Paul Thomas: Brief ray of hope for those working hangover sufferers

COMMENT

Drinking, like everything else, is subject to the tides and mysterious sea changes of fashion.

Now that television personalities, the ersatz celebrities of our women's magazine culture, have taken to sharing their tastes in booze with us, it's safe to assume that drinking is a cool thing to do.

True, it's not drinking as those of us who made the acquaintance of John Barleycorn before the dawning of the Wine Age remember it.

One of the clearer memories from my hazy days at Auckland University is of a drab little man who frequented the public bar of what was then the Inter-Continental Hotel.

He stood at the bar for hours at a time, cocooned in Mark Richardson-like concentration, downing Lion Red. Fascinated by his sheer relentlessness, we sought details from the bar staff, who claimed he put away up to 22 quart bottles a day.

I don't suppose there are many people nowadays who consume 20-odd litres of beer on a daily basis and fewer still who would regard that as admirable.

Beer swilling on an epic scale is associated with shabby attitudes and obesity, and there's nothing less cool than a fat redneck.

Except for single malt whiskies with unpronounceable names, spirits are also out of favour. Those old mixes - scotch and soda, brandy and dry, rum and coke - are now largely confined to RSA halls, bowls clubs and caravan parks.

As for fortified wines - your ports and sherries - well let's just say they're the tipples of choice of those unfortunates who sleep on park benches and hump their worldly possessions around in plastic bags and leave it at that.

When you're offered a drink these days, the choice is more than likely to be red or white. But whether it's a frisky pinot gris or a big, buttery chardonnay or an unruly brute of a Barossa shiraz, wine has the same drawback as every other alcoholic beverage: you can have too much of a good thing.

Hangovers are deeply unpleasant experiences. George W. Bush, who by all accounts used to give it a decent nudge, woke up with such a shocker a dozen or so years ago that he went on the wagon there and then.

Some of us would have settled for six glasses of water and an early night, while others might have resorted, in extremis, to the hair of the dog. Bush, as we now know, isn't one for half measures.

A ray of hope shone on past and future hangover sufferers last week when the news broke that an anti-hangover device, a dietary supplement called RU-21, is about to hit the market.

I've previously questioned the scientific community's tendency to pander to cranks and faddists and health bores who regard social occasions as minefields to be tip-toed through. You know the sort of thing: New research indicates that starting the day with a bowl of lightly stewed dandelions increases life expectancy by up to 7.2 years.

At last, I thought, the boffins have come up with something really useful, something that will benefit normal, fallible people leading normal, fallible lives.

Forget tax cuts, Dr Brash: making RU-21 easily affordable would do a damn sight more for the nation's productivity than any amount of macro-economic tinkering.

This bubble of optimism was resoundingly burst by an article in the English newspaper the Guardian. A reporter who had test driven RU-21 came to the conclusion that it only works if you don't drink too much.

Maybe, he wrote, RU-21 is for successful, motivated people who want to drink a glass or two of wine and get up bright and early the next morning to do yoga.

What sort of mad world are we living in when years of research and millions of dollars are devoted to producing a Claytons anti-hangover pill?

Someone should tell these clowns that a hangover is not a reluctance to get out of bed at the crack of dawn to engage in unbecoming bodily contortions and pseudo-spiritualism.

A hangover is waking up with the feeling that the Mike Tyson of the woodpecker world has taken up residence inside your skull. A hangover is having a mouth with the texture of pumice and the taste of a burnt-out rats' nest.

A hangover is wave after queasy wave of nausea surging through your already fragile system.

We're talking about a disorder that plagues countless decent people from all walks of life and it's high time the medical and scientific establishment started taking it seriously.