggs.

By rights, the hangover should curb further drinking. Nobody wants to see their tongue pale and furry again in the bathroom mirror. The 17th-century word for the sickness attendant on excessive drinking, ‘crapula’, accurately hints at a sleazy kind of stupor. Misery may tread fast on the heels of joy, but some of us drink as though immune from the wall-eyed hangover of tomorrow.