The Usurer's Tale?

Definitions (from the Cobuild dictionary, compiled in Birmingham):
Hangover:
1 If someone wakes up with a hangover, they feel sick and have a headache because they have drunk a lot of alcohol the night before.
2 Something that is a hangover from the past is an idea or way of behaving which people used to have in the past but which people no longer generally have

As the grey dawn of the New Year broke I recalled, while progressing towards Canterbury some years ago, finding an apparently centuries-old manuscript. Taking the form of a coarse lament and dedicated to a close friend named Geoffrey, it seems that the writer, at least without further support from a higher power, is still disinclined to reform his errant ways in the New Year:

Abed at noon,
ill-slept and indisposed
to rising yet.
And yet ten hours have passed
since last
my reddened eyes saw light.
Pulsating head indeed exceeds the beat of racing heart.
Oh me! And how
my troubled bowels
do vent their airs of grace devoid
(and needs must I avoid their pungent path!)
And as to work,
upon my soul I shall not shirk
one day of toil,
lest I forfeit a quenching cup
of grape’s intoxicating oil.

My researches suggest that this rough verse may have been written by someone in a much reduced, distinctly sub-prime condition, used to extravagant living on the ill-gotten proceeds of money lending. In the spirit of a New Year let’s hope nonetheless that he completed his journey and, however reluctantly, gained enlightenment and regained his senses in a transformation from which the whole of society would benefit. And let’s hope as well that in 2009 we shall all suffer fewer headaches and live in less interesting times!