Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick

One of the most powerful books I’ve read this year, Dick’s science fiction classic is a thought provoking observation on empathy and what it means to be human.

In a future world devastated by nuclear war, Rick Deckard is a licensed bounty hunter employed by the state to ‘retire’ renegade androids; exact breathing replicas almost indistinguishable from human beings, created as slaves for the off-world colonies.

Deckard’s ultimate goal is to own a real animal, now incredibly rare after the World War Terminus, and his mission to kill off half a dozen Nexus-6 androids is inextricably bound to his desire to replace the electric sheep on his rooftop with a living, breathing goat.

With most items now synthesised or modified, even comestibles we currently take for granted are incredibly rare or impossible to obtain. Alcohol features only twice in the book, but the poignancy of a glass of Chablis or bottle of bourbon made before the WWT and the subsequent radioactive dust is almost crushing.

Deckard’s mission almost comes unstuck when he starts to empathise with his quarry and even believes it possible to fall in love with an android. The beautiful Rachel Rosen flies down from Seattle to San Francisco to meet him in a hotel room, bringing a special gift in a paper bag:

She held out the paper bag. “I bought a bottle. Bourbon... It’s worth a fortune, you realize. It’s not synthetic; it’s from before the war, made from genuine mash.”

The effect on Deckard is intoxicating:

He sipped the bourbon; the power of it, the authoritative strong taste and scent, had become almost unfamiliar to him and he had trouble swallowing. Rachel, in contrast, had no difficulty with hers.

But that’s because Rachel, being an android, can feel nothing...

London's Best Pubs by Peter Haydon

A quick foray back into non-fiction this week for Peter Haydon’s beautifully produced guide to London’s most interesting and unusual pubs. I include it because it contains not one but two pictures of my favourite pub cat, Tom Paine at the Seven Stars, but also a rather fine historical introduction to the public houses of London.


Descended from coaching inns, taverns and alehouses, the London pub as an institution has changed considerably over the last few hundred years. Back in the 1700s, for example, the drink of the tavern was wine, until wars with France conspired to disrupt supply. Portugal came to the rescue:

Our long-standing friendship with Portugal meant that port was the popular tavern drink of the 18th century. Consumed as it was in very large volumes, port can be considered largely responsible for having made the 18th century the era of gout and the skull-splitting hangover.

William III’s policy to wean the population off wine popularised gin instead. He succeeded only in making the nation drunk. Indeed, until this point, alcohol wasn’t really considered particularly harmful:

...with gin came the revelation that there was an alcoholic drink that was actually bad for people.

After the gin fevers of the 18th and 19th centuries came the Temperance movement and drink as a political issue. London’s taverns, gin palaces and inns have been shaped by licensing acts, brewery speculation, social mores and trends and have arrived in the beginning of 21st century as unique and remarkable public spaces. Haydon describes them thus:

For me, the chief virtue of a pub is that it can almost anything you want it to be. Provided you do the landlord the courtesy of buying a drink you can stay as long as you like, be as gregarious or reticent as you like and be as idle or as studious as you like. You can enjoy the company of all or engage in solitary reverie. You can talk to strangers, make lifelong friends, catch up on gossip, commit to memory a cracking good joke for later use, hold forth on any subject close to your heart and leave whenever you wish (within opening hours, of course). The pub is egalitarian, libertarian, non-judgemental and subversive. For these reasons alone, I rate it as priceless.

He helpfully includes an excellent quote from Dr Johnson, regular at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese:

No, Sir, there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

I’ll quite happily raise a glass to that.

Wilt by Tom Sharpe

I hadn't read Tom Sharpe since I was at school so there was some reassurance in finding that Wilt, his satire on education, women’s liberation and the sexual revolution, was just as I remembered him. It's a bit dated now, but once it gets into its stride parts of it are still hilariously funny. There are a lot of references to rather outré sexual practices, as in all of his books, and plenty to booze, which gets it an entry here.

Downtrodden at his dreadful lecturing job (he is employed by a technical college to teach The Lord of the Flies to apprentice butchers, plasterers and gas fitters) and henpecked by his wife Eva, Henry Wilt dreams of asserting himself, if only he knew how. While he fantasises about killing Eva he has no idea how by going to a ghastly barbecue party things conspire to make it look like he’s actually got his way.

The Pringsheims, a visiting chemistry professor from America and his bonkers wife, have invited Wilt and Eva round to their little soiree. Unfortunately, neither realise that Sally Pringsheim has designs on Eva, and is prepared to stoop to any level to get her away from her husband. Wilt doesn’t help himself by drinking a little too much punch at the party:

In the end he looked into a large bucket with a ladle in it. Half an orange and segments of bruised peach floated in a purple liquid. He poured himself a paper cup and tried it. As he had anticipated, it tasted like cider with wood alcohol and orange squash.

Despite initial misgivings, he has a bit more:

Wilt stood in the middle of the garden and finished his third drink. He poured himself a fourth...

Drunk and suddenly cornered by Sally Pringsheim, he finds himself taken upstairs where Sally produces a bottle of vodka:

‘Oh, Henry, you’re so perceptive,” said Sally, and unscrewed the top of the vodka bottle... She swigged from the bottle and gave it to Wilt. He took a mouthful inadvisedly and had trouble swallowing it.

What follows is a disastrous set of events involving public humiliation with an inflatable sex doll, a thirty foot deep hole and twenty tons of concrete...

Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding

Famously starting each entry with a run down of the day’s consumption of calories, cigarettes and units of alcohol, Fielding’s book captured the lives of unmarried thirty-somethings so astutely that it’s now a publishing byword for books aimed at the same demographic.

The eponymous heroine starts the year with great intentions to eat properly, get a boyfriend and to drink less, but pretty soon on into 1995 things are beginning to slip. Not only has she got involved with a complete bounder, but he’s giving her the run around. There is only one course of action which is to get thoroughly drunk with her friends, leading to the inevitable the next day:

8 a.m. Ugh. Wish was dead. Am never, ever going to drink again for the rest of my life.

8.30 a.m. Oooh. Could really fancy some chips.

11.30 a.m. Badly need water but seems better to keep eyes closed and head stationary on pillow so as not to disturb bits of machinery and pheasants in head.

The course of true love never running smooth, Bridget finds herself back with the cad. Unfortunately, he’s also engaged to someone else. This new revelation leaves her needing the support that only good friends and hard spirits can provide:

Went immediately to Tom’s, who poured vodka straight down my throat from the bottle, adding the tomato juice and Worcester sauce afterwards.

As Bridget bumbles from one minor setback and humiliation to the next, she approaches Christmas, a season in hell for the singleton. The round of parties and get-togethers seem designed to point out her miserable status, as well as play merry hell with her alcohol intake:

For ten days now have been living in state of permanent hangover and foraging sub-existence without proper meals or hot food.

Never mind. Things turn out fine in the end and she finishes the year in the arms of Mr Right...

The Reason Why by Cecil Woodham-Smith

One of the most popular histories of the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade, Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why focuses on two the main protagonists in the debacle; George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan and James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan.

Woodham-Smith describes how the ‘purchase system’ allowed both of these stubborn and inexperienced aristocrats to rise to positions of command by buying their way through the ranks. Pushed out of one regiment for his bullying and autocratic behaviour, Cardigan was put in charge of the 11th Hussars where he used his own money to turn the regiment into a stylish and flamboyant outfit. He achieved some degree of success in this, despite dissent from some of his officers, a situation that led to the ‘black bottle’ affair.

Cardigan’s main beef was with the ‘Indian’ officers, men who had gained proper military experience while the regiment had been stationed in India. They resented his pushiness and his use of the 11th to show off to London society. He thought their conduct unbecoming. Nothing they did was right, not even what they drank in the mess:

In India it had been the custom for officers to drink porter – it was healthier and cheaper. To this the lieutenant-colonel furiously objected. Porter was the drink of factory hands and labourers, and he wished to make the 11th famous for its splendid hospitality, for he loved the pomp and ceremony of ‘great’ dinners. He forbade bottled porter to appear on the mess table.

General Sleigh is invited to dine with Cardigan’s regiment and he entertains him extravagantly with a formal do in the mess. All is going swimmingly until one of the guests asks for an alternative to champagne. An ‘Indian’ officer called over for a waiter:

General Sleigh’s aide asked if he might have Moselle instead of champagne, and John Reynolds gave the order to a mess waiter, who, anxious to supply the wine at once, did not stop to decant it, but placed it on the table in its bottle. At this moment Lord Cardigan looked down the table, and there, among the silver, the glass, the piles of hot-house fruit, he saw a black bottle – it must be porter!

Cardigan was transported with rage. This upstart officer, an ‘Indian’ to boot:

...was drinking porter under his very nose, desecrating the splendour of his dinner table. When it was explained that the black bottle contained Moselle, he refuse to be appeased; gentlemen, he said, decanted their wine.

One of the lieutenant-colonel’s muckers is sent around the next day to remonstrate:

“The colonel had desired me to tell you,” said Captain Jones, “That you were wrong in having a black bottle placed on the table at a great dinner like last night. The mess should be conducted like a gentleman’s table and not like a pot-house.”

Well, standards have to be maintained...

A Partial Indulgence by Stephanie Theobald

A phantasmagoria of excess and high-art, Theobald’s novel is a riot of indulgence, from food, to sex, to good painting, and of course, alcohol.


High society art dealer Charles Frederick de Vere leads a life of debauchery and opulence but his extravagant existence is quickly unravelling, haunted by his shady past and the death of his lover. As he slowly descends into his own personal hell, his former companions; Boston tough-cookie Carmen and wild spirit Cosima, niece of his childhood friend Ellsworth, drift in purgatory styled as a country home, soaking up ‘pre-meds’ that taste of red wine.

Freddy’s first meetings with Cosima are at Ellsworth’s country pile where the talented artist is knocking out forgeries for the London market. He cooks her eggs and caviar while tantalising her with the French dish of Ortolan:

“Tiny song birds from France. Illegal to eat. You lock them in a box, gorge them on figs and then drown them in Armagnac... You’re supposed to put a cloth over your head when you eat them. To keep in the fumes.” He drinks. “But mostly to hide yourself from the eyes of God.”

However Cosima and Ellsworth are now long dead and Carmen looks set to join them. The increasingly spooked de Vere looks back on his life and his school days with Ellsworth, who appeared one night with a bottle of claret looted from his father’s cellar:

He was holding a bottle of wine. On the label I could see a large letter ‘V’, a golden laurel and the words: Mouton Rothschild 1945 – L’Année de la Victoire. “They blather on about Château Petrus,” he said, starting to open the bottle, “But the day before I go to hell I shall drown my sorrows in a bottle of Mouton ’45.” When he’d pulled the cork out he smelled it. “Still a trace of death,” he said, tossing it into the fire.

The wine leaves a bad taste in Freddy's mouth:

My stupor at the richness of the taste was heightened by the fact that there was something almost disgusting about the wine. “Horrible, isn’t it,” Ellsworth said, his eyes filled with glee. “Funny that they call it victory wine,” I observed. “Why funny?” He frowned. “Why should victory be a pleasant flavour?”

Why indeed? Ellsworth’s penultimate act is to open a bottle of Mouton ’45 on the night he commits suicide...

Twelve Step Fandango by Chris Haslam

Be careful what you wish for. Martin Brock, a lowlife drug dealer working the Costa del Sol, dreams of a motorbike and a big stash of cocaine that will set him up for life and get him away from his home in a ruined Spanish hill castle and his crazy German girlfriend, Luisa. Then both the bike and the charlie turn up on the same day...


It’s fair to say that Martin’s use of recreational drugs and drink might have hampered his ability to make the right decision in a crisis. The day a runaway Parisian drug mule arrives with his ticket to a better life, he’s already fuddled:

Within the space of ninety late-afternoon minutes I had snorted up a quarter gram of coke, smoked an eighth of that blinding kif, and then knocked back half a pint of 80-proof home-grown aguardiente. It was reasonable to expect that I might be feeling a little off-centre...

When the Frenchman dies, Martin discovers an unbelievable quantity of very good cocaine hidden on the man’s bike. Now set for the big time, there’s just one thing to sort out; informing the unfortunate man’s next of kin. Who just might know what their lad was up to and want their property back.

Before long, Martin realises that he’s a very small fish in a very nasty pond. Desperate to get shot of the haul, he’s persuaded to go to Cadiz to meet with a contact who might be able to shift the drugs. Having hidden the cocaine in a ruined farmhouse, he’s out of toot and trying to wash away the twin horrors of jangled nerves that need cocaine and travelling with the equally irritable Luisa by drinking more fire water:

I necked the shot and left them... feeling light-headed, unsteady and frustrated as I stumbled into the lamplit alley. Something unravelled deep in my gut, blinked and belched an acid spray against my colon, sending my knotty quadriceps into spasm and causing my knees to tremble. I stood for a moment with my brow pushed against the cool glass of a milliner’s window, blaming my pain on that last glass of aguardiente.

He’s in a mess, and he knows it:

Too much alcohol had been consumed in too short a time as a result of there being no cocaine available to make life more bearable.

Unfortunately for Martin, things are just about to get a lot, lot worse...

An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David

A legend in food writing, Elizabeth David arrived back in Britain in 1946 to find food severely rationed and olive oil only available from the chemists. She put her reminiscences of the food she’d enjoyed in the Mediterranean into her first book, Mediterranean Food, which appeared in 1950, followed by volumes on the food of Italy and provincial France.

David is rightly remembered for her writing as well as her cooking and An Omelette and a Glass of Wine is a delightful compilation of journalism and recipes that first appeared in The Spectator and Vogue among other publications.

In the article that gives the book its name, David sets out a simple philosophy for enjoying food and wine, in this case a cheese omelette and a glass of white:

I like white wines with all cheese dishes, and especially when the cheese in question is Gruyère. No doubt this is only a passing phase, because as a wine drinker but not a wine expert one’s tastes are constantly changing. But one of the main points about the enjoyment of food and wine seems to me to lie in having what you want when you want it and in the particular combination you fancy.

Of course, you may choose to finish your meal with a dessert, perhaps an apricot tart, washed down with something sticky:

The custom of drinking a little glass of rich wine with a sweet dish or fruit seems to me a civilized one, and especially welcome to those who do not or cannot swig brandy or port after a meal... The musky golden wine of Beaumes – according to Mr Asher, and I see no reason to quarrel with his judgement, ‘its bouquet is penetrating and flower-like, its flavour both honey-sweet and tangy’ – and the sweet apricots, vanilla-sugared on crumbly pastry, made an original and entrancing combination of food and wine.

I will finish with her memories of Norman Douglas, an old friend of David’s, whose South Wind I am eyeing up for a future post:

There, at a table outside the half-ruined house, a branch of piercingly aromatic lemons within arm’s reach, a piece of bread and a bottle of the proprietor’s olive oil in front of me, a glass of wine in my hand, Norman was speaking. ‘I wish you would listen when I tell you that if you fill my glass before it’s empty I shan’t know how much I’ve drunk.’

Sage advice indeed.

Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will by David Levinson

I picked up the habit of choosing books by their titles far too long ago for me to shake it now and Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will originally fell into that category, but this remarkable collection of short stories made me wonder if there was some sense in the practice after all.

A parade of perpetually disappointed characters gives plenty of scope for self destruction, and among all the other tribulations Levinson throws at his cast, alcohol pops up enough times for an inclusion here.

In A Perfect Day for Swimming, Kate Burnett travels down from New York to Austin to see her father, now living with his partner Howard and Howard’s two young sons. Kate, fleeing from the wreckage of a relationship that she’s just destroyed, decides that Sun, margaritas, and a heart-shaped swimming pool are just what she needs to recuperate. Sadly, her hard working and harder drinking father promptly derails that.

Thrown out of his home by Howard, Kate’s father eventually reappears after midnight on Christmas Eve, his truck abandoned on the highway where it’s run out of petrol. She finds him swimming naked in the pool, drinking Chivas Regal from the bottle.

He took a swig and passed me the bottle. I took one, too, a healthy gulp. The flavour of it, strong and medicinal, exploded in my mouth.

An expedition to get glue for a broken Christmas decoration gets hijacked as well:

“How about we stop for a teensy-weensy little drink to celebrate my daughter’s brilliance,”... Once inside it became clear my father was a regular.

But it is Christmas, so the barman gives them each a shot of peppermint schnapps:

We lifted our glasses, clinked in succession, and downed the schnapps, which tasted corrosive, like fermented mouthwash. I asked for a glass of water and a beer while my father ordered a scotch, neat...

As her father abandons her at the bar while he dances with a man no older than her, Kate reflects that they made it look so easy. It never is, of course, and Levinson’s controlled prose describes these little tragedies so well...

Jaws by Peter Benchley

The beach read you never want to read on the beach, Jaws is another book which has been eclipsed by the subsequent film, although in the case of Spielberg's first blockbuster, that's no disservice to the original novel. Benchley’s thriller was a bestseller when it was published in 1974 and it still holds up pretty well over thirty years later; remarkable, really, considering that one of the main characters is a fish.

Describing the plot feels a bit unnecessary, but for those readers who have somehow avoided Jaws all these years, here goes: large shark terrorises small town. Police chief Martin Brody tries to catch the shark with marine biologist Matt Hooper and fisherman Quint. Shark almost wins...

I had presumed that the film was a faithful interpretation of the book, but Benchley puts a lot more back story into the novel, including Brody’s wife’s disappointment in her marriage. Born into a rich family who summered on Long Island, she daydreams about what her life could have been if only she hadn’t married the local bobby. The arrival of the wealthy Hooper prompts her to organise a dinner party, a concept alien to her husband.

Uncomfortable having posh guests around, Brody starts hitting the rye and ginger and his wife has already told him to slow down by the time the wine is served. No expert on the grape, he isn’t entirely sure what he’s drinking:

He took the bottle of white out of the refrigerator, and as he uncorked it he tangled his tongue trying to pronounce the name of the wine: Montrachet. He arrived at what seemed to him an acceptable pronunciation, wiped the bottle dry with a dishcloth, and took it into the dining room... “A glass of Mount Rachet,” he said. “Very good year, 1970. I remember it well.”

Worried that the lamb is undercooked, half pickled in whiskey and downing the wine, Brody comes over all peculiar halfway through the main course:

He had started to chew a piece of meat when another wave of nausea hit him. Once again sweat popped out on his forehead. He felt detached, as if his body were controlled by someone else. He sensed panic at the loss of motor control. His fork felt heavy, and for a moment he feared it might slip from his fingers and clatter on to the table. He gripped it with his fist and held on. He was sure his tongue wouldn’t behave if he tried to speak. It was the wine, it had to be the wine.

After the disastrous dinner party, catching the great white shark is a piece of cake...

The Wee Book of Calvin by Bill Duncan

A hilarious exploration of the North-East of Scotland, The Wee Book of Calvin analyses the people of the region through their language and behaviour with particular attention paid to all things dour...


Of course, no book on Scotland can omit its most famous alcoholic export, Whisky. Uisge beath. The water of life:

‘Freedom and whisky gang thegither’, according to Scotland’s national Bard. In the North-East, wild mood swings, gratuitous insult, physical and verbal abuse of strangers, imagined slight, self-injury, false bonhomie, spontaneous singing of Frank Sinatra songs in a broad Dundonian accent, delirium tremens, unwanted sexual attentions, incontinence, unaccompanied public dancing, indecent exposure, memory blackout, insolvency, uncontrollable facial tics, temporary loss of motor functions, social ridicule, divorce, sexual dysfunction, random violence, a face prematurely ravaged by thousands of ruptured blood vessels and whisky gang thegither.

Duncan gives a potted history of distilling in Scotland, before ruminating on some of its more unfortunate side effects, exemplified by some horrifying newspaper headlines gleaned from the local press:

Each instance of fracas, disorder and alcoholic mayhem accompanied by the tired litany: ‘The accused had been drinking heavily... the accused had no recollection of the incident... a history of alcohol-related offences.’

He leaves us with a treatise on the hangover, with its age-old trinity of sin, guilt and self-loathing. The hangover, his uncle once explained to him, is the yin to whisky’s yang:

...as a Calvinist he recognized The Hangover as a necessary moral device, balancing polarized cosmic forces in a zen-like harmony, each moment of pleasure tempered by the certainty of its opposite.

Or to put it more simply:

The hangover – yer payment fur havin a guid time.

Blazing Saddles: The Cruel and Unusual History of the Tour de France by Matt Rendell

Sports writing would not seem to be the obvious place to look for drinking in literature (cricketing biographies aside) but the Tour de France is not a regular sporting event. The world’s most famous bicycle race began in 1903 and in over a century it has seen its fair share of drink, drugs, crashes and other disasters.

Rendell’s book is a glorious compendium of the tour, filled with anecdote and populated by giants of the cycling world. Naturally, sporting prowess is sometimes the door to excess, or at the very least a healthy appetite. Rider Marcel Bidon confessed years later that he would drink a half-bottle of champagne before each stage, and 1960s cycling legend Jacques Anquetil indulged in all number of dietary deviations, especially while on tour:

“To prepare for a race, nothing beats a good pheasant, champagne and a woman.”

That said, Anquetil probably overdid it on the Pyrenees étage of the 1964 tour when during a rest day he accepted an invitation to a ‘méchoui’ in Andorra:

...a traditional meal of lamb roasted whole on a spit. The solid food was accompanied by a drinking competition with his directeur sportif...

The next day, Anquetil started nervously...

Champagne wasn’t to everyone’s taste and most of the cyclists seemed happy to stick to beer. During the 1935 tour in an incident that would never happen these days (and more’s the pity in my mind) a sight for sore eyes appeared halfway through the race:

...on stage seventeen, from Pau to Bordeaux, in overpowering heat, the riders found beer bottles lined up at the side of the road, and declared a truce to sate their thirst. It was a well designed ruse by Julien Moineau, who rode straight past the beer and reached Bordeaux fifteen minutes ahead of the peloton.

Chapeau!

Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

Back to the beach and the sun lounger this week for the original ‘bonkbuster’, Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls.

Written on a hot-pink IBM Selectric Typewriter, Susann’s story of three young women and their misadventures in show business was dramatised in 1967 and is famous as one of the most unintentionally camp films of the decade. The adulterated screenplay and the dreadful acting manage to strip the story of all the grit of the original novel, which is a terrific read.

All three women suffer their fair share of woes: tragic Jennifer North commits suicide by overdosing on ‘dolls’ (the various uppers and downers that give the book its title), Anne Welles ends the book sinking into a barbiturate torpor while her philandering husband is fooling around with another woman, again, Neely O’Hara winds up destroyed by drink and drugs. Of the three, Neely is the only one with real talent; talent for singing and acting and dancing, but also for all out self destruction. Susann darkly hints at this right at the start. Neely’s the girl next door, a plucky kid who’s dragged herself up by her bootstraps:

Nothing bad could ever happen to someone like Neely.

By the time Neely has got to Hollywood, she needs uppers to wake up, to lose weight, and downers to sleep at night. And what the hell, they work faster with whisky:

She looked at the clock – midnight. The pills weren’t working. She needed some more Scotch to help them along... It was lucky she had learned booze helped the pills work... The dolls without booze were nothing. Well, she’d just have to go downstairs and get some more.

By the time that Neely is committed to a sanitarium, she’s bleary eyed, carrying around a bottle of Scotch and screaming curses at Hollywood.

Eventually she gets out, sober and clean of drugs, but within a year she’s back to a bottle of Scotch and two hits of Demerol a day.

She’ll make a comeback again – and again and again, as long as her body holds out. It’s like a civil war, with her emotions against her talent and physical strength. One side has to give. Something has to be destroyed.

Valley of the Dolls has recently been reappraised as being years ahead of its time. In that light, the real tragedy in this book is that forty years on in showbiz, nothing has changed at all.

Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard

I had the privilege of reviewing one of Elmore Leonard’s books a while back for the FT, so while leafing around the library looking for inspiration, I decided to pick up something from his extensive back catalogue.

Rum Punch is probably better known through Quentin Tarantino’s film adaptation Jackie Brown, which is a shame, because it’s a tightly written crime thriller that is more than worth investigating in its own right.

Odell Robbie sells guns to criminals, but his operation is under the surveillance of the feds and when they arrest Jackie Burke who ships his money into Miami from the Caribbean he’s under pressure to get her out of the picture, fast.

Unfortunately for Odell, some of his accomplices don’t work to his level of professionalism. Louis Gara, for example; a three time jailbird who knows Odell from Detroit. Louis has lost his edge since he’s been inside:

Four years staring at the walls and drinking shine, the man was burnt out, useless.

You see, in this business, you have to stay sharp:

Louis was thinking he should not drink rum. Or he should find a glass and have another one... He had started this afternoon in the bar at the Ocean Mall, Casey’s, hiding out from Melanie, thinking of her as a female cannibal. Bourbon this afternoon, rum this evening, nothing to eat in between...

So when the final pick up takes place and Louis has to get back to his car, he needs to remember where he’s left it:

Sometimes when he was living in South Beach and drinking a lot he’d forget where he parked and have to roam up and down the streets. He’d had a few pops this afternoon before he’d picked her up.

That kind of sloppiness will get you more than a hangover. Let’s just say, Louis doesn’t get to go to prison a fourth time...

e by Matt Beaumont

A rare example of a zeitgeist book that still stands up ten years after the initial hype, e is an epistolary novel written entirely in e-mails between various employees of dysfunctional advertising agency Miller Shanks.

It’s the first day back of the new year, 2000. Miller Shanks are after a contract with Coca Cola and the London office has two weeks to prove themselves. It’s a cinch - naturally the firm is staffed by professional creatives, not drunken buffoons still hungover from the Millennium jollies:

Our Millenniums in brief. Mine’s a total blank – woke up in a skip in Poplar at five am, 1 Jan, but had a spectacular view of the Dome as I leaned over the edge to puke. Vin was in Berlin and was so depraved he can’t bring himself to tell me what he got up to. On the way back he was gutted that the Y2K bug didn’t kick in and make the Airbus drop from the sky – figures the adrenaline rush would’ve worked wonders for his hangover.

The impending Coke deadline isn’t the only cloud on horizon. Half of the office are off to Mauritius to film an advert for ‘adult’ TV channel, LOVE. The team makes sure that they get to the airport safely:

What happened to you on Friday night? Did you get off with that Bosnian barmaid? Vin was so wasted he nearly didn’t make the flight. Had to put him through crash detox in the Heathrow club lounge.

After an imploding breast implant, heatstroke and a waterski accident do for the hired team of glamour models imported for the shoot, they film an advert that could have been made in the office car park back in London. Unfortunately not before the client manages to assault Gloria Hunniford, out in the islands filming a holiday programme. The press are on to them like a shot:

We’ve had the Sun snapper on our verandah taking shots of us through the window. Doesn’t look good – the contents of the mini-bar are scattered on the bed and Vin is comatose on the floor in nothing but a Fat Slags T-shirt.

If that sounds bad, wait until the Creative Director’s taste for ladyboys loses the firm the Coke contract...

Love Remains by Glen Duncan

Another recommend from a few years back, Love Remains is a beautifully written yet exceptionally bleak novel. A love story between two students, Nick and Chloe, is interspersed with scenes of Nick wandering around New York six years later in a near catatonic state.


Something has obviously gone seriously awry in Nick and Chloe’s lives and Duncan slowly builds up to the random and catastrophic event that has caused Nick to flee London for America and Chloe to be left for dead back home. On the run and convinced that the future itself has ended, Nick finds himself in a seedy bar in the Village, Scrimshankers, patronized chiefly by borderline and committed alcoholics. Mickey, the sadistic middle-aged widow Nick falls in with, contemptuously describes it as the sort of place where drunks to go to die.

A pub that most people would cross the road to avoid, Scrimshankers is the domain of Lancelot, another refugee from Britain, who props up the bar there and souses himself with whisky:

Again the drinkers pause... He drained his glass then knocked the empty on the counter. ‘Marty? Oi Marty yew fackin’ khant. Johnnie Red in there please – one cube of ice, mate, all right? Not your usual fucking avalanche.

Finding another ex-pat in the filthy bar, Lancelot starts to confide with Nick:

Lancelot rapped the counter with his solid knuckles and Marty delivered two more clinking tumblers of Scotch. Lifting his glass up to one of the bar’s weak overhead lights, Lancelot inspected its contents, coldly. ‘Doesn’t work now, you see,’ he said. Nicholas looked up at him. ‘Used to shut me up. Booze. Stopped talking.’

Like the boozers in Scrimshankers, there’s something poetic about the self-destruction in Love Remains, although I’d hesitate to pass the book on to anyone holding out hope for a happy ending...

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People by Toby Young

In 1995, journalist and co-founder of The Modern Review Toby Young left London for New York and a job at Vanity Fair. Somehow he lasted two years before his litany of bad behaviour, terrible work and general hopelessness finally got him the push.


How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is an amusing account of Young’s time in New York where he seemed to do his level best to annoy as many people as possible, seeming without trying. Perhaps part of the problem was that his alcohol intake appeared only to be matched by his penchant for cocaine, with disastrous results. I could quote whole chunks of the book verbatim for the purposes of 120 Units, but I’ve picked on one episode in particular when Young is sent back to London to do a photoshoot with New British Artist Damien Hirst.

Hirst turns up, with friends Keith Allen and Alex James in tow:

...at 11am on 7 December I rendezvoused at the Groucho Club with the photographer and we went upstairs in search of ‘The Boulevardiers’, as the three subjects had been dubbed... We found them in the billiard room nursing terrible hangovers. The bar of the Groucho hadn’t opened yet so I was immediately dispatched to buy a bottle of vodka. It was the first of many that they would consume over the course of the day.

After New York, even Young is surprised at the state his subjects are in:

I was quite shocked by just how unkempt ‘The Boulevardiers’ were... Even at 11a.m. they were bleary eyed and unshaven...They smelt as if they’d spent the night on the floor of the Coach and Horses, rolling around in dog ends... A better name for the three of them would have been ‘The Toxic Avengers’.

Needless to say, as the vodka flows and several grams of toot disappear up various nostrils, the shoot descends into chaos. Finally, the trio refuse to sign the release for the photos. Young reads them the riot act which, to his surprise, works. Well it seems that way at first:

In the end, Hirst relented and motioned for me to hand him one of the release forms. He scrawled what I took to be his signature and then handed it back. I thanked him profusely and then read what he’d written: ‘Suck my big dick’.

Words of warning to the rest of us: never work with children, animals or artists...

BRUTE! by Malcolm Bennett and Aidan Hughes

Promising Sheath-busting romance!!! Two-fisted action!!! and Hard-boiled adventure!!! this is a compendium of ‘pulp nasties’ from the cult BRUTE! comic book of the 1980s. The stories were highly stylised pulp fiction, loosely based on films and observations of contemporary British life, all illustrated by Hughes’s distinctive artwork and driven by hard talking dialogue.


An admirer of Hughe's work with rock band KMFDM, I first discovered BRUTE! through his website, then somehow tracked down this collectors’ edition second hand. I’ve never seen a copy since, so I’d rather this one didn’t get left in the pub... As it happens, the public house features regularly in the comics. This excerpt comes from the episode PAC-MEN!:

WANTED! P.A.C. – MEN! The Pub Action Committee NEEDS YOU! Enrol Today!

Unemployed Noska sees the ad in the job centre window. And applies!

“We are the Pub Action Committee and we are looking for good, war-waging commandos for our squad. We’re brutal messy cruel and vengeful. But we’re fair. We have to be. We’re talking ALCOHOL!”

Job taken! His mission? Recently people have been staying at home, not drinking:

“We must get these people away from the TV and BACK INTO THE PUBS!!!”

On his first night, Noska is sent out with the platoon:

“Right men!” barked the Squad Commander, resplendent in his Kronenbourg Combat Kit. “Let’s get out there! If anyone resists, subdue him and administer this!” He lifted a half-gallon flagon. “This is pure spirit, Gold Label and Scrumpy!”

But Noska’s squad find two old folk who won’t drink! His parents!!!

“Mum! Dad!” he croaked. “OH NO!” Noska’s parents were later committed to a new anti-TV. wing at the centre, while he was jailed for conspiring with known health freaks.

Now that’s a lesson to us all. OFFICIAL!!!

The Crow Road by Iain Banks

Starting, in my mind, with one of the best opening lines in contemporary literature - It was the day my Grandmother exploded - Iain Banks’ The Crow Road is the story of the McHoan family, mainly viewed through the eyes of youngest scion Prentice.


Tragedy and untimely death seem to stalk the McHoan clan; the exploding grandmother falls off a ladder in the beginning of the book, and the central story concerns the mystery of Prentice’s Uncle Rory, missing for many years.

There are glorious descriptions of alcohol throughout, and being a Scottish writer, Banks includes copious references to whisky. Flicking through the book I was spoilt for choice: In the end, I decided to pick a scene I recall very clearly from when I first read it back in 1996. Prentice has gone to a family party the day after Hogmanay, only to discover the his elder brother Lewis is now going out with Verity, the woman Prentice has lusted after from afar for years. Distinctly put out, he gets stuck into the booze:

I went through to the dining-room and helped myself to a pint of the neuron-friendly punch that Uncle Hamish always made for the event... We sipped - or in my case gulped - the weak but tasty punch, nibbled on Aunt Tone’s buffet-bits, and played Alternative Charades; an invention of my father’s in which one first has to guess the category of the thing one is being asked to decipher.

No easy task for a man who has rather rapidly got through a skinful of punch.

My last memory is of trying to mime Rare Gynaecological Disorders, preparatory to attempting Toxic Shock Syndrome. But apparently people insisted that one stand up to do one’s piece, and I - successfully acclimatised to the horizontal by this time - refused to pander to this sort of nit picking, and so passed my turn on to my Cousin Josh with as much good grace as I could muster.

Outrage is only moments away. Prentice, oblivious to the world by now, only finds out exactly what he said to his brother and his girlfriend, in front of everyone in the room, when his mother speaks to him the next day. She lets him have it chapter and verse:

I felt the blood draining from my neck like somebody had opened a valve in my ankle... “And I think we all successfully worked out what ‘doing the Delta Foxtrot’ was, as well, before you became totally incoherent.”

Prentice spends the rest of the day apologising and trying to recover with Irn Bru and spring water...

Never a Normal Man by Daniel Farson

Daniel Farson has been dead over a decade now and was long off British Television screens by the time I was watching regularly, so it was by chance that I happened upon a reference to him online. After discovering that he used to drink (a lot) in Soho in the fifties, I decided to inquire further and got this weighty autobiography out of the library.


Written when he knew he was dying, it is incredibly frank and self deprecating, sometimes to the point of distraction, but never for too long; Never a Normal Man is a most entertaining read. It begins while he is travelling in Istanbul, wandering around looking for rough trade and getting soused on raki, the clouded silver poison which propels you into the vicious circle where you need another raki to start the day and continue to oblivion and obliteration.

Not long after his national service he started as a photographer for Picture Post. Finding himself in Soho one morning, he had his first encounter with portrait photographer and artist, John Deakin:

As I waited for the pubs to open, a new experience for me which was to be repeated for the rest of my life, I was sure that something wonderful might happen. Soho exuded optimism; it was a land of anticipation sometimes realized. A man in dark glasses tried the door of the York Minster... Following him inside as the pub opened, I watched as ordered his first drink, downed it, shivered, and sighed with heartfelt relief. “That’s better.” As the York Minster, better known as The French Pub, began to fill up, I was startled to hear friends asking each other if they need to apologize for their behaviour on the night before...

This is his introduction to a man of whom, when he arrives on a visit, Farson says:

The phrase ‘fell out of a train’ is used lightly, but Deakin did so literally.

Soho in this period was full of such characters and he made lifelong friendships with Deakin and the painter Francis Bacon. Farson became a household name from his documentary television programmes, before giving it up to run a pub, which of course, lost him a stack of money. He finished up broke and living in Devon, away from the fading lights of the West End.

I have always been a lousy drunk, wild, euphoric and abusive after that beautiful preamble, and the terrifying thing is that I have not improved in forty years. If anything it has got worse with age, he writes, describing how his career was compromised by several court appearances for being drunk and disorderly. Nevertheless, it’s a remarkable autobiography by a remarkable man, now sadly vanishing from the pubic eye; the book appears to be out of print and my copy hadn’t been out of the library for a year.

Bodies by Jed Mercurio

I first came across Bodies a few years back when I was doing a stint as a judge on the first novel award panel for the Guildford Book Festival. It turned up as one of the debuts and I was impressed by the pace and the writing. It also has a rather gruesome passage about a street drinker which is one for the ‘pains’ and ‘perils’ of the 120 Units ethos.


The anonymous narrator is a junior doctor a hospital working in A+E. It’s hard edged stuff; mistakes are made, people die, a consultant’s competence is severely questioned although nobody wants to blow the whistle. The doctor’s affair with a nurse is written in the same visceral prose as the hospital episodes to disconcerting effect. Underneath it all is a pitch black gallows humour which seems at some points to be the only thing keeping the narrator going.

The book’s footnotes offer an opportunity for light relief, explaining various medical and non medical terms. One of the arrivals in A+E is described as an alky:

Alky: alcoholic (traditionally defined as a person who drinks more than their doctor).

The drunks in A+E are put into three categories:

PFO: pissed, fell over. PGT: pissed, got thumped. PDE, pissed, denies everything.

Amongst all of this, the street drinker comes in having vomited blood:

Maybe he once had a beer belly but it’s gone the way of the house and the wife and the clean clothes. His skin is white, his arms and legs bone thin. His abdomen creases in rolls, rolls of skin, not fat. A beard tangles over the lower half of his face streaked grey and clumped with debris. He can’t shave because of the tremors. I’m asking questions. Vomit breath stinks out the cubicle. “What colour was it? Was it food or liquid you’d taken down earlier? Was it dark green? was it red with blood? Was it very dark brown like coffee grounds?”... “Coffee grounds*,” he says as if he’s said it before. [*Coffee Grounds: the standard description of blood from an old gastric bleed (fresh blood is, of course, red).]

The man won’t make the end of the book, and neither will the narrator as a doctor. The jury still seems to be out as whether it’s a brave exposé of hospital practice or whether Mercurio is a jaded and bitter man who should never have gone into the profession on the first place. The novel ended up as second fiddle to a successful TV series, so criticism seems a little pointless now...

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

This entry came about after a discussion with my cousin about our mutual antipathy to Thomas Hardy which doesn’t exactly sound like a recommendation... However, I then remembered that the Mayor of Casterbridge opens with the infamous scene where a man sells his wife at auction while drunk, so I reckoned that for the purposes of 120 Units it was worth another look.


Field labourer Michael Henchard arrives at a country fair with his wife and daughter. Spotting the refreshments tent, is about to slip under the sign Good Home-brewed Beer, Ale, and Cyder when his wife insists that they go for a pot of furmity instead. In retrospect this might have been a mistake... Furmity is wholesome stuff; a mixture of corn in the grain, flour, milk, raisins, currants, and what not, but it’s a little dull on its own. Henchard turns back to the woman serving the slop and catches her eye:

He winked to her, and passed up his basin in reply to her nod; when she took a bottle from under the table, slily measured out a quantity of its contents, and tipped the same into the man's furmity. The liquor poured in was rum... The man finished his basin, and called for another, the rum being signalled for in yet stronger proportion. The effect of it was soon apparent in his manner, and his wife but too sadly perceived that in strenuously steering off the rocks of the licensed liquor-tent she had only got into maelstrom depths here amongst the smugglers.

Before long, Henchard is royally Brahmsed and starts to get argumentative with his wife. There’s a blazing row and he sets up an auction, finally selling her to a sailor for five guineas. Silence descends as the transaction is completed:

He rose and walked to the entrance with the careful tread of one conscious of his alcoholic load.

In the way of Nineteenth Century literature, Michael becomes hugely successful and eventually attains the title of Mayor of Casterbridge, but his shameful past comes back to haunt him. Finally ruined and reduced to vagrancy, Henchard leaves Casterbridge and dies in a hovel, leaving a brief will:

…no murners walk behind me at my funeral, & that no flours be planted on my grave, & that no man remember me. To this I put my name, Michael Henchard.

And one day I suppose I ought to read the rest of the book...

The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten

Rosten describes his book on language as a relaxed lexicon of Yiddish, Hebrew and Yinglish words often encountered in English, plus dozens that ought to be... An entertaining foray into Jewish culture, it’s filled with jokes, anecdotes and wit; a perfect book for bedside reading.


This is however a blog on booze, not linguistics, so I’m only quoting from one entry in the book: shikker.

1. A drunk. ‘He’s a shikker.’
2. (Adjective) Drunk. ‘She got a wee bit shikker.’

Rosten points out that in Jewish folklore and literature the souse is almost unknown but he does go on to say that the goodness of wine is frequently mentioned in the bible.

The rabbis also believed that wine possessed splendid curative properties: ‘Wine is the greatest of all medicines.’ ‘Where wine is lacking, drugs are necessary,’ Rabbi Huna said. “Wine helps to open the heart to reasoning.’

I’ll drink to that. Although Rosten then quotes an old saw:

When one man tells you you’re shikker, hesitate; when two tell you, slow up; when three men tell you – lie down!

I’ll leave with the obligatory joke at the end:

In the lounge of a Catskill resort, an hour before the dinner hour, Mrs Meckler asked Mrs Smelkin, ‘How about a cocktail before dinner?’ ‘No, thanks. I never drink.’ ‘No, why not?’ ‘Well in front of my children, I don’t believe in taking a drink. And when I’m away from my children, who needs it?’

The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall

The closest I have ever come to getting a tattoo was while reading Sarah Hall’s The Electric Michelangelo, a novel written with such beauty and detail of the art of tattooing that it’s almost persuasive.


Cyril Parks grows up in Morecambe in the early part of the twentieth century. With his natural gift for drawing, he is soon taken under the wing of the local tattooist (or ‘scraper’), Eliot Riley. Riley is a fantastic literary creation, and if I have any fault with the book it’s that he’s killed off too soon. A smooth tongued charmer, a brilliant tattoo artist, and a raging drunk, he agrees to take Cyril on as an apprentice, then proceeds to get him pissed at his local pub:

Four drinks into the afternoon Riley’s lessons were expanding, philosophically, and Cy was feeling a very dull and blurrish head on him, trying to keep up with his employer’s pace... As stout gave way to spirit, Riley proceeded onto personal matters.

Riley teaches Cyril his trade, and covers him in tattoos as well, but as Riley’s hell raising and drinking worsen, Cyril Parks becomes his guardian angel, the antidote to all the venom. It’s Cyril who gets him out of fights, rescues him from the outraged and the violent, takes him home when he’s collapsed drunk in a gutter. One night the pier catches fire and the looters move in before it finally burns to the ground:

...Riley and six other men sat drinking beer as fast as their oesophagus tunnels could convey it to their stomachs in the Pier Bar. Then just Riley, daft with alcohol and alone, pouring another glass of ale as the fire crept past him on the counter, singeing his jacket sleeve, until, hearing that some skinflint idiot was left inside the now-prodigal inferno, Cy ran in and screamed murder at Riley and called him Eliot and hit him for the first time in his jaw to get him to follow him out.

Riley, of course, pushes his luck too far, and one morning his working hand is mutilated by his enemies, and he is lost to his trade, and then to his life. He drinks himself to death, finally succumbing to a bottle of bleach he has stolen from a doorstep.

Cyril ups sticks across the Atlantic and moves to Coney Island, plying his trade as the Electric Michelangelo. And in the end, I never got that tattoo.

The Take by Martina Cole

Returning to a gangland theme, I recently picked up a copy of Martina Cole’s The Take, a story of organised crime and family betrayal from Britain’s best selling author. I was drawn to Cole by this fantastic interview in The Guardian ('The Booker prize money wouldn't even keep me in cigarettes') and finally got about to taking one of her novels out of the library.


The Take follows the life of career criminal Freddie Jackson, East End ‘face’ and drink and drug fuelled nutter. Freddie puts away the sauce, but not quite to the same degree as his long suffering wife, Jackie, who is slipping into alcohol dependency. Finally, it looks like Freddie has gone too far, even for Jackie. At eleven in the morning, self-destruction beckons:

She burped, and tasted the tannic cheapness of the wine, then she topped up the glass and drank once more. She need oblivion and she knew that today of all days it was not to be hers. This was far too serious to anaesthetise with wine or vodka. This needed brandy or even whisky.

There are some great descriptions of the ravages of booze throughout the book: A copper with the beer gut and the weather beaten look of a man who had drunk too much too soon, the electric pain of a hangover. Speaking of hangovers, there’s a cracking one when Freddy’s best friend wakes up after his stag night:

The night before was a complete blank, and he know that was how this was meant to be. He had been drinking brandy and port, a lethal combination, and he felt as if someone had hit him over the head with a billiard ball in a sock.

For all the heavy drinking and drug taking, the swearing and the ultraviolence, The Take is at heart a morality tale about hubris and nemesis. And I’m enjoying every minute of it.

Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson

A most glorious farce, James Hamilton-Paterson’s Cooking With Fernet Branca introduces Gerald Samper, (one of the Shropshire Sampers), biographer to the stars, dreadful singer, poisonous cook and all round ninny.


The dialogue is shared between Gerry and his ghastly neighbour Marta, an East European film composer. They have both opted for the seclusion of a mountain top in Italy and are none too impressed to find themselves living next door to each other. A minor war erupts in the Tuscan countryside, generously lubricated by Fernet Branca, of which Gerry says:

...a drink whose charm is discreeter even than that of the bourgeoisie, being black and bitter. I’d always thought people only drank it for hangovers.

That said, his initial antipathy soon dissolves and is replaced by references to the Branca brothers’ nectar. Marta is more cautious and refers to it as a rather insipid version of that galisya our hunters drink.

Fernet aside, I am grateful to Hamilton-Paterson for enlightening me as to the truth behind the champagne wasted on the podium at sporting fixtures:

Had you ever wondered why one of those famous houses like Möet et Chandon would permit what looks like a jeroboam of its Premier Cru Brut des Bruts to be shaken up and squirted to waste from a podium by spotty boys who clearly prefer Coke? Well I have... My great discovery was that nowadays there is a small concrete bunker by the entrance, an annexe labelled Dernier Cru Grands Prix Réserves containing specially large bottles kept exclusively for sporting events. Carefully guarded to ensure that none gets out onto the open market and into the hands of serious champagne drinkers, they contain very sweet Asti spumante imported from Peidmont with further addition of carbon dioxide and chemicals to produce the right explosive gush of bubbles for the cameras.

I’m rather glad that’s cleared up...

The Long Firm by Jake Arnott

I picked up Arnott’s The Long Firm from a bookshop not long after it was published and was highly impressed by this ambitious first novel which consists of five separate stories, all revolving around a fictional gangster, Harry Starks.


Of the five pieces, the longest, and to my mind the most impressive, follows the last few months of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, the man whose murder eventually caused the arrest and conviction of the Kray Twins.

A gun-for-hire for both the Krays and Harry Starks, McVitie is spiralling out of control in London’s underworld. Addicted to amphetamines and drinking heavily, his behaviour is increasingly unreliable and unpredictable. That said, everyone around him is wasted on speed and booze, it’s just McVitie is a hell of a lot worse.

Taken to a nightclub to see Dorothy Squires, Jack notices she’s been at the sauce:

Dorothy’s taking swigs from a bottle between numbers. Pretending it’s water, I suppose. It’s obviously booze. Looks like she’s had a few already. Harry looks a bit concerned. Unprofessional, he’d call it. “She’s pissed Jack,” he says a bit affronted.

Jack’s not exactly sober himself. He goes on to heckle Squires, then perform an impromptu striptease on the stage before getting thrown out of the club.

Arnott colours his book with the ugly side of the 1960s. Jack gets the brush off from Harry, who is going through his own crisis:

Winston Churchill on the gramophone when I go round to see Harry. Bad sign. Empty bottles of Stematol and Napoleon brandy lying around. Anti-depressants with cognac chasers, a desperate attempt to stave off his gloomy madness.

McVitie ought to know about desperation. He turns up at the Kray’s club thoroughly drunk with a badly concealed sawn-off shotgun under his jacket. He’s persuaded to leave:

Push myself off the bar. Nearly tumble over onto the floor. Stumble out.

Jacks’ number is about to come up. On 29 October 1967 he’s lured to a flat in Stoke Newington where the Krays are waiting. The last line in the story goes to Ron Kray: “Do him!”

The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe

A child of the '70s, I've always had a bit of a soft spot for the decade, even though I only made my appearance half way through. The Rotters' Club sits itself comfortably in the middle as well, dissecting this turbulent era through the teenage antics of four friends at a Birmingham grammar school.


Booze makes several appearances, including a passing reference to Blue Nun (!) but I’ve selected for the blog that teenage rite-of-passage, namely drinking too much from the drinks cabinet at a party where the parents are away.

Benjamin Trotter can remember consuming three quarters of a bottle of vintage port, and little else after that:

Benjamin awoke, opened his eyes, and noticed some peculiar things. Firstly, opening his eyes had made no difference. He still couldn’t see anything. Secondly, he was in excruciating pain. His back ached and he had cramp in both legs but this was small fry compared to the pulsing, shuddering pain in his temples, which periodically spread out in waves of unmitigated agony, making him feel that his entire skull was enclosed in a slowly contracting vice.

Having woken up in a wardrobe with a girl whose name he can’t recall and a blistering hangover, Benjamin remembers that it’s the first day of the new school year the next day, and as a school prefect, he has to go to drinks that very evening, despite the fact that all he felt capable of doing was having a long and much-needed vomit then crawling into bed to die.

He gets away with his hangover at first, hiding his drinks and doing his best to keep down the food. Trouble starts with the toast at the end:

Now, Mr Nuttall is going to pass around a bottle of the Founder’s Port. In keeping with a tradition going back to the eighteenth century, we shall all declare our loyalty to King William’s, and drink our glasses down in one draught.

The bathroom quickly beckons young Benjamin...

The Reeve's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer

I’m plundering the vault of my English A-Level again, this time for what is probably the most renowned work in the language. I actually had to learn The Franklin’s Tale, but I’ve picked on this one instead, as there are some nice references to drinking in it. (The text I have used here was adapted to Modern English by D. Laing Purves in the 19th century.)


The Reeve’s Tale is a direct retort to the infamous Miller’s Tale. Put out that in the miller’s story the character of the carpenter is cuckolded and made a fool of, the reeve, himself a carpenter, responds in kind. The yarn he spins is of how a robbing miller is duped by two Cambridge students whom he has originally set out to deceive. The students, knowing full well that the miller is giving short measure for the corn that he’s milling, attempt to catch him in the act of fiddling the sacks, however, the canny old miller lets their horse loose and they spend all day trying to find it. Returning at nightfall, they offer to pay the miller for bed and board. Persuaded by their money, the miller sends out for strong ale at the best, and the miller, his wife and daughter, along with the students, drink themselves into a torpor.

Well had this miller varnished his head;
Full pale he was, fordrunken, and nought red.
He yoxed, and he spake thorough the nose,
As he were in the quakke, or in the pose.

His wife is also pissed:

As any jay she light was and jolife,
So was her jolly whistle well y-wet.

The whole lot take to their beds, the miller snoring from both ends:

This miller had, so wisly bibbed ale,
That as a horse he snorted in his sleep,
Nor of his tail behind he took no keep.

The bawdy finale to the story involves the students managing to bed both wife and daughter and knocking seven bells out of the miller. Thus, concludes the reeve, have I quit the Miller in my tale.

Dombey And Son by Charles Dickens

I have to confess that this is the only Dickens that I have read in its entirety, and that was during a fevered four day reading session when it appeared as an A-Level text. A while back, then....


Dickens, by all accounts, used to keep a well stocked cellar, but I can only recall one particularly boozy episode in Dombey And Son, the second marriage of Paul Dombey to the widowed Edith Granger. The staff at the wedding party start early:

One of the very tall young men already smells of sherry, and his eyes have a tendency to become fixed in his head, and to stare at objects without seeing them. The very tall young man is conscious of this failing in himself; and informs his comrade that it's his 'exciseman.' The very tall young man would say excitement, but his speech is hazy.

And continue in a similar fashion after the nuptials:

All the servants in the meantime, have been breakfasting below. Champagne has grown too common among them to be mentioned...

As is the way of these things, the party is over all too quickly. The bride and groom depart for their honeymoon, and normality must return downstairs. The hangovers are in the post already.

Giddiness prevails below stairs too. The very tall young man whose excitement came on so soon, appears to have his head glued to the table in the pantry, and cannot be detached from it... Mr Towlinson has a singing in his ears and a large wheel going round and round inside his head. The housemaid wishes it wasn't wicked to wish that one was dead.

Alas, the marriage ends in disaster and Dombey is ruined! However, with typical Dickensian plotting, somewhere around the 900th page, Dombey is reunited with his estranged daughter and happiness prevails.

Fitzrovia: London's Bohemia by Michael Bakewell

The lure of biography is hard to resist and I’ve returned to the genre with a short set of ‘character sketches’ published by the National Portrait Gallery on London’s Fitzrovia set.


West of the Tottenham Court Road and north of Oxford Street, Fitzrovia was London’s bohemian enclave in the first half of the Twentieth Century. It was also chock full of bars and drinking clubs. As Bakewell puts it in his introduction:

It was essentially a pub culture, fuelled by drink and conversation...

He also points out:

Much of the story of Fitzrovia is of talent blighted, promise unfulfilled and premature death through drink.

I’ve picked on two of the book’s characters for this entry; Dylan Thomas and Aleister Crowley. Although it was his lungs that killed him in the end, Thomas put back an astonishing amount of sauce in his time – he referred to his drinking sprees up in London from Wales as ‘capital punishment’ – and for a long time it was thought that the booze was to blame for his death at 39. He was employed by the BBC after the second world war, something they might later have had cause to regret:

As his reputation as a poet grew the talk and the drink steadily took hold and the poems grew fewer and fewer. He became increasingly unreliable, taking advances for projects that were never fulfilled. The BBC were bombarded with increasingly desperate demands: ‘ADVANCE IMMEDIATELY... I owe every tradesman in town.’

Edward Alexander ‘Aleister’ Crowley, the self-styled ‘Great Beast’ and ‘Baphomet’ was an occultist, magician and fraud. A sinister character, the Fitzrovians didn’t really know what to make of him. He ended his days in Hastings, and his funeral in Brighton was a blasphemous spectacular that shocked the Corporation into an edict of ‘never again’.

He employed alcohol, sex and all manner of drugs as gateways to his excursions into the astral plane. Inevitably he left behind him a trail of destruction, disciples, wives and the ‘scarlet women’ who assisted him in his conjurations were likely to end up insane or alcoholic or both.

I feel I shall be visiting this fascinating group of people again...

Tom Brown’s School Days byThomas Hughes

The ultimate public school novel, Tom Brown’s School Days follows Thomas Hughes’s eponymous hero through his education in the 1830s, much of it taking place at Rugby School under Doctor Arnold.


So far all very worthy, and not too much about drink, although flicking through the book, I was amused to see the boys drinking beer. Probably of the ‘small’ variety. Anyway, it’s Flashy the school bully and his exploits I was looking for. Later resurrected by George MacDonald Fraser for an excellent series of novels, Flashman is a toady and a creep who after persecuting Tom Brown and his chum ‘Scud’ East all term, finally goes to far and ‘roasts’ young Brown over a fire. (Boo, hiss!)

Flashy is first encountered on the rugger field, playing the game in a most ungentlemanly fashion. Later at supper, the head of the winning team stands up on the table to make a truly gushing speech, firstly about how well the team played (hurrah!) then to impart a word of warning about the vices available in the local boozer.

Then there's fuddling about in the public-house, and drinking bad spirits, and punch, and such rot-gut stuff. That won't make good drop-kicks or chargers of you, take my word for it. You get plenty of good beer here, and that's enough for you; and drinking isn't fine or manly, whatever some of you may think of it.

Flashy, as is well known, comes to a bad end. After scorching Tom Brown, he eventually finds himself thrown out for drunkenness:

One fine summer evening Flashman had been regaling himself on gin-punch, at Brownsover; and, having exceeded his usual limits, started home uproarious. He fell in with a friend or two coming back from bathing, proposed a glass of beer, to which they assented, the weather being hot, and they thirsty souls, and unaware of the quantity of drink which Flashman had already on board. The short result was, that Flashy became beastly drunk.

Doctor Arnold, who had long had his eye on Flashman, arranged for his withdrawal next morning, and he exits the novel in disgrace. The book is frankly the poorer for that.