The Old Devils.
I’m not sure anyone has ever written more convincingly about hangovers than Kingsley Amis. Scarcely a book goes by without at least one set-piece on the mornings after the nights before, and always so psychosomatically compelling that the mouth dries and the head droops and the sharp, stabbing pains pierce the otherwise befuddled brain like fog and the Pharos. Just the other day I was nursing what I thought was the dying remnants of a faint hangover, until I made the mistake of reading The Old Devils. Walking down the street a few minutes later, I stood on a paving slab which was ever so slightly loose; my delicate inner equilibrium went so fucking haywire that I wasn’t sure whether I was going to throw up or fall over.
The reason I bring this up is because, unwittingly or otherwise, Amis in his novels makes having a hangover more appealing than actually being drunk. Drinking, in Amis, is not really that much fun, just something that people do from motives of ennui or escape, a self-administered soporific which just makes people less and less aware of being more and more of a boring wanker. It’s only when people are hungover that they’re alive again, agonisingly so, every sense turned up to eleven, to the torrential tap, to the scouring pads of pillows.
There’s always that next-morning moment when your consciousness, so joyously mixed up in the holistic whole of experience, slowly comes back to you. This is what should be called the “Fuck, I’m me.” moment, when it occurs to you that you are not merely part of the hilarious pantheistic compound that is Life. No! You are explicitly and specifically you and, as you remember it, being you really isn’t that great: certainly not if what you feel like right now is anything to go by. And, to Amis, it’s all like that. Drinking. Sex. Love. Everything.
Still. All in all. I’d rather be me than no-one.