Oh, the horror of a full-on, head-splitting, stomach-queasing hangover. Think of all those mornings (or afternoons, even) when you've stepped gingerly out of bed, vowing never to allow alcohol across your lips again. Maybe Oscar Wilde was poised to take the pledge, after too many party scoops, when he noted that nothing succeeds like excess.
Our pledges of abstinence don't quite work, of course. We're nearly all recidivists, breaking the common-sense rules about booze time and again. So what really helps to minimise the pain? "Two pints of water and two multivitamins before you go to bed," my teenage daughter said the other day, with the disconcerting air of One Who Knows. There's no doubt that copious amounts of water work wonders, not just at bedtime but in between drinks all evening long to counter the severely dehydrating effects of alcohol.
Some doctors argue that a dose of vitamins - B and C particularly - helps to hasten post-party recovery. Others, including Dr Stephen Murphy, a Dublin GP interviewed recently about hangovers on the Pat Kenny Show, say you can't do much better than retire with a pint of water, laced with a pinch of salt and a couple of spoons of sugar.
One doctor who believes it is possible to improve on this formula for morning-after survival is Dr John Bott-Walters, the English scientist who developed Get Up and Go with Verve in conjunction with the Dublin company Beeline Healthcare. This anti-hangover product - a citrus-flavoured powder that you drink, dissolved in a glass of water, last thing before going to sleep - won the Best New Product 1998 award from Superdrug in Britain.
Containing sugar, salts and various amino acids, it apparently helps the liver to process excess alcohol into harmless molecules, rather than relying on analgesics such as aspirin and paracetamol (beware of mixing these with alcohol, by the way) merely to mask the effects.
I have a sachet of Get Up etc at my bedside, ready to test in the highly likely event that, one of these fine evenings, I'll drink a tad too much. It's £3.99 for a pack of five, from major supermarkets, pharmacies and Beeline Healthcare's new shop on the Hibernian Way off Grafton Street.