It's time to curl up with a nice cup of tea.. and the Bagthorpes. Photograph: Sarah Lee.
A really bad hangover can only be dealt with in stages. There is a lot of groaning to get through. There is that first, crucial cup of tea to be drunk. There is fried food - or at the very least a slice of toast - to be eaten. There must be more tea. And then there is the retreat to bed.
This is the stage at which some sort of reading matter becomes essential. How else can guilty thoughts of the night before - dammit, the year before - be kept at bay? The radio is TOO LOUD. The television is TOO BRIGHT. The internet is TOO CONFUSING.
Obviously the choice of book is crucial, and severely limited by certain physical constraints - if you can lift your head off the pillow for more than five minutes then you haven't really got a hangover, have you. So you can leave that Pynchon on the bedside table - it's too heavy. Those Penguin Classics are going to have to stay on the to-read pile as well - the print's too small. Surely any kind of thriller is going to be too energetic - explosions, running about and hanging chapters are hardly the thing to set you up for a nice snooze.
Suggestions from a bleary-eyed arts desk include children's books, Pride and Prejudice (only if you've read it before) and Helen Cresswell's Bagthorpe Saga, but what do you think? What literature can help conjure a happy new year from the wreckage of last night?
