by Kingsley Amis
The best hangover scene ever written, from a master of both writing and hangovers. “[Jim] Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way… He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning… 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” Photograph: Ronald Grant
by Tom Wolfe
“The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple… If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.” The fictional British journalist is reputed to be based on Christopher Hitchens Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
by Helen Fielding
Women have, in general, been less specific about hangovers than men – but Bridget Jones, the voice of her generation, put an end to that. “11.45pm. Ugh. First day of New Year has been day of horror. Cannot quite believe I am once again starting the year in a single bed in my parents’ house. Having skulked at home all day, hoping hangover would clear, I eventually gave up and set off for the Turkey Curry Buffet far too late. When I got to the Alconburys’… I was still in a strange world of my own – nauseous, vile-headed, acidic… I leaned against the ornament shelf for support” Photograph: PR handout
by Bruce Robinson
Among the metaphysical insights from Withnail and Marwood (the “I” of the title) as they drift into the “arena of the unwell”, are “Oh God, I don’t feel good. Look, my thumbs have gone weird! My heart’s beating like a fucked clock! I feel dreadful, I feel really dreadful,” to which Withnail responds, “So do I, so does everybody. Look at my tongue; it’s wearing a yellow sock.” Of Withnail’s other measured contributions, even including the haughty demand that “There must and there shall be aspirin!”, the one that lingers is the succinct “I feel like a pig shat in my head” Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
by Tom Waits
Speaks for itself in its perfect need – as it encapsulates the state of being hungover while still drunk – to blame not just others but inanimate objects. “The piano has been drinking. My necktie is asleep. The combo went back to New York. The jukebox has to take a leak… And you can’t find your waitress. With a Geiger counter. And she hates you and your friends. And you just can’t get served without her. And the box office is drooling. And the bar stools are on fire. Cause the piano has been drinking. The piano has been drinking. The piano has been drinking. Not me, not me…” Photograph: Rex Features
Directed by John McTiernan
Woken from pained idiot-slumber, the hungover Sgt McClane (Bruce Willis) is told that “Simon” (Jeremy Irons) has just blown up a big bomb and now wants, as the vernacular of another Willis film would have it, to get medieval on his (Bruce’s) ass. Bruce has to save the world, again, but with a colon-crippling hangover, a real fandootzie eggslammer, and is angry enough to tell police chief Walter Cobb (Larry Bryggman), even before coffee or a shower, that “you and Simon have ruined a perfectly good hangover”. The idea of a perfectly good hangover is intriguing: the idea of “ruining” it even more so Photograph: Rex Features
by Dean Young
Not too much poetry about hangovers, but Pennsylvanian Dean Young nailed something with: “Hangover, you drive me into the yard to dig holes as a way of working through you. Alas, I feel like something spit out by a duck, a duck other ducks are ashamed of, when I only tried to protect myself by projecting myself on hilarity’s big screen at the party where one nitwit reminisced about the 39¢ a pound chicken of his youth and another said, Don’t go to Italy in June, no one goes to Italy in June. Protect myself from boring advice… from the boring past and the boring present…” Photograph: Public Domain
David Nicholls
Awake at 9.30am, redolent with “dread and self-loathing combined with sexual frustration”, Dexter Mayhew, anti-hero of Nicholls’s bestselling novel – the film version is due next year – has a bad day ahead of him. He is just coming down from shedloads of both drugs and drink, and from having, for a job, to listen to Jamiroquai. The best aspect is the juxtaposition between his sudden morning lurch towards confidence – haven’t we all? – and the outcome. “He finds a bottle of vodka and pours an inch into his glass… as he hasn’t been to sleep yet, this is not the first drink of the day but the last drink of last night...” Photograph: Allstar
by George Macdonald Fraser
While we’re dabbling with scatology, let’s not forget the other physical effects of hangovers. Here, Harry Paget Flashman inadvertently starts the entire Charge of the Light Brigade. “When my orderly tumbled me out before dawn, I felt as if I were about to give birth. My bowels were in a fearful state. I was blown up like a boiler... Damn all Russian champagne... Suddenly, without the slightest volition on my part, there was the most crashing discharge of wind, like the report of a mortar.” Lord Cardigan takes it as such, and launches the infamous attack Photograph: Public Domain
by PG Wodehouse
And now for a cure. Wodehouse’s perfect valet cures Bertie’s retching hangover through his magic potion. As Jeeves puts it: “It is the Worcester sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it its bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening.” Bertie attests: “For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right… hope dawned once more” Photograph: PR Handout
