I wrote recently of the Hangover Heaven bus that tours Las Vegas with blacked out windows, a rack of intravenous drips and a credit card machine.
For $99 - around £65 - about you can have a shot of Redemption - a litre of IV fluid laced with vitamins, while sufferers in New York can dial up the IV Doc for a similar service.
Neither plan to come to Scotland where options tend to be less high tech. The impressive-sounding Glasgow Hangover Service merely offered a fast-food delivery with gallons of Irn-Bru for those too ill to shop. Ironically, the drink still feted as a mystical hangover cure was once endorsed by the temperance lobby as an 'invigorating tonic' and manly alternative to alcohol.
All such remedies including Irn-Bru were dismissed by Frank Kelly Rich in an article on hangovers that concluded that there was no cure. "How do I know this?" asked Rich, founding editor of America's Modern Drunkard magazine, "because if it did the person who invented it would be richer, better known and infinitely more beloved than Bill Gates. There'd be a statue of him in your town square."
Feeling the same way, I was sceptical when Dhruv Trivedi, an Indian entrepreneur, invited me to test out his magic potion in a Glasgow bar two weeks ago. Would it just be Irn-Bru by another name? I wondered, but the prospect of free booze and simple curiosity won me over. Trivedi claimed to have isolated every symptom from dehydration to skull-splitting headaches and found a natural remedy for each one.
His inspiration had been a monster hangover in his home city of Mumbai which almost cost him his job and led to him to set up a life sciences company and launch his Anti-Dizz! hangover cure in India. On moving to Glasgow to join its Entrepreneurial Spark business program, he realised the name would have to change. As there's no medical definition of a hangover here you cannot claim to cure it.
So was born Kangaroo Bounce Back - a citrus-flavoured powder that dissolves in water. I drank a glass after a good five pints, and left the bar feeling sufficiently merry to miss the last train home which meant the bus and crashing out at 2am. The next day I didn't exactly bounce out of bed, but there was no headache, dizziness or nausea. Had I just met the next Bill Gates?
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