You drunk the wine and now you must pay the price. There is a headache, there is a headache on top of the headache, and it’s got a headache of its own. All you want is to sit still and let the headaches fight it out, until there’s only the alpha-headache for you to deal with, but you can’t. You can’t because there is stuff to be done.

So much stuff.

Things were broken, damaged and disarranged. While you were enjoying the heady wine they seemed like trivial things. There would always be wine, there would never be morning, all problems would be resolved.

Now there is no more wine, only morning. The problems have not been resolved. Everywhere you look there is ruin. “Traitor” has been carved into your antique writing-desk. That’s there forever now. No amount of polishing is going to remove that. Ornaments and knickknacks have been smashed to pieces. Strange how saddening that is. They’d been around so long that you’d really stopped noticing them, but they were yours and now you suddenly appreciate how much nicer they made living here.

No time to mourn, though, everything has to be sorted out quickly. There’s a deadline looming. It’s like that time you threw a teenage party the night before your parents were due back from holiday. Christ, what were you thinking?

Oh god! What has someone done on the TV? The filthy animal!

No time to dwell on it. It’s time for the Marigolds and the sturdy bin-bag. Just stuff things in, no time to worry about whether what you’re hastily discarding is repairable or valuable, you just have to clean up.

God, this would be a lot easier if you didn’t keep remembering all of the crap that the wine made you say last night. Did you really make those plans? Was everyone as drunk as you? Are they really going to expect you to do those things?

Fuck! That Lancaster House speech! What were you thinking?

Block it out. Stuff things into bin-bags with extra force. Just throw everything away, you can always say you’ve de-cluttered, de-toxed, gone back to basics…minimalist. Yeah, you can make that sound like a choice, rather than just an outcome.

Right, there’s no way that room is ever going to be the same again. Perhaps you could just close the door on it and pretend it was never there. Hey, that might work for that bedroom as well. Sure, the house will be smaller, but you might be able to manage the bits that you live in.

That really was one hell of a party, but this is 2018, the year of the hangover.