The Salmon of Doubt

These memories are completely beyond the reach of your normal, sober mind. Which is why, after some ill-advised evening out, you will be the only person who is completely unaware of some barkingly stupid remark you made to someone whose feelings you care about deeply, or even just a bit. It is only weeks, months, or, in the case of New Year’s Eve, exactly a year later that the occasion suddenly returns to your consciousness with a sickening whump and you realise why people have been avoiding you or meeting your eyes with a glassy stare for so long. This can often result in your saying “Jesus God” to yourself in a loud voice and reaching for a stiff drink, which leads you up to the next point of inebriation, where of course fresh shocks await your pleasure.

And the same is true on the way back down. There are certain memories that will only be retriggered by revisiting exactly the same state of dehydration as the one in which the original events occurred. Hence the New Year’s Resolution problem, which is that you never actually remember the resolutions you made, or even where you wrote them down, until the exact same moment the following year, when you are horribly reminded of your complete failure to stick by them for more than about seven minutes.

So what is the answer to this terrible, self-perpetuating problem? Well, obviously, rigorous self-discipline. A monastic adherence to a regime of steamed vegetables, plain water, long walks, regular workouts, early nights, early mornings, and probably some kind of fragrant oils or something. But seriously, the thing we are most going to want on New Year’s Day, and be desperately trying to remember how to make, is a good hangover cure, and especially one that doesn’t involve diving through the ice on the Serpentine. The trouble is, we can never remember them when we want them, or even know where to find them. And the reason we can never remember them when we want them is that we heard about them when we didn’t actually need them, which isn’t any help, for the reasons outlined above. Nauseating images involving egg-yolks and Tabasco sauce swill through your brain, but you are not really in any fit state to organise your thoughts. Which is why we need, urgently, to organise them now while there is still time. So this is an appeal for good, effective methods of freshening up the brain on New Year’s Day that don’t involve actual cranial surgery. Hangover cures, please, therefore, to know where to find them. And the reason we can never remember them when we want them is that we heard about them when we didn’t actually need them, which isn’t any help, for the reasons outlined above. Nauseating images involving egg-yolks and Tabasco sauce swill through your brain, but you are not really in any fit state to organise your thoughts. Which is why we need, urgently, to organise them now while there is still time. So this is an appeal for good, effective methods of freshening up the brain on New Year’s Day that don’t involve actual cranial surgery. Hangover cures, please, therefore, to

. And may the next thousand years be especially good ones for you and your descendants.

The Independent on Sunday, DECEMBER 1999

My Favourite Tipples I love whisky in every way. I love the way it looks in the bottle, that rich golden colour. I love the labels arranged on the shelf—the kilts and claymores and slightly out-of-focus sheep. I love the sense that it’s a drink that—unlike, for instance, vodka from Warrington—is rich in the culture and history of the place where it is distilled. I love particularly the smoky, peaty aromas of the single malts. In fact the only thing I don’t like about whisky is that if I take the merest sip of the stuff it sends a sharp pain from the back of my left eyeball down to the tip of my right elbow, and I begin to walk in a very special way, bumping into people and snarling at the furniture. I have therefore learnt to turn my attention to other tipples.

Margaritas I’m very fond of, but they make me buy very stupid things. Whenever I’ve had a few margaritas I always wake up in the morning with a sense of dread as to what I will find downstairs. The worst was a six-foot-long pencil and a two-foot-wide India eraser that I had shipped over from New York as a result of one injudicious binge. The confusing thing was that they arrived home several weeks after I did, so I found them downstairs one morning after having had just one glass of Chianti with my evening pizza.

I therefore now drink Stolichnaya vodka martinis if I go to New York, because they’re very smart and sophisticated and New Yorky, but, most important, they render me incapable of doing anything stupid, or indeed anything at all, though I occasionally converse very knowledgeably about quantum chromo-dynamics and pig farming when under their influence.