Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

The classic pirate adventure, Treasure Island introduced the world (and myself as a young boy) to Long John Silver, the Black Spot and X marks the spot. Stevenson’s novel is full of characters described as a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt" and such like. With pedigree like that it can be rightly assumed that the book is soused in rum.


The author’s attitude to the sailors’ favourite tipple is actually rather damning: nobody who indulges in rum comes to any good. (The only abstemious pirate is old Long John himself, who is sober enough to save his skin when he’s given the Black Spot by convincing his would be executioners that they have damned themselves by ripping a page from the Bible for their summons.)

The novel starts with the arrival of Billy Bones at the Admiral Benbow inn. Once first mate to the infamous pirate Flint, Bones is now a derelict old soak with one eye permanently over his shoulder. The book’s narrator, Jim Hawkins, remembers him holding court in the bar at night, knocking back the drink:

There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his stories or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," all the neighbours joining in for dear life... Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

Too much rum isn’t good for a man, especially if he’s upset his old friends. Attacked by a scurvy old tar by the name of Black Dog, Bones has a stroke; although all he can think about is one more drink:

"Jim," says he, "rum"; and as he spoke, he reeled a little, and caught himself with one hand against the wall. "Are you hurt?" cried I. "Rum," he repeated. "I must get away from here. Rum! Rum!"

The doctor reads him the riot act:

“...what I have to say to you is this; one glass of rum won't kill you, but if you take one you'll take another and another, and I stake my wig if you don't break off short, you'll die—do you understand that?—die, and go to your own place, like the man in the Bible.”

Bones isn’t convinced, and begs Jim for a glass of the old poison:

“And now you see, mate, I'm pretty low, and deserted by all; and Jim, you'll bring me one noggin of rum, now, won't you, matey... I lived on rum, I tell you. It's been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me; and if I'm not to have my rum now I'm a poor old hulk on a lee shore, my blood'll be on you, Jim, and that doctor swab"; and he ran on again for a while with curses. "Look, Jim, how my fingers fidges," he continued in the pleading tone. "I can't keep 'em still, not I. I haven't had a drop this blessed day. That doctor's a fool, I tell you. If I don't have a drain o' rum, Jim, I'll have the horrors; I seen some on 'em already. I seen old Flint in the corner there, behind you; as plain as print, I seen him; and if I get the horrors, I'm a man that has lived rough, and I'll raise Cain. Your doctor hisself said one glass wouldn't hurt me. I'll give you a golden guinea for a noggin, Jim."

Rattling with the DTs, Bones’ number is about to come up. When Blind Pew tips him the Black Spot a few days later, he drops dead of stroke number two. Everyone else blames the rum, of course...

Sleep With Me by Joanna Briscoe

A wonderfully creepy and intense novel about sex and obsession, Sleep With Me follows the life of Bloomsbury couple Richard and Lelia, both of whom find themselves seduced by the faithless fascinating oddity Sylvie Lavigne.

Beware of mice, warns Briscoe, as the anonymous looking Sylvie winds her way into Richard and Lelia’s life just as Lelia falls pregnant. Unfortunately, Richard appears to be unable to make a decision without first consulting his willy, so his judgment is distinctly cloudy when the temptation of starting a clandestine affair with Sylvie presents itself. In a situation like that, it’s perhaps also better not to be fuddled by booze at a house party:

My half-sentences were truncated by wine so that I could hardly speak.

Richard’s friend MacDara is also in the throes of an affair, a mystery woman stalking him, and messing around with his head. Richard gets sozzled with him in a restaurant and considers confessing his own infidelity:

I took a vast gulp of rough red wine, then another. Its warmth travelled up my spinal cord to my head, and tempting plans began to bloom.

Perhaps he should have done. Sylvie comes along to Richard and Lelia's shotgun wedding later in the year and Richard finds out that he and MacDara share the same extra-marital love interest. A time perhaps to retreat into embarrassed silence, but Richard, soaring on wine and testosterone, can’t think straight:

A terrible writhing of conflicting emotions fermented in my brain with the wine. I burped, loudly, into the night... I opened my mouth; I took a gulp of wine.

He should have stuck with the bottle, but ends up hanging one on MacDara’s chin. Just as well he doesn't find out what his new wife has been up to as well until he's had a chance to calm down...

Kafka’s Soup by Mark Crick

A brilliant piece of literary ventriloquism, Kafka’s Soup presents fourteen recipes, as written by the world’s writers. Kafka presents a recipe for miso soup, The Marquis de Sade stuffs poussin, and Harold Pinter makes cheese on toast. As this is a blog about drinking rather than eating, I’ve selected a few quotes from Rich Chocolate Cake á la Irvine Welsh.


Stevie is planning a quality fuckin cook-up and hoping to avoid his so-called friends who will come around his flat, drink his beer and eat his chocolate cake. It’s a boozy old recipe with a good glug of port in the mixture:

Ah add the eggs and flour to the mixture and pour oan a drop of port. Ah hae a drop masel; it’s no bad, so I put some more intae the pan. The bottle’s soon finished. Ah’ve drunk half and the other half’s goan intae the mixture – greedy fuckin cake.

He’s got enough booze laid in to keep him going while it’s in the oven:

Ma heid is beginning tae throb again and ah decide it’s time tae hit the bevvies. Ah’ve enough cans of special tae see me through till the cookin’s over, if nae fucker comes in.

Unfortunately, his ‘friend’ Spammer turns up, along with Gav and Hiddy, two layabouts who work for the local funeral directors. They’re on the way to a funeral, but they daren’t leave the coffin in the hearse while it’s parked outside, as they’ve lost one body already. They come in with the deceased’s grieving girlfriend, Debbie, and start on the beer:

Gav and Hiddy hae forgotten their hurry and are hittin the bevvies, their feet up on Debbie’s boyfriend’s wooden overcoat.

As the cake is now cooked, it’s time for the icing, complete with a good measure of kahlua:

Kahlua’s a fuckin lassie’s drink, ah know, but it’s no bad in a cake.

At least the end result goes down well:

Spammer has by now drunk the rest of the kahlua, and is oot of his box, jumping around desperate for a piece of the brown stuff... We’re all soon stuffing our faces, though ah would’nae recommend the heavy as an ideal accompaniment.

It looks so good, I might try it myself, but I’ll take his advice and avoid the Special Brew...

Soho: A Novel by Keith Waterhouse

The late Keith Waterhouse’s eulogy to his beloved Soho is a glorious farce rather than a serious piece of work, but it’s entertaining nonetheless and since it’s set in that notorious district, soaked in booze.

Leeds student Alex Singer pursues his girlfriend Selby all the way to London, convinced that she’s found a job in Soho. Quickly broke, he finds himself befriended in a bar by the celebrated television personality Brendon Barton, a man once thrown out of the Groucho Club for urinating into a plant pot.

“The night is too young for wining and dining, so where to now?” asked Brendan, as if he regarded himself as Alex’s host. “But don’t suggest the French, because I’m barred.”

Alex’s evening disintegrates into a whirl of pubs and Soho characters as he stumbles from one bar to another and Waterhouse throws in every one of the area’s clichés to chronicle a district that at the time of the book’s writing was changing fast. Down in the New Kismet, he runs into two theatre scenery shifters who are taking a dead newspaper vendor on one last pub crawl. Washed up actress Jenny Wise spots the stiff on the carpet:

A swig of brandy had had the paradoxical effect of sobering Jenny up somewhat. If she had registered the prone form of Old Jakie lying on the floor, it was only now that she acknowledged the fact. “If you ever see me like that, Mabel,” said Jenny, wagging a finger, “Just pour my brandy down the sink and call me a mini-cab.”

When he finds himself at a book launch it’s all Alex can do to get himself another drink. After all, the management take a dim view of drunks:

They wouldn’t even let the author through the doors... Apparently he began on the sauce at seven this morning at the Waiters Club. By the time he got to Frith Street this evening he was crawling along on his hands and knees. The law turns up and asks him what he thinks he’s doing. “Oh, it’sh all right, oshiffer,” he says, “I’m just looking for my car keys.”

Alex’s drunken odyssey finally staggers to a halt the next day, but not before three more people have died and the New Kismet has opened its bar for free drinks. Drunk, broke and a long way from Yorkshire, Alex runs into the two flymen again, this time sans corpse. Someone asks them why they’re not down at the New Kismet enjoying the free drinks:

“Nah.” The first flyman waxed philosophical. “We came out. It’s a funny thing about booze, mate. If you don’t have to pay for it, it never tastes as good as if you do.”

Sadly, it’s a philosophy not shared by many other of Soho’s denizens.

Samson Agonistes by John Milton

Patrick Hamilton makes great use of Milton’s Samson Agonistes in his novel Hangover Square (qv). Each chapter in the book is prefixed by quotes, many from Milton's poem, where he draws comparisons between Netta and Samsons’s nemesis, Delilah.

Samson, the Chorus informs us, was an abstemious man through oath to God, who didn’t touch a spot. However, Milton’s description of the dancing Rubie is enough to give the rest of us a thirst:

Desire of wine and all delicious drinks,

Which many a famous Warriour overturns,

Thou couldst repress, nor did the dancing Rubie

Sparkling; out-pow'rd, the flavor, or the smell,

Or taste that cheers the heart of Gods and men,

Allure thee from the cool Crystalline stream.

Samson reiterates the point. He has only time for cool fresh water. He never:

...envy'd them the grape

Whose heads that turbulent liquor fills with fumes.

Sadly, his oath is broken when he tells Delilah where his strength comes from. (In Hangover Square, George’s allure to Netta is destroyed when he tells her he loves her and explains that he is squandering his savings to be with her.) Samson, blinded by his enemies and condemned to wander eyeless in Gaza finally redeems himself by tumbling the pillars of the Philistines’ temple, killing himself and everyone inside.

Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton

Regarded as Patrick Hamilton’s finest novel, Hangover Square is the story of George Harvey Bone, a kind hearted but weak willed man who pursues his infatuation with the shallow and vicious Netta, a failed actress who, along with her ghastly friends, fleeces him for money and drinks. But George also suffers from dumb moods when he is suddenly unaware of everything going on around him and can only think of one thing: to kill her.

Netta, an awful little drunk, hangs around with the fascist Peter and the drink sodden Mickey, the man who came up with the phrase Hangover Square to describe a particularly shocking morning-after-the-night-before.

Mickey was about twenty-six, short, with a small moustache on a pasty face. The romance and glory of his life were behind him... He was famous for his drunkenness locally, being particularly welcome in drinking circles, such as the one surrounding Netta, because, by his excess, he put in companions in countenance, making their own excesses seem small in comparison. Your hangover was never so stupendous as Mickey’s, nor your deeds the night before so preposterous.

The descriptions of wasted days in public houses are so palpable I could almost feel the pint glasses sticking to the Lino tabletops. George, who views life through beer-shot eyes, takes a friend to an Earl’s Court boozer. His friend politely looks around the pub, thinking it a nice place to go for a summer drink:

But, of course, he could not see what George could see – the wet winter nights when the door was closed; the smoke, the noise, the wet people: the agony of Netta under the electric light: Mickey drunk and Peter arguing: mornings-after on dark November days: the dart-playing and boredom: the lunch-time drunks, the lunch-time snacks, the lunch-time upstairs: the whole poisoned nightmarish circle of the idle tippler’s existence.

George longs to escape this hellish existence and take Netta away with him, but a disastrous trip to Brighton shows her up for what she really is when she meets him at the station, not alone as planned, but with Peter and someone else they picked up in a pub on the way:

...he realized that they were all three aggressively drunk – had been aggressively drunk for several hours.

As he knocks back the whiskey in an attempt to forget Netta, George finally snaps into one last dumb mood and Hamilton’s seedy Earl’s Court drama ends in tragedy.

My Summer of Love by Helen Cross

I picked this up after watching Pawel Pawelikowski’s beautiful film version, but Helen Cross’s stunning debut novel is much more raw and visceral than its dramatisation. I read it again for the blog and found it even more spellbinding and shocking than I had the first time.


Bored by her dysfunctional home life shared with her publican father and overweight stepbrother, PorkChop, fifteen-year-old Mona spends her time drinking, playing on fruit machines and starting out a minor criminal career of petty burglary. Against the backdrop of the escalating miners' strike, Mona meets the rich and beautiful Tamsin.

Tamsin seduces Mona with a terrible lie that her sister has starved herself to death and Mona is quickly besotted by Tamsin’s every word:

She had pronounced my name heavily, the way Lindy used to when emphasising the meaning she originally intended. Tamsin’s eyelids were drooping. That was the first time that it occurred to me that she was a drinker. A true, heavy, girl drinker... Oh praise the Lord she was a drinker!

Mona plots to spend the summer with Tamsin who is alone, ignored by her preoccupied and selfish parents. Tam shows her around their big house:

“Next, Mona, proof that you don’t have to die to go to heaven,” she said when I caught up with her at the bottom of the stairs. “You’ll like this one darling.” “Oh?” I exclaimed brightly. “The cellar. Rows and rows of dusty bottles of booze just waiting for girl drinkers.”

Drunken antics escalate from high jinx to malicious and increasingly destructive pranks. As Mona gets herself deeper and deeper into trouble, her devotion to Tamsin is the only thing that keeps her going. When she finally discovers that Tam has been lying to her all summer she is distraught, but agrees one last attempt to run away together:

“Let’s go,” whispered Tam, pushing her damp fingers through mine. “Let’s get some wicked liqueur first, honey,” I said, and lifted a bottle from the new drinks tray which rested on the sideboard in the hall.

Demented on gin, they stumble into the unfortunate PorkChop and the summer suddenly gets a lot nastier...

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend

A real time piece from the 1980s, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ is a brilliantly funny slice of social observation, drawn through the eyes of its eponymous hero. Sue Townsend’s pen was as sharp as ever during the later books, but unfortunately, Adrian himself had begun to depress me and I stopped reading them...

A hypochondriac who thinks he’s an intellectual, Adrian bumbles through life with a complete lack of self unawareness. His diary captures his frustrations with his family, his school and his love for the treacle haired Pandora Braithwaite.

He starts the year with a worthy set of New Year’s resolutions:

8. After hearing the disgusting noises from downstairs last night, I have also vowed never to drink alcohol.

My father got the dog drunk on cherry brandy at the party last night. If the RSPCA hear about it he could get done.

Woodbine smoking OAP Bert Baxter is another thorn in Adrian’s side. After looking after him for the Good Samaritans for a few months, he finds himself having to clean up his filthy home:

Pandora and I went to look at Bert’s house today. It is a truly awesome sight. If Bert took all his empty beer bottles back to the off-license he might get enough money on the empties to pay off his rent arrears... My father took Bert’s beer bottles back to the off-license this morning. The boot, back seat and floor of the car were filled with them. The car stank of brown ale. He ran out of petrol on the way and called the AA. The AA man was most uncivil, he said it wasn’t the Automobile Association my father needed, it was Alcoholics Anonymous.

He drily recounts the time that Bert comes to visit, driven over by Pandora’s father:

Pandora’s father stayed for a quick drink, then a pre-lunch one, then a chaser, then one for the road. Then the had one to prove that he never got drunk during the day... I had to endure watching my father do his imitation of some bloke called Frank Sinatra singing ‘One for my baby and one more for the road’. Pandora’s father pretended to be the bartender with our Tupperware custard jug.

New Year comes round again so quickly. His last entry for the year ends thus:

My father came crashing through the front door at 1 a.m. carrying a lump of coal in his hand. Drunk as usual. My mother started going on about what a wonderful son I was and how much she loved me. It’s a pity she never says anything like that when she’s sober.

And so onto Adrian’s Growing Pains...