18 June 2025

Hangovers I have known

The barman who made our pre-dinner Martinis was good at his job, and this may be where our problems began…

It is now Wednesday, which means I am on Day Three of the hangover from lunch in London on Sunday. On the whole, things are much better than they have been. The nausea is largely gone, as is most of the trembling. The first day, though, was horrendous – as bad as anything I can remember in a life that has had a few belters in its time. The worst one ever was in 2005 in Umbria, when my friend D— came up from Rome with a couple of bottles of grappa which, he assured me, was the good stuff, and not the liquid made from battery acid, fermented twigs and rats’ carcasses that gets fobbed off on tourists. To this day, I still feel slightly queasy when I hear the word “grappa”; even typing it in full makes the stomach lurch. I can certainly never drink it again.

As in that case, the excessive drinking last Sunday was the result of meeting up with a friend I hadn’t seen in years. It was my old flatmate and partner in crime Razors, with whom I shared the original Hovel in Marylebone. I do not use the term “partner in crime” entirely facetiously, but I am not going to say any more because that’s all the self-incrimination I’m going to be doing for now.

Razors, which is not his real name, escaped the clutches of Blighty and moved to Los Angeles, where he has been making lots of money doing something related to films. Occasionally I have asked him to explain to me what it actually is, but my heart is never in it when listening to the answer, and my mind wanders over to the important bit, which is that he earns a lot more money than me – a fact that he, too, is happy to return to.

A few years ago family business called him back to the land of his birth, and he offered to buy me lunch at Rules, the venerable and incredibly expensive restaurant in Covent Garden. That was a washout: the night before, I treated myself to a kebab from what had up until then been my favourite gyro place on the Western Road: honestly, they were so good you could actually eat them sober. However, on this occasion, there had been some kind of breakdown in their health and safety regime, and I spent the next day and a half in agony in the bathroom; I was in no fit state to go to the chemist’s for some Dioralyte, let alone get on a train to London to eat roast pheasant and spotted dick.

So this time I was careful. For a couple of days beforehand, I ate nothing but dry bread and tinned soups, sterilised all my glasses before drinking from them and even took care not to go out in the wet in case I slipped and broke something. Rules was off the menu, though: some bean-counter has decided that you can’t sit down for more than two hours at lunch, and two hours is no time at all for a decent meal when you have a lot to catch up on. So in the end he decided on Hawksmoor on Air Street, which we heard does a good Sunday roast, and that was what Razors was craving, because apparently in Los Angeles the only thing they eat is sushi.

Quick food review: the roast beef was divine, with a nice smokey flavour, the roasties were acceptable, the gravy wasn’t as good as mine but then no one’s gravy is, and the Yorkshire Puddings… well, let’s just say they need to go back to the drawing board with them. But the barman who made our pre-dinner Martinis knew what he was doing, so much so that we had two each, and this may be said to be where our problems began.

By the way, when I said above that we had a lot to catch up on, that’s not really the correct phrase. We do not really give a monkey’s about what the other person has been up to. We just want to have a laugh, and Razors has a somewhat robust sense of humour that does not always go down terribly well in well-heeled circles in LA. A mutual friend of ours who happens to be female asked me, after our last meeting, how his children were doing (he has two sets, from two marriages). I replied that the question had simply not arisen, on the grounds that a) I didn’t care and b) he had not flown several thousand miles across desert, mountain and sea to talk about child-rearing.

“The thing is,” he explained, generalising terribly but with perhaps with a grain of truth, “when women have a conversation, it’s about information; when men have a conversation, it’s about entertainment.” Well, it was jolly entertaining, and my eldest child, who, along with their siblings, got to see a lot of him on alternate weekends, joined us for a bit, and that was delightful.

The evening then got a bit ragged: we went to several pubs in Soho, I think, having large and expensive Islay malts in each one; maybe these, along with the bottle of Malbec each that we had at lunch, and the brandies after it, contributed to my lack of well-being for the next three days. I finally got back to Brighton after midnight. Then I thought it would be a good idea to have a nightcap. It was not a good idea. Since then, I have signed the pledge: not a drop of liquor will pass my lips again. Well, maybe a little one. But not just now.