Just a quickie, this one.
One of my favourite, silly little anthologies, probably now lost (I have several boxes of books - jumbled, unknown - in storage with old college friend, The Egregious Dr P, but I fear I am unlikely ever to be reunited with them; and the vast majority of my library was abandoned long since) was a little paperback called The Hangover Handbook. [Oooh, thank heavens for Amazon! I think this is it - somebody please send me a copy.]
It's a random mix of literary excerpts (including Kingsley Amis' famous account of a hangover in 'Lucky Jim' - often reckoned to be the best literary description of the experience - which includes something like: "a small, furry creature had somehow crept into his mouth during the night, and died there."), hangover 'cures', and odd tidbits of information from around the world.
The French, I was charmed to learn, use the idiom 'guèle de bois' ('wooden snout') to describe this condition.
Better, better by far, though, was this - from Norway, I believe (Scandinavian readers, please forgive me if I have misattributed the country or horribly corrupted the language - I am working purely from decades old memory here):
jeg har tommermen
Which means - "I have carpenters in my head."
Such a vivid phrase! I'm not sure that I have ever felt that myself, not even on the hellish occasion I recounted in my last post; but I can so readily imagine what it must be like.
[At least it could, I suppose, be better than having Carpenters' songs in your head, which is what we so often suffer at unwanted times here in The Unnameable Country!!]
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