I make a martini, Gordon’s or Barr Hill, every night at seven with, in my mind at least, a matador’s formality. I use dense, square ice cubes. Like the pop of a cork exiting a bottle, a martini’s being shaken is one of civilization’s indispensable sounds. The martini is the only American invention, Mencken wrote, as perfect as a sonnet.

I like my martinis shaken rather than stirred because they seem colder and because the ice crystals that swim briefly on the surface are ethereal. I also like mine extremely dry. I was pleased to read, in the 2018 Times obituary of Tommy Rowles, the longtime bartender at Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle hotel, that his secret was to omit vermouth entirely. “A bottle of vermouth,” he said, “you should just open it and look at it.” Modern cocktail orthodoxy is not kind to me, or to Tommy. Stirring, these days, is in, and vermouth is poured with a heavy hand. T. S. Eliot would not have minded. He was a vermouth man, so much so that he named one of his cats Noilly Prat, after his favorite brand. When I do add vermouth I apply Hemingway’s formula, 15:1, in honor of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who liked gin to outnumber vermouth in the same ratio he wanted to outnumber opponents in battle. The toast I make, with whoever is present, is usually the one I learned from the late Caroline Herron, a former editor at the Times Book Review: “To the confusion of our enemies.” The toast Jack Nicholson makes in Easy Rider—“To old D. H. Lawrence”—isn’t bad, either.

“The world and its martinis are mine!” Patricia Highsmith exclaimed in her diaries. Martinis inspire this sort of enthusiasm. Frederick Seidel, in his poem “At Gracie Mansion,” refers to an ice-cold martini as a “see-through on a stem.” The poet Richard Wilbur liked to add “fennel juice and foliage” to his. I’d like to be like Eloise, in the children’s book by Kay Thompson, and keep a bottle of gin in my bedroom. If you want to go broke quickly rather than slowly, drink your martinis outside the house.

Occasionally I’ll mix a vodka martini, recalling that Langston Hughes appeared in a Smirnoff advertisement. Vodka martinis flush out the snobs, who don’t consider them martinis at all. Roger Angell, whose New Yorker essay “Dry Martini” is the best thing I’ve read on the subject, admitted that he and his wife moved from gin to vodka because vodka was “less argumentative.” The best paean to the vodka martini appears in Lawrence Osborne’s amazing book The Wet and the Dry, which is about trying to get a drink in countries where to do so is against the law. Osborne decides that, with its olive, his vodka martini tastes like “cold seawater at the bottom of an oyster.”

Don’t get all excited, as did Kenneth Tynan, and try to take your vodka martini rectally. Tynan had read, in Alan Watts’s autobiography, that this was a good idea. Tynan had his girlfriend inject the contents of a large wineglass of vodka, via an enema tube, into his rectum. “Within ten minutes the agony is indescribable,” he wrote in his diary. His anus became “tightly compressed” and blood seeped from it. It took three days for the pain to abate. “Oh, the perils of hedonism!” he wrote.

I make my first drink on the late side because I like it too much. I also want to prolong the anticipation. Alcohol is, as Benjamin Franklin noticed, constant proof that God loves us. I drink more than most people but less than some. I don’t have an especially big tank; my tolerance is not Homeric. But almost nightly I drink two martinis and, with dinner, a glass or two of wine, without negative effects in the morning. If I have that third glass of wine, my morning at the desk becomes an afternoon at the desk.

Drinking alone doesn’t depress me, the way it does some people. Franklin didn’t recommend it. “He that drinks his cider alone, let him catch his horse alone,” he wrote. But Christopher Hitchens said that solo drinks “can be the happiest glasses you ever drain,” and Norman Mailer, in his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance, praised what he called “that impregnable hauteur which is, perhaps, the most satisfying aspect of solitary drinking.” When alone, I’ll put on good loud music, of the sort my wife, Cree, does not especially like (jazz or Hüsker Dü) and read magazines and eat cheese until I get tiddly and head for bed. But I prefer companions. When I learn that someone new is coming over, I mentally ask the same questions Kingsley Amis did: “Does he drink? Is he jolly?” Alcohol can bring out the poetry in a person’s soul.

In 2006, Gary Shteyngart, the irrepressible author of novels such as The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Super Sad True Love Story, gave an interview to the Denver-based magazine Modern Drunkard. It’s one of the great interviews of the new century and some enterprising young editor should print it as a chapbook. In the meantime, find it online and send the link to your friends. James Baldwin may have said, “I don’t know any writers who don’t drink,” but that was a long time ago. Shteyngart’s complaint is that writers don’t belly up to the bar with the enthusiasm they once did. “We’re this sterilized profession, we all know our Amazon.com rankings to the nearest digit,” he said. “The literary community is not backing me up here. I’m all alone.” He added, “It’s so pathetic when I think about my ancestors. Give them a bottle of shampoo and they have a party. And here I am with the best booze available.” I’ve tried my best to keep Gary, from my own apartment, company.

“Why didn’t everyone drink?” Karl Ove Knausgaard asked in Book Four of My Struggle. “Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person becomes attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgments are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful.”

Dawn Powell made a similar point in her diaries. “A person is like blank paper with secret writing,” she wrote, “sometimes never brought out, other times brought out by odd chemicals.” In his novel Submission, Michel Houellebecq wrote, “It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.” Amis—a copy of his book Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis should be in every home—put it this way: “The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.”

America’s founders understood all this. Barbara Holland, in her book The Joy of Drinking, reminded her readers that in 1787, the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention “adjourned to a tavern for some rest, and according to the bill they drank fifty-four bottles of Madeira, sixty bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, twenty-two of port, eight of hard cider, and seven bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them. Then they went back to work and finished founding the new Republic.” Fifty-five delegates consumed fifty-four bottles of Madeira? Which founder let the side down?

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Excerpted from The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading by Dwight Garner. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Dwight Garner. All rights reserved

Humans, guinea pigs, and some fish, birds, fruit bats, and primates cannot synthesize vitamin C, yet it is essential to our survival. Scurvy, the deficiency of vitamin C, was the scourge of both the far-wandering sailors and the location-locked soldiers who lacked a balanced diet. It was a common condition in military camps, and in prisons and asylums.

During the Irish Potato Famine, which impacted many countries in the 1840s, the sudden blight wiping out a staple food source raised the prices of other vegetables and dairy. About a million people died of scurvy, typhus, cholera, or dysentery, and about two million emigrated from Ireland.

In the United States, travelers making their way to and participating in the San Francisco Gold Rush of the mid-1800s suffered scurvy owing to poor food provisioning. At Fort Laramie, Wyoming, a last stop before the Rocky Mountains on the overland route to California, scurvy in 1858 was treated by a surgeon who made medicine of “a thick greenish-brown mucilaginous mixture” from prickly pear cactus, mixed with two ounces of whiskey flavored with lemon essence. In the American Civil War of the 1860s, scurvy along with other nutritional deficiencies mostly impacted poorly supplied Confederate fighters.

By that time, the cure for scurvy was known. The condition was most thoroughly studied at sea and had impacted the voyages of Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, Captain James Cook, and Christopher Columbus. In the 1700s, physicians and surgeons working for the British Royal Navy tackled the issue: Was it a disease (like the venereal diseases that it was sometimes confused with) or a deficiency?

The preventative and treatment for scurvy was discovered and rediscovered many times throughout history, with citrus specifically prescribed as early as 1564. Sea captains of many different countries understood that citrus prevented or cured scurvy, yet their real-world wisdom was continuously passed over in favor of some theory that usually fit in with Galenic medicine by physicians on the mainland.

Suspected causes of scurvy included an excess of salt in the diet, copper poisoning, poor ventilation or moist air (good old miasma again), dirty clothing and living conditions, lack of potassium, and parasites living on cockroaches, among other ideas. Shipboard food like salted meat, stale beer, and hard biscuit contained little or no vitamin C.

Symptoms of the disease are bleeding and swelling of gums, terrible-smelling breath, teeth and hair falling out, skin bruises, weak bones, reopening of old wounds, hallucinations, and blindness in the end. The running theory was that scurvy was a “disease of putrefaction.” People were thought to be rotting on the inside.

Proposed antiscorbutics (scurvy preventatives or cures) included rice, beans, sulfuric acid, vinegar, molasses, cinchona bark, mustard, opium, mercury, rhubarb, hops, juniper berries, seal carcass oil, scurvy grass, and especially sauerkraut or horseradish. Fermented beverages like spruce beer, regular beer, and cider, plus fizzy soda water and rum punch were quite often employed. So was gargling with urine, which probably didn’t help with the foul-breath issue. Other ineffective treatments included purgatives, bleeding, sweating, bathing in animal blood, and—surprisingly often—burial of a person up to the neck in sand.

John French’s 1651 The Art of Distillation listed a recipe for “A Scorbutical Water or a Compound Water of Horseradish” that contained scurvy grass, brooklime, watercress, white wine, lemons, briony, horseradish, and nutmeg. It was to be macerated for three days and then distilled. “Three or four spoonfuls of this water taken twice in a day cures the scurvy presently.”

Many of these cures centered on acidity, fermentation, or carbonation, under the theory that they prevented putrefaction of the organs. Taking “fixed air” (carbon dioxide) was suggested by one chemist who recommended that sailors should mix lime juice and sodium bicarbonate to “be swallowed during the effervescence.” They got the lime part right anyway. Likewise, concentrated malt syrup was supposed to ferment into beer inside the stomach, with similar gas produced.

In an onboard clinical trial in 1747, Scottish doctor James Lind (1716–1794) divided patients suffering from scurvy into six groups who received one of the following: cider, sulfuric acid, vinegar, sea water, citrus (oranges and lemon), or a medicinal paste of garlic, mustard seed, and horseradish. Citrus worked best, but Lind didn’t dwell on it as a preventative so much as a curative treatment, and the British navy did not implement citrus rations for another four decades.

Captain Cook (1728–1779) was thought to have conquered scurvy in the 1770s, but in reality he managed it well with better onboard living conditions and frequent stops for fresh food. On his second voyage of 1772–75, Cook’s ship was supplied with many antiscorbutic options: malt wort, sauerkraut, “elixir of vitriol” (sulfuric acid), cider, Joseph Priestley’s soda-water-creating device, evaporated carrot juice, and a poisonous mix of antimony and phosphate of lime called Dr. James’s Powder. Cook thought concentrated malt was the solution, and due to his stature, his insistence that it was the best scurvy preventative delayed the implementation of citrus by a couple decades.

At the same time, sea captains were taking matters into their own hands, sourcing both citrus and other fresh vegetables when they went on land. Finally, by the 1790s, some Royal Navy ships were officially outfitted with lemon juice as a scurvy preventative. (The Merchant Navy implemented it much later.) It was served as a daily allowance with spirit, water, and sugar, or in a drink called a Negus with fortified wine in place of spirit.

With citrus identified as the solution, there was still the problem of how to preserve the fruit or its juice on board ships already notorious for having spoiled beer and undrinkable water after a few weeks or months. Lind recommended a “rob” of lemons and oranges reduced over a fire to boil off water. This was meant to be rehydrated on board with water or alcohol such as in a punch or with wine. Unbeknownst to them, the heat of boiling would destroy much of the vitamin C in the juice, and it would deteriorate even more after storage at room temperature. Others tried concentrating the lemons by freeze distillation, or by adding tartaric acid.

Other methods to preserve citrus juice included mixing it into olive oil, brandy, or rum, sometimes with added sugar. The latter would be a Daiquiri (rum, lime, and sugar) if limes had been used rather than oranges and lemons. But limes were not the preferred citrus of the navy until the mid-1800s. To support merchants from the homeland, Britain switched from purchasing large quantities of Mediterranean lemons to buying West Indies limes (particularly from Montserrat in the Lesser Antilles) owned by British merchants. For this affectation, Americans began to call British seamen “limeys.”

In both medical texts and drink recipes, there was confusion between lemons and limes, given the closeness of their names, the green color of unripe lemons, and the inability to identify which was which once squeezed. Though limes are more acidic than lemons and oranges, they contain significantly less vitamin C than either one, and the commercially prepared reduced lime juice on board was relatively useless against scurvy. Some physicians began to reverse their opinions as to whether the whole citrus thing was effective at all. Incidents of scurvy actually crept up again for a time after the switch to limes, but sea voyages became faster with the introduction of steamships, and scurvy declined again.

The Rose family of Leith, Scotland, was in the shipbuilding business and then later in the ship-supplying business. By 1871 the family company was called L. Rose & Company, “lime juice and wine merchants.” Lauchlan Rose (1829–1885) knew of the provisioning requirements of the time, which were lime juice in 15 percent Demerara rum, provided in four-gallon jars, but he didn’t feel that the sailors were getting the benefits of fresh lime juice. Around 1865 Rose had the idea to create a sweet juice drink for both sailors and the general public, a less medicinal (and less boozy) preparation than what was used on board.

Preservation of food by sealing glass containers and canning was relatively recent technology at the time, and Rose used what he learned about the process in his preparation. The Merchant Shipping Act of 1867 required British ships to carry fresh lime juice on board, and in the same year Rose registered a patent for “an improved method of preserving vegetable juices.” His trick was to employ sulfuric acid in an airtight container to preserve the juice, then it was sweetened and bottled as Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial. It was a success both domestically and on board. By 1893 Rose was able to purchase his own estates on which to grow lime trees.

In the 1900s the company diversified and produced lime marmalade and “promoted gin and lime as a social drink and the ‘discovery’ that lime juice could act as a hangover cure,” according to the book Limeys. Rose & Company later produced rum shrub, ginger brandy, and orange quinine wine. In 1957 the company was bought by Schweppes, makers of tonic water and mineral waters, which were both also used medicinally at first. Limeys author David I. Harvie calls Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial the “world’s first and still surviving branded fruit drink.”

Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial is used in place of fresh lime juice in some dive bars and homes, though it contains sweeteners, preservatives, and added coloring. The ingredient was immortalized in Raymond Chandler’s 1953 book The Long Goodbye, in which a character states, “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”

The sentiment of the latter sentence is disputed, as is where the Gimlet got its name. One theory is that it was named after a Captain Gimlette. The second is that the drink is named after a small tool to poke holes in casks.

Vitamin C was not isolated until 1928, and it was finally proven to be the curative agent for scurvy in 1932. Experiments were conducted on guinea pigs, which had been found to share our common need for vitamin C through diet. This was not the first time guinea pigs have served as experimental subjects: They were shot up with wormwood until they died. Lavoisier and Pasteur both employed them in their experiments. And humans have sent them into space several times. What a ride.

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Excerpted from Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails by Camper English. Used with permission of the publisher, Penguin Books. Copyright 2022 by Camper English.

I’ve worked in the hospitality industry for twenty years and I don’t think I’ll ever stop. Yes, it’s dynamic and your colleagues are usually the coolest people on earth, but my favorite part is maybe a little creepy. Being part of a space where other people—strangers—relax into who they really are, is exciting.

It’s a thrill to be part of something ephemeral and constantly changing that is a meaningful backdrop to someone else’s big night. It’s like being on someone’s home base, if not exactly their home. Making a person—again, a stranger—feel safe, seen and important, requires a lot of work. In some ways, it’s a lot like or writing a book. Creativity is an essential part of every job in the hospitality industry, a collaboration with everyone in the room to create an immersive and emotionally valuable experience.

Jean, the protagonist of my latest novel, The Night Shift, is a bartender. Characters who are bartenders or servers or hosts are so valuable in stories because they are eternally, almost passively, a part of all things. And so are the places they work, which is why bars are such a staple in fiction.

In fiction and in life, bars are the setting for dates (good and bad,) handshake deals, reunions with long lost friends, revelations of shocking news, reconciliations, even weddings and funerals. Really, almost anything can happen in a bar; believe me, I’ve seen it all. Here, I’ve compiled a list of some of my favorite fictional bars, bartenders, and bargoers, many of whom have also seen it all.

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Chantal V. Johnson, Post-Traumatic 

One of my favorite books of the last year was Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson. I’ve never read anything like it. This book is so sad but also wildly and unapologetically hilarious. The book’s protagonist Vivian, an aspiring writer and lawyer who works with clients in a psychiatric hospital, finds lots of ways to alter her mood, and she definitely knows her way around a bar. Vivian frequents bars on dates, with friends, and after professional conferences, but my favorite bar in this book is an imaginary one. Vivian has a fantasy about writing a successful book and doing interviews to promote it. In this fantasy, she seduces an imaginary journalist by singing Kate Bush songs at a fictional karaoke bar; “In the article the journalist would write that he fell in love with her somewhere around “Cloudbusting” but didn’t make a move until “Wow.”

Dominique Fabre, The Waitress Was New 

This short, slice-of-life book follows, Pierrot, a career bartender, through the soapy death rattle of Le Cercle, a quintessential Paris bistro. This book captures every mood of service, shining a light on the bustling overwhelm of a dinner rush and the maudlin solitude of closing time. It is a faithful portrait of the hospitality ecosystem. More importantly, it poignantly examines what happens when that ecosystem gets disrupted, simply when one person does not show up for their shift.

Nghi Vo, The Chosen and the Beautiful

This brightly burning retelling of the Great Gatsby from the perspective of Jordan Baker is a spectacular study in the never-ending party. That elusive dream of eternal celebration is summoned in these pages, and Nghi Vo conjures up another world where the cocktails at the bar are laced with demon blood and the nights never end. If this book was a cocktail, there would surely be some absinthe involved.

Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger 

In the opening scenes of A Certain Hunger, Summers introduces us to her protagonist—food critic and murderer—Dorothy, at the bar. We meet her gaze in the mirror, we see how she drinks her aperitif, how she carries herself, how she flirts with the men in the bar. The bar comes alive almost like a familiar, winding its way around Dorothy and revealing her convincing grace and darkest impulses in the most flattering light.

Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

Is there any kind of bar more simultaneously depressing and filled with promise than an airport bar? Mouth to Mouth is a thrilling reminder of all of the surprises a long wait at an airport can yield, and the near mystical quality of a bar (ok, the fancy one in the first class lounge is a bit more glamorous than what the rest of us are accustomed to) that always stands still while routes of the world swirl around it. Wilson does a masterful job of turning the airport bar into a kind of crystal ball.

Dawnie Walton, The Final Revival of Opal and Nev

The Gemini is a bar where the titular Nev meets Opal, “This girl with the voice that flew over and through and around her sister’s so strangely.” It’s not Nev’s lighting strike moment in the face of Opal’s skill that fascinates. Rather, it’s the post-lightning strike in the Gemini’s shabby greenroom that hits hard in the heart department. We’ve all been to these bars and clubs where everyone dreams big but has to settle for regular life.

Xochitl Gonzalez, Olga Dies Dreaming

Xochitl Gonzalez offers up an astonishingly faithful portrait of New York City life, down to the protagonist, Olga’s, local bar. I love the description of Noir; “a satiating place to be sad…like a well-insulated garage, illuminated by mismatched lamps and filled with old kitchen stools, in a completely unironic way.” Noir is not glamorous, but it’s a place you go where everybody knows your name. The jukebox has everything Olga wants in a playlist and the cast of regulars are pitch perfect, particularly Janette, the public school administrator who haunts the bar throughout the summer.

Chelsea Bieker, Heartbroke

Nobody writes like Chelsea Bieker. Each of her characters rings through these pages clear as a bell. I’m not sure how she does it in this collection, but each story is a jewel, the facets sharp, compelling, and heart wrenching. The Barge, a miner bar in the opening story, is no exception. Chelsea Bieker evokes the platonic form of dive bar—a place where the best and the worst things can happen (often at exactly the same time).

Meiko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

The protagonist of Breast and Eggs, Natsuko, and her sister, Makiko, grow up very bar adjacent. Their single parent mother is a hostess at a bar in the neighborhood, and eventually Makiko also becomes a hostess and single mom. Makiko’s bar, Chanel, is not a happy place, but many places of work are not happy. Kawakami renders Chanel, and the characters who frequent it, in chilling detail. Kawakami finds every dark corner and angle in the examination of what it means to live and work in a female body, and sometimes those dark corners are in the shabby dim of Chanel.

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The Night Shift by Natalka Burian is available from Park Row Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

What a subject! And, in very truth, for once, a “strangely neglected” one. Oh, I know you can hardly open a newspaper or magazine without coming across a set of instructions—most of them unoriginal, some of them quite unhelpful and one or two of them actually harmful—on how to cure this virtually pandemic ailment. But such discussions concentrate exclusively on physical manifestations, as if one were treating a mere illness. They omit altogether the psychological, moral, emotional, spiritual aspects: all that vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure that makes the hangover a (fortunately) unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization.

Imaginative literature is not much better. There are poems and songs about drinking, of course, but none to speak of about getting drunk, let alone having been drunk. Novelists go into the subject more deeply and extensively, but tend to straddle the target, either polishing off the hero’s hangover in a few sentences or, so to speak, making it the whole of the novel. In the latter case, the hero will almost certainly be a dipsomaniac, who is not as most men are and never less so than on the morning after. This vital difference, together with much else, is firmly brought out in Charles Jackson’s marvelous and the hangover horrifying The Lost Weekend, still the best fictional account of alcoholism I have read.

A few writers can be taken as metaphorically illuminating the world of the hangover while ostensibly dealing with something else. Parts of Dostoevsky can be read in this way. Some of Poe’s Tales convey perfectly the prevailing gloomy uneasiness and sudden fits of outlandish dread so many of us could recognize, and Poe himself had a drink problem; contrary to popular belief, he was not a dipsomaniac, but his system was abnormally intolerant of alcohol, so that just a couple of slugs would lay him on his back, no doubt with a real premature burial of a hangover to follow.

Perhaps Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis, which starts with the hero waking up one morning and finding he has turned into a man-sized cockroach, is the best literary treatment of all. The central image could hardly be better chosen, and there is a telling touch in the nasty way everybody goes on at the chap. (I can find no information about Kafka’s drinking history.)

It is not my job, or anyway I absolutely decline, to attempt a full, direct description of the metaphysical hangover: no fun to write or read. But I hope something of this will emerge by implication from my list of countermeasures. Before I get on to that, however, I must deal with the physical hangover, which is in any case the logical one to tackle first, and the dispersal of which will notably alleviate the other— mind and body, as we have already seen, being nowhere more intimately connected than in the sphere of drink. Here, then, is how to cope with

THE PHYSICAL HANGOVER

1. Immediately on waking, start telling yourself how lucky you are to be feeling so bloody awful. This, known as George Gale’s Paradox, recognizes the truth that if you do not feel bloody awful after a hefty night then you are still drunk, and must sober up in a waking state before hangover dawns.

2. If your wife or other partner is beside you, and (of course) is willing, perform the sexual act as vigorously as you can. The exercise will do you good, and—on the assumption that you enjoy sex—you will feel toned up emotionally, thus delivering a hit-and-run raid on your metaphysical hangover (M.H.) before you formally declare war on it.

Warnings. (i) If you are in bed with somebody you should not be in bed with, and have in the least degree a bad conscience about this, abstain. Guilt and shame are prominent constituents of the M.H., and will certainly be sharpened by indulgence on such an occasion.

(ii) For the same generic reason, do not take the matter into your own hands if you awake by yourself.

3. Having of course omitted to drink all that water before retiring, drink a lot of it now, more than you need to satisfy your immediate thirst. Alcohol is a notorious dehydrant, and a considerable part of your physical hangover (P.H.) comes from the lack of water in your cells.

At this point I must assume that you can devote at least a good part of the day to yourself and your condition. Those who inescapably have to get up and do something can only stay in bed as long as they dare, get up, shave, take a hot bath or shower (more of this later), breakfast off an unsweetened grapefruit (m.o.t.l.) and coffee, and clear off, with the intention of getting as drunk at lunchtime as they dare. Others can read on—but let me just observe in passing that the reason why so many professional artists drink a lot is not necessarily very much to do with the artistic temperament, etc. It is simply that they can afford to, because they can normally take a large part of a day off to deal with the ravages. So, then,

4. Stay in bed until you can stand it no longer. Simple fatigue is another great constituent of the P.H.

5. Refrain at all costs from taking a cold shower. It may bring temporary relief, but in my own and others’ experience it will give your M.H. a tremendous boost after about half an hour, in extreme cases making you feel like a creature from another planet. Perhaps this is the result of having dealt another shock to your already shocked system. The ideal arrangement, very much worth the trouble and expense if you are anything of a serious drinker, is a shower fixed over the bath. Run a bath as hot as you can bear and lie in it as long as you can bear. When it becomes too much, stand up and have a hot shower, then lie down again and repeat the sequence. This is time well spent.

Warning. Do not do this unless you are quite sure your heart and the rest of you will stand it. I would find it most disagreeable to be accused of precipitating your death, especially in court.

6. Shave. A drag, true, and you may well cut yourself, but it is a calming exercise and will lift your morale (another sideswipe at your M.H.).

7. Whatever the state of your stomach, do not take an alkalizing agent such as bicarbonate of soda. There is some of this in most hangover remedies but not enough to do you any harm, and the bubbling is cheerful. Better to take unsweetened fruit juice or a grapefruit without sugar. The reasoning behind this, known as Philip Hope-Wallace’s Syndrome, is that your stomach, on receiving a further dose of acid, will say to itself, “Oh, I see: we need more alkaline,” and proceed to neutralize itself. Bicarbonate will make it say, “Oh, I see: we need more acid,” and do you further damage.

If you find this unconvincing, take heed of what happened one morning when, with a kingly hangover, I took bicarbonate with a vodka chaser. My companion said “Let’s see what’s happening in your stomach,” and poured the remnant of the vodka into the remnant of the bicarbonate solution. The mixture turned black and gave off smoke.

8. Eat nothing, or nothing else. Give your digestion the morning off. You may drink coffee, though do not expect this to do anything for you beyond making you feel more wide-awake.

9. Try not to smoke. That nicotine has contributed to your P.H. is a view held by many people, including myself.

10. By now you will have shot a good deal of the morning. Get through the rest of it somehow, avoiding the society of your fellows. Talk is tiring. Go for a walk, or sit or lie about in the fresh air. At eleven or so, see if you fancy the idea of a Polish Bison (hot Bovril and vodka). It is still worth while without the vodka. You can start working on your M.H. any time you like.

11. About 12:30, firmly take a hair (or better, in Cyril Connolly’s phrase, a tuft) of the dog that bit you. The dog, by the way, is of no particular breed: there is no obligation to go for the same drink as the one you were mainly punishing the night before. Many will favor the Bloody Mary, though see my remarks on this in the Drinks section. Others swear by the Underburg. For the ignorant, this is a highly alcoholic bitters rather resembling Fernet Branca, but in my experience more usually effective. It comes in miniature bottles holding about a pub double, and should be put down in one.

The effect on one’s insides, after a few seconds, is rather like that of throwing a cricket-ball into an empty bath, and the resulting mild convulsions and cries of shock are well worth witnessing. But thereafter a comforting glow supervenes, and very often a marked turn for the better. By now, one way or another, you will be readier to face the rest of mankind and a convivial lunchtime can well result. Eat what you like within reason, avoiding anything greasy or rich. If your P.H. is still with you afterwards, go to bed.

Before going on to the M.H., I will, for completeness’ sake, mention three supposed hangover cures, all described as infallible by those who told me about them, though I have not tried any of the three. The first two are hard to come by.

12. Go down the mine on the early-morning shift at the coal-face.

13. Go up for half an hour in an open aeroplane, needless to say with a non-hungover person at the controls.

14. Known as Donald Watt’s Jolt, this consists of a tumbler of some sweet liqueur, Bénédictine or Grand Marnier, taken in lieu of breakfast. Its inventor told me that with one of them inside him he once spent three-quarters of an hour at a freezing bus-stop “without turning a hair.” It is true that the sugar in the drink will give you energy and the alcohol alcohol.

At this point, younger readers may relax the unremitting attention with which they have followed the above. They are mostly strangers to the M.H. But they will grin or jeer at their peril. Let them rest assured that, as they grow older, the M.H. will more and more come to fill the gap left by their progressively less severe P.H. And, of the two, incomparably the more dreadful is

THE METAPHYSICAL HANGOVER

1. Deal thoroughly with your P.H.

2. When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is, and there is no use crying over spilt milk. If this works, if you can convince yourself, you need do no more, as provided in the markedly philosophical

G.P. 9: He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.

3. If necessary, then, embark on either the M.H. Literature Course or the M.H. Music Course or both in succession (not simultaneously). Going off and gazing at some painting, building or bit of statuary might do you good too, but most people, I think, will find such things unimmediate for this— perhaps any—purpose. The structure of both Courses, hangover reading and hangover listening, rests on the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim.

*

HANGOVER READING

Begin with verse, if you have any taste for it. Any really gloomy stuff that you admire will do. My own choice would tend to include the final scene of Paradise Lost, Book XII, lines 606 to the end, with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624–6. The trouble here, though, is that today of all days you do not want to be reminded of how inferior you are to the man next door, let alone to a chap like Milton. Safer to pick somebody less horribly great. I would plump for the poems of A. E. Housman and/or R. S. Thomas, not that they are in the least interchangeable. Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum is good, too, if a little long for the purpose.

Switch to prose with the same principles of selection. I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is not gloomy exactly, but its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate in no mood of self-pity.

Turn now to stuff that suggests there may be some point to living after all. Battle poems come in rather well here: Macaulay’s Horatius, for instance. Or, should you feel that this selection is getting a bit British (for the Roman virtues Macaulay celebrates have very much that sort of flavor), try Chesterton’s Lepanto. The naval victory in 1571 of the forces of the Papal League over the Turks and their allies was accomplished without the assistance of a single Anglo-Saxon (or Protestant). Try not to mind the way Chesterton makes some play with the fact that this was a victory of Christians over Moslems.

By this time you could well be finding it conceivable that you might smile again some day. However, defer funny stuff for the moment. Try a good thriller or action story, which will start to wean you from self-observation and the darker emotions: Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, Gavin Lyall, Dick Francis, Geoffrey Household, C. S. Forester (perhaps the most useful of the lot). Turn to comedy only after that; but it must be white—i.e. not black—comedy: P. G. Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Captain Marryat, Anthony Powell (not Evelyn Waugh), Peter De Vries (not The Blood of the Lamb, which, though very funny, has its real place in the tearful category, and a distinguished one). I am not suggesting that these writers are comparable in other ways than that they make unwillingness to laugh seem a little pompous and absurd.

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Excerpted from Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis by Kingsley Amis. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Kingsley Amis. 

I love drinking in America. They don’t have restricted alcohol measurements like they do in the UK or those other countries where people dying is considered a negative thing. In a country where you can buy an assault rifle over the counter and that profits off health care, why on earth would they limit how much alcohol you can pickle yourself in?

There isn’t a tipping culture in the UK. You can tip.

Most people do. You’re a wank if you don’t. It’s about ten percent. The employees don’t rely on them in the same way Americans do. American bartenders need tips because their minimum wage doesn’t cover shit.

Australia’s minimum wage is something like 40 bucks an hour and that’s why they give the worst service in the entire world. Take a seat, America, I’ll get back to you. Aussies, you’re up, you lazy fucking bastards. Christ, you suck at service. I don’t care who you are in Australia, that applies to every single one of you. You suck at service because you’re spoiled. You don’t need tips to live, so you put an almost French level of effort into hospitality. You don’t fear your customers because you don’t really need them.

You’ll get to them within an hour or two. If you’re polite, it’s because you’re a nice person. You’re choosing to be polite. If you’re having a shit day, you’ll more than happily take it out on my dining experience, as if I’m the reason your dad never hugged you. The great thing about Aussies is I don’t even have to end this tirade with “But I still love Aussies” because they won’t give a shit. They can take a punch and give it right back. Unlike you bitchy little Yanks. Yes, back to you. In America, servers need tips to live. I don’t like this, but it does mean the service is excellent everywhere. That, coupled with most Americans being lovely, means their service staffs are the friendliest on the planet.

I go into a bar. I order my gin and tonic because I have the drinking palate of an 85-year-old widowed woman. The bartender then pours gin into a glass. Not some. Not a bit more than usual. Fucking half. Half gin, half tonic. That’s not what a gin and tonic is, you psycho. That’s not a drink. That’s a commitment.

I’ll still drink the drink, obviously. I’m Scottish. I’m thrilled at this turn of events. That’s three times the normal measure of gin I’m used to, and it’s the same price. So of course I tip heavy. I’ll double it. What great service.

That’s my first mistake. The bartender looks down at my five-dollar tip and thinks to him- or herself, Holy shit. Five bucks. I love this guy. I’ll keep an eye on this little millionaire. I drink my gin and tonic. Like a man. Yes, like a man.

All you beer-drinking losers are too macho to admit that beer tastes like a thousand sweaty buttholes. You sit there throwing shade at real men, like me, who down cocktails. You’re too fragile and too proud to admit that fruit tastes better than wheat. Drink for drink, I’ll floor you. You do a beer, I’ll do my pornstar-martini, and I promise you, you’ll die. End of you. RIP, bitch.

I’ll finish my gin and tonic and order another one. The bartender sees my raised hand, comes down, and goes “Oh, this bloke. The big tipper. Ol’ Fish and Tips. Tippy Longstocking. My best friend. I’ll give him a bigger measurement, as a thank-you for the big tip.”

American bartenders need tips because their minimum wage doesn’t cover shit.

I then watch this murderer fill the glass three-quarters of the way with gin and then splash in some tonic. I sit there thinking, Oh, my God. This guy is a legend. That’s far too much gin. I’ll have to give him another big tip as a thank-you, and then give him a thumbs-up to signal that he’s nailed this measurement, and not to deviate from said measurement. I’ll also squeeze 90 limes in there to dilute the taste and stop my scurvy from getting any worse than it already is. I tip another three dollars, so that maybe next time he doesn’t pour as much gin.

Then this greedy little man sees the three dollars’ worth of tip and thinks, That’s still triple the normal tip amount. I still love this man. I will look after him. He’s drinking to forget. I choke back this 75 percent gin, 15 percent tonic, and ten percent ice over ten minutes. I’m tipsy. I’ve basically had eight British gin and tonics. My brain doesn’t register the difference. I’m in denial. I can’t be drunk after two drinks. If I was, I’d never be allowed back in Scotland. Babies who hadn’t even walked yet would spit at me from their strollers. Their first words would be homophobic slurs.

I order my third. The bartender, who would now literally die for me, pours an entire glass of gin. All the way to the top. Plops in some ice and then bends down and whispers the word tonic into the glass and hands it to me. I then choke an entire lime into this glass like it owes me money. It’s a Sour Patch Kid glass of suicide at this point. Still booze, though, so I’m not turning it down. Never. I tip another five dollars because at this point this guy is running his bar at a loss. I’m tipping to make him stop. Please stop. Just make normal ones. I don’t have the strength to say no. His mind is blown that I’ve tipped again. I shit you not, this professional will then give me a free drink. I’ve tipped so much, 13 dollars, that he now has to buy me one. Whether it’s just a free round or whether he pours me a shot and does it with me. As if we’re friends. We’re not friends. My real friends would never make me drink pure gin. I am scared of this man and I drink through sheer pride and fear. I have now consumed three times my normal consumption of alcohol in four drinks. All for less than 50 dollars. Madness.

I then wake up two days later, wondering why I still give Americans shit when it comes to their drinking culture. I still do, though. You pussies.

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Excerpted from EVERYONE YOU HATE IS GOING TO DIE: And Other Comforting Thoughts on Family, Friends, Sex, Love, and More Things That Ruin Your Life by Daniel Sloss. Copyright © 2021 by Daniel Sloss. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

It seems incredible now that it used to be normal—almost part of the job description—to get drunk at work, to have convivial lunches and schmooze clients. Drinking even took place in consultants’ restaurants in hospitals and in senior common rooms in universities. My life as a junior hospital doctor in the 1970s was spent either on the wards or in the hospital bar. Every hospital had one consultant who would regularly be unfit for action because of being drunk. In one of my first senior resident jobs in a top London hospital, I once found a senior professor collapsed on the floor. As I tried to get him up and into an office, the professor of medicine walked by, saw him lying there, sighed, “Oh no—not again!” and helped me carry the incapacitated prof to his office to sleep it off.

During my first stint on a Medical Research Council grant panel in the 1990s, they served wine at lunch. Though not everyone drank, I suspected that grant scoring was more lenient in the afternoon—unfairly for the morning grants. After a few of us pointed this out, the alcohol was discreetly removed from the menu.

Long lunches still happen in some industries but they are for high days and holidays celebrations and vacations, not the everyday norm. Now most industries are dry, at least during the daytime, and in hospitals drinking is a dismissible offense. The reason for this is obvious—alcohol impairs performance. But also, lunchtime drinking has become unfashionable, so there’s social pressure against it too.

In Japan, there’s still a tradition that you seal a business deal with alcohol, and drinking after work with your colleagues is seen as obligatory. You must never leave the bar before your boss, which is why workers stay overnight in tiny hotel rooms built just for this purpose.

In China, which now consumes half of the trillion-dollar-a- year global alcohol market, celebratory drinking at meals with the shout of “Kampai!” is standard (or at least it seems to be when I am there). I find avoiding getting drunk at every meal the most challenging aspect of being in China, even more so than the language barrier.

In the US as in many countries, companies now use booze as a bonding mechanism, with Friday happy hours and team drinks and, of course, the classic Christmas party. The fallout from those has probably led to more Dry Januaries than any other factor.

It does seem that companies are going to have to become more creative and less alcohol-focused with their after-work activities since the advent of #MeToo and the fact that fewer people now drink. That includes ex-alcoholics as well as those who’ve chosen to go sober and people who don’t drink for religious reasons, such as Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

According to one US survey, one in three people (35 percent) preferred not to drink alcohol at work events. Sixteen percent said they drank at them despite not wanting to, and 12 percent pretended to drink in order to fit in. The biggest morning-after regrets of those who did drink? Revealing personal secrets to colleagues (14 percent) and complaining about work-related issues to the boss or coworkers (13 percent). Nine percent said they embarrassed themselves by getting too drunk and eight percent said they “engaged in sexual activity with a coworker.”

Which brings us to the morning after. Have you ever spent a day slumped at your desk, achieving barely anything? People reckon they are around 40 percent less productive when hungover. The Atlantic reports, “Excessive drinking costs the US economy more than $220 billion—or about $1.90 per drink, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which studies the negative externalities of alcohol consumption each decade. Seventy-two percent of the costs came from lost workplace productivity, according to the 2006 survey, which suggests that the economic drag from hangovers is about $160 billion.”

A review of 19 studies by the University of Bath has shown that it’s your sustained attention—concentration and focus— that’s hardest hit by a hangover. Your memory is also affected, both short- and long-term, but the problem is in making memories, rather than retrieving them.

It sounds obvious, but hangover symptoms are dose-dependent. Australian researchers—who Breathalyzed subjects, then tested their memories—found those whose brain function was the most impaired had had the highest blood alcohol concentrations the previous night too.

In short, if you’ve got a hangover, you won’t be doing your best work. So you might as well spend the day in bed (though it may be hard to get a doctor’s sick note)!

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Excerpted from Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Health by Professor David Nutt. Copyright © 2020. Available from Hachette Go, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.