Through a Glass Darkly

But roll less than in my whirling head

The green gem of absinthe deep in the glass

Where I drink perdition and the thunder

Of the Lord's judgement to roast my naked soul

- Antonin Artaud, from Verlaine Drinks, undated poem

Got tight on absinthe last night. Did knife tricks.

- Ernest Hemingway, from a letter to Guy Hickok, 1931

Artaud was possibly overdoing it a bit, but I know what he meant. I'm not feeling at all well. My hands are shaking, my eyes are raw. Either I really have had holes drilled into my temples or I'm paying severely for drinking last night. Or rather, for what I was drinking last night.

Toulouse-Lautrec carried it around in a hollow cane; Alfred Jarry referred to it as holy water. Paul Verlaine, the absinthe drinker's absinthe drinker, greeted strangers shouting 'I take sugar with it!' Jarry's description was apt: the reverence that so many 19th and early 20th-century artists and writers held for absinthe was almost religious. A roll-call of their names would illustrate perfectly the bohemian cult of the period, as well as the central role played by this powerful emerald liquor. Its combination of aesthetic appeal and psychotropic properties - handy if poetry was your thing, convenient if your visionary painting wasn't what it used to be - made it a useful tool, tightly bound to a mythology of doomed genius: the cliché of tragic but inevitable self-destruction. In other words, dying fairly horribly and before your time. Verlaine's tempestuous relationship with the young Rimbaud was soaked in the daily ritual of absinthe consumption which they found essential to invoke the fantastic visions of their poetry. (Rimbaud gave up all three for good after Verlaine shot him during a particularly moody binge, but still didn't make it to 37.) Picasso's Blue Period was possibly a result of the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas who shot himself in a bar - and a reflection of the colours of the drink in which he subsequently sought solace.

Although it was the Swiss who invented absinthe, it was France that adopted it as a national symbol; during the 1840s soldiers in the Algerian war had been issued it as a fever preventative. When they returned home they took the taste for absinthe with them. By the turn of the last century absinthe was a cultural phenomenon, no longer restricted to Parisian artistic circles. At 5pm - officially known as the Green Hour - the cafés and bars of Paris were packed with people sipping la fée verte (the green fairy). Absinthe bars became popular throughout Europe and America.

Absinthe's fall into disrepute was slow but steady. By 1912 it was banned in Belgium, Switzerland and the USA. Momentum gathered for change to the law in France after a particularly grisly murder trial, in which absinthe was judged to be as guilty as the accused. An age of decadence and political upheaval had found a scapegoat. Absinthe disappeared as the First World War loomed, all protests overshadowed by the unprecedented carnage of modern warfare.

Absinthe is the only liquor ever to be singled out for prohibition. While its ruinous reputation was trumped up by over-zealous abstainers, there is scientific evidence of its unusual effects. The combination of its alcohol content - traditionally 144º proof, stronger than almost any other spirit - with the herb wormwood causes a chemical reaction not dissimilar to marijuana. Though little is known about how it actually works, the essence of wormwood is thujone, which is pharmaceutically categorised as a convulsant poison. If this doesn't sound bad enough, consider the following from the biblical revelations of St John: 'And the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter'. Ponder the strange fact that the Russian for wormwood is chernobyl and you may feel the need to become a committed absinstheur to cope with the effects of millenniumosis. And now you can: for the first time in around 60 years absinthe is available in Britain. Those sedate folk who brought you The Idler magazine, working with an importer under the collective name 'Green Bohemia', are supplying bars and individuals with an absinthe from the Czech Republic.

Hill's Absinth brings with it a ritual from Prague that, dare I say it, smacks of another narcotic preparation. Pour a measure into a glass, dip in a spoonful of sugar, ignite, admire the pretty blue flame that drips back into the glass as the sugar caramelises, douse with a shot of water to cool, and sip. Whoever invented this technique knew a thing or two about marketing: the feeling of being involved in an illicit activity adds immeasurably to the business of drinking something that initially reminded me to book a dentist's appointment, before not being able to remember to do anything very much at all. The effect was quite interesting. An initial warm inner glow was followed by a feeling that my eyes could see that bit further around the sides of my head than usual. Some people at this point feel a slight wave of aggression or mild irritation, but this is swiftly replaced by a sensation that's, well, a bit trippy. (Or, as Oscar Wilde put it, 'the first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things'. Well, he would put it like that, wouldn't he).

The real marker of my first absinthe session came the morning after. There are mild hangovers and there are bad hangovers, and then there is the absinthe hangover. I remember waking and feeling as though someone had been rubbing shards of broken glass on the backs of my eyes while I was asleep. I couldn't construct a concrete thought, let alone a sentence - I was distinctly under the weather. There's nothing new or extraordinary about being hungover; one tends to have recovered in time for cocktail hour the next day. The trouble with absinthe is that the wormwood toxins absorbed from a few generous measures stay in the body for up to three days. That's three days. That means going for a drink the next evening and feeling utterly wasted again after a mouthful. In my case, that was a day and following night of shivers, sweats and cramps; in other words, basic alcohol poisoning.

Could drinking absinthe inspire those who feel their creative flame has dimmed? Maybe, although given the quantities of alcohol regularly consumed by those caught in the gravitational swirl of the art world, I doubt it. It may possibly inspire very bad poetry, some rather over-elaborate painting and a few mediocre novels. There's ample evidence of how an affair begun gazing into absinthe's opalescent depths can end - from now on, I will treat it with a certain amount of respect. No guzzling, no fancy home-made cocktails, no having a fifth to be sure the fourth worked. And no knife tricks.