The hair of the dog that bit you

From The History of the Hangover:

There is no such thing as the perfect hangover, although anyone who has known more than one of them seems to have the perfect hangover cure. The roast beef sandwich, I've heard it said repeatedly, can't be matched.

I was a professional hangover artist in my twenties and can attest to the efficacy of the roast beef sandwich.

In Scotland, a country famous for its drinking, the hangover remedy bought in shops, Irn Bru—iron brew—is known by some as the true national drink, more than the scotch that has you drinking Irn Bru the next morning. It is said to be made from girders and, like spinach, gives you enormous strength—so much of it that you can will yourself out of any old hangover.

I don't which is worse: Irn Bru or haggis although I think it's the latter which smells like the dirty socks worn by a sufferer of athlete's foot fungus and tastes like cardboard finely chopped and mixed with lard and bits of gristle - well it is after all made with sheep's internal organs mixed with oats and stuffed into sheep's intestines.

My first wife was Scottish and living in Scotland cured me of hangovers or rather I should say that it cured me of drinking. The last really bad hangover that I had was after a wild night waking up on a Sunday morning lying on a sofa in a strange house. The next thing that I knew was being taken to church by the entire family. It took me the whole day to remember where I was and how I had got there. Actually it took me the whole day to remember who I was.

The thing about drinking in Scotland is that the pubs closed at 10pm and everyone bought "cerry oots" aka "carry outs" aka "take out booze" and then repaired to the nearest bachelor pad to drink into the wee ours of the morning. After soccer, the most popular sport in Scotland is getting someone as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. It took me a while to realize that the Scots were not being generous by treating me to shot after shot of Scotch. They were indulging in their national sport: "drinking the Sassenach (Englishman or any foreigner) under the table." I left Scotland and stopped drinking.

Edmund Wilson said he once inflicted a hangover on T.S. Eliot. "I gave him bootleg gin," Wilson told a friend about an evening he spent with the poet. "He is so shy that you have to drink with him to talk to him—and we both got into bad condition. The next morning he had an awful hangover and said his joints creaked, and I felt as if I had wantonly broken some rare and exquisite vase. I have felt guilty about it ever since."

That must have been fun. Eliot was such a namby-pamby sort of fellow. What sane American would go to live in England permanently?

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a bit of an expert. "The hangover," he said in a description of New York in the 1920s, "became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta." The test pilots Tom Wolfe wrote about in The Right Stuff operated on conditions of a near-permanent hangover. It was their fuel. Flying and drinking and drinking and driving was the military ethos—that's what you did. That's easier to understand among people for whom there really may not be much of a tomorrow. Not everyone is a test pilot living with the prospect of their next and potentially fatal crash.

Drinking and hangovers were for years part of the legislative process on Capitol Hill. In Sean Wilentz's The Triumph of American Democracy, 850 pages pass with barely a drink mentioned. That's a remarkable achievement; in reality, congressional committee chambers in the first half of the 19th century were stashed with liquor every night when there were to be deliberations over a bill, as Joanne Freeman, an immensely witty historian at Yale, pointed out in a recent talk about the violence among congressmen in antebellum Washington. Much of the violence on Capitol Hill during that period—and there were an immense number of fights within Congress before the Civil War—was fuelled by drink and hangovers.

Boozing while working went on until the 80s. When I first moved to San Francisco in 1978, three martini lunches were still "in." Fortunately I was still a teetotaller in those days and didn't indulge or I may have sold my soul to the devil.

Christopher Hitchens has written memorably about smoking and drinking; in fact, there's almost no better place to begin a consideration of the hangover than with an essay he wrote in the early 1990s on drinking and smoking, which appears in his book For the Sake of Argument. As Hitchens points out, there has been a nicotine ingredient in the modern hangover, and quite a few people swear that it wasn't the drink that did them in the night before; it was the cigarettes. "Only a fool expects smoking and drinking to bring happiness," Hitchens wrote, "just as only a dolt expects money to do so. Like money, booze and fags are happiness, and people cannot expect to pursue happiness in moderation."

My mother, being a sensible woman, was the first person to point out that smoking caused worse hangovers than boozing.

I haven't had a real doozy of a hangover in nearly 40 years mostly because I stopped drinking for 20 of those years but also because, when I did start drinking again, I stuck to wine with food - and water.

I learned the trick about drinking one glass of water for every glass of wine in Italy where every bottle of wine is automatically served with a bottle of sparkling water. One third of the cause of hangovers is dehydration.

Another third is the strain on the liver. The only way to get round that is to drink in moderation and the final third is drinking on an empty stomach. Therefore I only drink when I am eating.

There's no magical property in a roast beef sandwich. It simply works by soothing a stomach inflamed by too much booze.