Low life | 22 February 2018

My hangover was what the great Kingsley Amis describes in his Everyday Drinking guide as a ‘metaphysical’ hangover. Apart from the usual feeling of being unwell, stealing over me was that ‘ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future’. Amis’s remedy was to read the final scene of ‘Paradise Lost’, Book XII, lines 606 to the end, ‘which is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature’. Otherwise he recommends battle poems, such as Chesterton’s ‘Lepanto’. But now the random selection of images and scenes recollected from the previous evening paused on a new and particularly horrific one. So before I searched for ‘Lepanto’, before rising even, I reached for the phone and typed in ‘how to clean vomit from the inside of a car’.

I am evidently not the first person to type this sentence into a search engine.