With Christmas and New Year out of the way, your body thought it was over the most demanding time of the year. Well guess what? It was wrong.

Chinese New Year is upon us and with it all the gan bei-ing of Yangjing and, even better, bai jiu that goes with it.

To help readers through round three of the festive season BJW has compiled a list of hangover "cures" that may or may not be of use.

1. Hair of the Dog: straight down the pub for another pint or two. Some say this only delays the effects of the hangover, even so it can get you by if you have something important to do. So long as the people you are dealing with don't mind you smelling like George Best on a match day.

2. A fried breakfast: it's kill or cure time as you cook or order up a plate of protein, carbohydrates and amino acids, all held together by lashings of grease. If you can keep it down for an hour afterwards then all's well in the world, if not, its re-emergence can be an uncomfortable experience. Not for the faint hearted.

3. Chemical cures: Alka-Seltzer or Resolve do a grand job, but unfortunately they are not too widely available in the capital's yao dian. Try a couple of soluble aspirin in glass of water with a fizzy Vit-C tablet and some salt and sugar to help replace those electrolytes. You can use this to wash down a vitamin B complex tablet that will help your poor old liver. Not too natural, but then neither is necking loads of alcohol till the wee hours.

4. Bloody Mary: Tomatoes provide antioxidants while the vodka does the hair of the dog bit. As for Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco, who knows? You deserve a drink if you can keep this down.

-Vodka

-Dash of lemon or lime

-Worcestershire sauce

-2 or 3 drops Tabasco sauce

-Salt and pepper

-Small bottle of tomato juice

-Serve with ice

5. Banana shake: After caning your body with booze, your potassium and magnesium levels are dwindling, luckily bananas have these minerals in abundance. They are also loaded with fructose, which will help replace sugar. Shake form makes them much more digestible.

- 1 x Banana

- 1 x raw egg

- Spoonful of honey

- Half a pint of milk

- 1 x crushed wheat breakfast biscuit

Blend and enjoy

6. The hangover pill: Developed in Russia and much talked about in the Western press, there's something decidedly moody about this product that is yet to be endorsed by governments but widely available online. At your peril.

7. Water: Remember this? Yes, that clear stuff you couldn't get enough of in the summer. Widely available in taps and shops, a litre before bed will do wonders for you the next day. Some people go for a glass for every drink they have had that night, but after a night of "Gan bei-ing" that could take forever.

8. Exercise: It is said that a few laps round the block the next day gets everything working and processing all that nasty stale alcohol quicker. Trials show it often leads to reoccurring drunkenness, a banging headache and projectile vomiting.

9. Sneaky beaky: Prevention is better than cure so they say, so why not impress your friends with your drinking ability, by making a point of going to the bar a lot where you order drinks like, shandy, coke or lemonade for yourself? While they look like the strong stuff, you are in fact re-hydrating yourself while vastly improving your street cred. Your body will love you for this too.

10. Marriage and Children: Nothing ruins a social life more than these two, and while you think you are missing out on all the good times, consol yourself with the cosiness of home life and the fact that you don't have to do any of the above on a regular basis.

Simon Farnham

(China Daily 01/20/2006 page14)