The Hangover Through The Ages – In All Its Cherry-Tinted Glory | Eva Wiseman

Happy Hangover to everyone celebrating! I hope your decorations are in place, the garland of tin cans, the decorative cigarette butts, the thick yellow air of a night well spent. I don't drink much these days, so when I do, it's an occasion: a celebration of friends and liver function. The New Year is one of those occasions, a boundary of time that is crossed with alcohol and grief. Unlike moving house or the birth of a baby, beyond the bottles we wearily examine in the morning, there's no sign that anything has changed as the year turns - it's more of 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 prepare for the year ahead. Vodka is recommended, sometimes necessary. But over a lifetime, its effects and textures evolve. So far, I've witnessed the following ages of hangovers…

Teens: A teenage hangover hits like a water balloon, both exhilarating and exasperating. Peeling off a classmate's couch, there's an air of slapstick hilarity as you spin in yesterday's T-shirt through their sleeping house to find a receptacle for your cherry-flavored vomit. It's sick like you've never been before - witchcraft Alice in Wonderland here - with the first sick you get bigger, a thousand feet tall and tall like an adult, with the second you shrink to the size of a thumb, specifically your own thumb, which in a miserable moment last night you lifted when you walked past Bethany Kim past Nisa Local oh my god oh my god. But when the vomit has passed, so does the hangover, and you return to your body with a new sense of wonder at the world and the infinite freedoms it contains. is the medicine of bravery. Newly hatched in the adult world, you build yourself daily as if you were in Lego, trying to find a form that suits you. You take a drink, the pieces rearrange, you take another and the pieces cling to someone else. The next day, you wake up squashed against the wall in someone else's single bed with navy blue sheets and vomit politely at the absence of a pillowcase. You might close your eyes and charm yourself through time in 3 a.m. lust and honesty, but instead you'll drag your body out of bed, suddenly overwhelmed by the smell of your own burnt breath, and drink two liters of Coke on the way home. Here you will relax in the woolly atmosphere of your housemates' hangovers and order a pizza. As the alcohol oozes from your skin, it will be replaced by a kind of murky poetry, and you'll tell the story of last night as if it were an epic war movie. The next night, that's what we were drinking for; you always forget it.

The 1930s: where once you kept ticket stubs and ribbons in a box under your bed, now you keep memories of nights, not just out of tenderness but also small warnings. Alcohol has become something of a WD40 for your social life - you no longer have time for an afternoon of gossip, you have to pack three nights into one evening and the bottles run out fast. Hangovers are worth it, and you keep it up, you repeat it to yourself and who cares to hear it, they are worth it, even if sometimes they bring shivering waves of anguish and shame. Oh my God oh my God, the memories scratch against your eyelids, oh my God oh my God, you check your sent messages. Your body looks like a lost mitten, leaning mournfully on a door. Why didn't you have children? Why didn't you marry that boy with the navy blue sheets? Why did you have children? Why did you marry that boy with the navy blue sheets? Wine also lubricates parenthood, and the hangover is punishing enough – you deserve that creaky stomach, that blood-temperature exhaustion, it's good for you. This is the age when some people decide it's not worth it. It's also the age where it can bring earth-shattering truths - the sinkhole of a hangover becomes a therapist's couch, where you are both therapist and therapist, and emerge into the light of day scarred but whole. , and perhaps limping.

Quarantine: You drink to fond memories of pleasure. You now have a cocktail shaker, and there's something vaguely fabulous about mixing up a Martini while the TV is screaming bad news in your living room. And when the hangover hits, you greet it like an old friend from town – what did you bring me this time, old friend? What violence and greed, and improbable take-out orders, and awful realities, and late-night eBay shopping, and long-dead arguments hidden in the old burial ground of conversation, and unflattering camera angles, and stifling compliments , and awkward phone calls, and movements that make someone recoil, regrets and kittens, and old episodes of Have I Got News for You, and freezing cold...