NOW THAT THE NEW millennium has cracked and I've finally learned how to spell it, I find myself pondering the ultimate secret of the universe, a seven-letter word for a wingless bird, and why man can travel 230,000 miles to the moon and back without so much as a single flat tire but still cannot find a cure for the common hangover.

The answer to the first, of course, is "42," and the second is "apteryx," but for the third, all I've come up with so far amounts to little more than "I don't know" and "have you tried pickled eye of sheep?"

I remain convinced that hangovers are the Almighty's vengeance for Adam and Eve's turning the apple from the Tree of Life into cider or a particularly vile sort of Calvados - or maybe He just overslept on Day Seven and got up on the wrong side of the bed.

Whatever, hangovers have been inflicting torment on us for a considerable length of time, even longer than Ruby Wax, "Friends" or Bill Clinton's second term. In fact, history's first recorded bender - and inevitable morning after - was logged by Noah, no doubt the result of being cooped up for 40 rainy days running with a nagging wife and three squabbling brats and having to clean the cat boxes aboard his ocean-going zoo.

In the dozen or so millennia since, mankind has perfected the art of speech (if not always the intelligence to go with it), developed the printing press, split the atom and invented light bulbs and cars and airplanes and toilet paper that doesn't skid. But hangover remedies have progressed little beyond the "cup of coffee and pray for death" level.

Let it be said here and now that my personal interest in this matter is purely academic - oh, well, with maybe just a touch of schadenfreude (kraut for having a good old case of the jollies over the miseries of others, particularly ones who invented daylight saving time or nicked the last parking space on your street).

Verily did I, in my halcyon days, devote considerable funds, evenings and effort into keeping the good lairds of the Scottish whisky industry in castles, kingly estates and kilts of finest tartan. But those days ended abruptly seven years back when my liver packed up its gall bladder and threatened to leave home, and my pancreas turned into a pitted pile resembling a slab of moon rock.

There have been moments since when I have definitely felt the need for such spiritual sustenance - trying to get unlost in the maze that passes for a one-way traffic system in Basingstoke, England, for example, or contemplating my brand-new Ford as it tottered on four stacks of bricks that thieves had thoughtfully put there to replace the four wheels they had removed and sent to new homes in Scotland.

But I have resisted temptation, not so much through any grand exercise of willpower as in the fervent desire not to be told a second time in a hospital bed that I had about 24 hours to live, give or take six minutes or so. The prospect of the gallows or guillotine in any form, as Charlie Dickens or someone once wrote, does concentrate the mind wondrously.

In my case, a hangover served as a useful reminder that I must have had a really good time, even if I couldn't remember a lot of the minutes or sometimes the hours. Otherwise, I tended to regard hangovers as a bit like being tarred and feathered - if it weren't for the honor of the thing, I'd just as soon pass.

But if I were still drinking today, I might be sorely tempted to quit, on grounds that most cures look infinitely worse than the disease. If the hangover remedies now on offer are intended to terrify, they are certainly succeeding.

If you tie one on in Outer Mongolia and are unfortunate enough to wind up in the hands of the local experts in hangover treatment, you can expect to be handed a pickled sheep's eye in a glass of tomato juice and told to knock it back in a couple or three gulps. Which may be a hair of the dog less horrifying than drinking tea made out of rabbit doo-doo, as cowpokes, cattle thieves and patrons of the Dead Man's Gulch saloon used to do.

Things are a little less draconian in Haiti, where the favorite voodoo rectifier of boozy mistakes is to stick 13 black-headed pins into the cork of the bottle that got you blasted in the first place. Puerto Rican boozers shake off the shakes by rubbing half a lemon under their drinking arm.

And thus has it ever been. In the Middle Ages, serfs, yeomen and lords and ladies alike drank to forget the agonies of the Black Death and King John's wretched tax policies and the problems of getting a decent meal down at the local MacGruel's, and their cure for the head-splitting aftermath was to pop a handful of bitter almonds into the mouth and chase it down with raw eels.

A few centuries more on the books didn't bring much of a change for the better. In 19th century London, the resident chimney sweep - "The Smoke," as it was and is still known, and for good reason - sobered up by downing warm milk laced with - what else? - soot.

There is the ever-popular "hair of the dog" theory that suggests simply drinking more of the same stuff the morning after that had left you feeling like death warmed over after the night before. One expert describes this as a myth only slightly larger than Sasquatch or the Loch Ness monster and suggests "you would be just as well off putting ice cubes up your butt."

And the list goes on and on - figs and oranges and an effervescent thingie called Guronsan and raw oysters in tomato juice and warm Coca-Cola and a huge meal of cheeseburgers, fries and a milk shake while watching a movie on TV.

My own choice, had I been capable of it after a night of chasing down cognacs and scotches with schooners of champagne or Uncle's own foxglove and gladiola wine or anything else that poured freely, would have been to pray for a route passing "GO" without any attempt at a hangover cure and proceeding directly to the analgesic arms of death, or at least a reasonably lengthy coma.

As it is, my morning sun shines on a hangover-free zone. But the price I am condemned to pay is never finding out what happens when you mix Southern Comfort with crème de cacao or whether a really dry martini can be properly constructed by running nude through the kitchen waving a cork lightly dampened with vermouth.

Thought for the Week: If the shoe fits, get another one just like it.

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