Happy new hangover to all who celebrate! I trust your decorations are up, the wreath of tins, the decorative cigarette butts, the thick yellow air of a night well had. I don’t drink much these days, so when I do it is an occasion: a celebration of friends and liver function. New year is one of those occasions, a boundary of time which we cross with alcohol and sorrow. Unlike when moving house or having a baby, beyond the bottles we wearily survey in the morning there is no sign of anything having changed when the year turns – instead it is a celebration of time itself, a chance to note its strangeness and speed, the way we carry it behind us like the train of a dress, and a chance to brace for the oncoming year. Vodka is advised, sometimes necessary. But over the course of a life, its effects and textures evolve. So far, I have witnessed the following ages of hangover…
Teenagers: a teenage hangover hits like a water balloon, equal part exhilarating and maddening. Unpeeling yourself from a schoolfriend’s sofa, there is an air of slapstick hilarity as you spin in yesterday’s T-shirt through their sleeping house to find a receptacle for your cherry-flavoured vomit. This is sick like you’ve never sicked before – some Alice in Wonderland sorcery here – with the first sick you get bigger, a thousand feet tall and grand like an adult, with the second you shrink down to the size of a thumb, specifically your own thumb, which in a lamentable moment last night you raised when you passed Bethany Kim outside the Nisa Local oh God oh God. But when the vomit has been evacuated, so has the hangover, and you return to your body with new wonder at the world, and the infinite freedoms it contains.
Twenties: alcohol is bravery medicine. Newly hatched into the adult world, you have been building yourself daily as if out of Lego, trying to find a shape that fits. You have a drink, the pieces rearrange, you have another, and the pieces snap on to someone else. The next day you wake crushed into the wall in somebody else’s navy-sheeted single bed, and retch politely as you note the lack of pillow case. You could close your eyes and charm yourself back through time into the lust and honesty of 3am, but instead you will grim your body out of the bed, overpowered suddenly by the smell of your own burnt breath, and drink two litres of Coke on the way home. Here you will relax into the fleecy feel of your housemates’ group hangover and order pizza. As the alcohol seeps from your skin it will be replaced by a cloudy kind of poetry, and you’ll tell the story of last night as if an epic war movie. The evening after is what the drinking was for; you always forget this.
Thirties: where once you’d save ticket stubs and ribbons in a box under your bed, now you keep memories of nights, not just out of fondness but also as little warnings. Alcohol has become a sort of WD40 for your social life – you no longer have time to ease into an afternoon of gossip, you must pack three nights out into a single evening, and the bottles empty quickly. The hangovers are worth it, and you maintain this, you repeat this to yourself and whoever will listen, they are worth it, even if sometimes they bring shuddering waves of anxiety and shame. Oh God oh God, the memories scrape against your eyelids, oh God oh God, you check your sent messages. Your body feels like a lost mitten, propped up dolefully on a gate. Why didn’t you have children? Why didn’t you marry that boy with the navy sheets? Why did you have children? Why did you marry that boy with the navy sheets? Wine lubricates parenthood too, and the hangovers feel suitably punishing – you deserve this grinding stomach, this blood-temperature exhaustion, it’s good for you. This is the age some people decide the hang is not worth the over. This is also the age in which it can bring shattering truths – the pit of the hangover becomes a therapist’s couch, where you are both therapist and therapee, and emerge into the daylight scarred but whole, and perhaps with a limp.
Forties: you drink to the loving memory of fun. You have a cocktail shaker now, and there’s something vaguely fabulous about mixing oneself a Martini while the telly screams bad news into your living room. And when the hangover arrives, you welcome it as if an old friend visiting from the city – what have you brought me this time, old friend? What violence and greed, and unlikely takeaway orders, and awful realities, and late-night eBay purchases, and long-dead arguments hidden in the ancient burial grounds of conversation, and unflattering camera angles, and stifling compliments, and awkward phone calls, and movements that cause one’s back to go, and regrets and kittens, and old episodes of Have I Got News for You, and freezing cold opinions, and typing with empathy into the internet before quickly deleting it, and what photos will you press into my eyes as a memory from my photo app, and what filters? You light a fire, you settle in.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
