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Six variations on a hangover

When the season gets too jolly, lighten up your folly
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Tis the holly jolly season, when it's way too easy to lean into the "jolly" side of things.

Should have stopped a little earlier with those Coronas yesterday? Too much bubbly, or maybe just too many celebrations celebrating the celebratory? If you believe "festive" is spelled "h-a-n-g-o-v-e-r", this one's for you.

For anyone over the age of, say, 19 (let's keep things legal here), good chance you've known the underbelly of Party Central. Short (hopefully), nasty and sometimes brutish, hangovers seem to be payback time for something, although I can never quite remember what.

Whichever balance sheet they reckon, hangovers have dogged humans since the beginning of time, or at least the start of the cocktail hour. All those amethysts the ancient Greeks embedded around the outside of their drinking goblets weren't exactly knobs to prevent slippage when things got "out of hand." Amethysts were thought to have curative powers.

I hand it to the Brits, though, for really getting down and dirty with hangovers. We write about that which we know best, don't they say. So it is that that quintessential master of British humour of a certain stylish period, P.G. Wodehouse (called "Plum" by those who knew him best), described six different hangovers in his 1949 romp, The Mating Season, which have lived on in infamy.

It took another Englishman, Milton Crawford, a post-post-modernist, one with his own sense of humour to boot, to turn them inside out and offer us the Wodehouse Six, revisited, complete with recipes for good morning-after brekkies in his witty little Hungoevr Coobkook (sic).

To start, we have The Broken Compass hangover, a purely psychological, touchy-feely state wherein your lower lip corners hit your shoes and just about everything else is equally droopy. This woe-is-me attitude tells you your "amazing" lover and just about everything else good in your life is gone. Forever.

You might feel like you have a morally "broken compass," too, depending on what you may or may not remember from the night before.

Sounds like time for a Corpse Reviver — a "hair of the dog" solution invented by one Frank Meier at the Ritz Bar in Paris in the 1920s. Upon launching his cocktail, Mr. Meier advised: "To be taken before 11 a.m. or as soon as strength and energy is needed."

To wit, mix 1 oz. of Calvados, with 1 oz. of vermouth rosso and 1 oz. of brandy. Stir over ice in a mixing glass, strain and serve in a frosted martini glass, with an orange slice for garnish. If you actually frost the glass and slice the orange without cutting yourself, you deserve bonus points.

Or you could save the Corpse Reviver for Wodehouse's hangover type No. 2, The Sewing Machine. Actually, you can mix and match, since more than a few versions of Corpse Reviver have been concocted since the 1920s, a cultural commentary unto itself.

As for The Sewing Machine hangover, think pins and needles, and a few more needles, jabbing you repeatedly between the eyes, into your eyes, your skull, and the muscles you freaked out boarding yesterday.

At this point, you may well consider taking up sewing rather than drinking as a pastime. Alternatively, you might turn to one of the distinctive hangover cures from our worldly neighbours with more experience with these sorts of things.

In Hangover Cures, Ben Reed, a former Cocktail Bartender of the Year, a distinction akin to hairdressing awards, suggests that his favourite "cures" from around the world include thick, hot onion soup as served in France; a glass of heavy cream in Norway; or a pickled eye from a one-eyed sheep served in a glass of tomato juice by our compadres in Outer Mongolia.

On the other hand, or arm, I should say, try Ben's suggested Puerto Rican option — rub a lemon into the armpit of your drinking arm, which might not actually fix the hangover but will make you smell better.

Personally, I would trust the Russians most, given they are at the top of the heap — the straggly, hung-over heap — of peoples who consume the most alcohol per capita, at least as reported by the Daily Mail.

Russians, according to the Mail, consume an average of 27 litres of pure alcohol per person per year at the time the stats were gathered (2005). Translated, this equals some 1,350 pints of beer or 90 bottles of vodka. Each year. Or seven and a half bottles of vodka a month.

When someone in Buzuluk or Murmansk suffers a hangover, they might reach for heavily salted cucumber juice and black bread soaked in water. The water to rehydrate; the cucumber juice to rehydrate and restore electrolytes (think Gatorade). As for the black bread, it's probably just a good sponge and overall stomach soother. Perfect for Plum's No. 3 hangover: The Comet.

In The Comet, one is flying, soaring, albeit fuzzily or directionless, generally pulling a Ziggy Stardust in space with a broken control panel, not quite wretched and not quite connected to planet Earth either. If The Comet hits while you're in bed, it's sometimes called The Pillow Spinnies.

That leaves us with The Atomic hangover. Yes, you say to yourself, groaning miserably, something has definitely exploded, levelling more than a few internal hectares and leaving a large crater behind. And The Cement Mixer, which says it all (churn, churn, churn). And last, but far from least, The Gremlin Boogie, which I'll leave to your own interpretation, and at which point you may wish you had no roommates to bear witness.

I've often wondered if other animals suffer hangovers — the coyotes, say, that have been reported gobbling up fallen apples or pears which have fermented, then meandering around in zig-zaggy lines, occasionally kicking up their heels. Likewise crows, who were obviously unable to fly away. Seriously. These things happen.

Which begs the question, are their hangovers better or worse than our own, and do they have as much fun remembering them?

Enjoy the rest of your holidays. Drink responsibly — and stay away from those cement mixers.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer whose first drink was sake lifted from her parents' liquor cabinet.