A Certain Age by Rebecca Ray

I was expecting a novel of youth gone wild when I took this out of the library, and although Ray’s nameless protagonist is dysfunctional in many respects, the book is also a poignant description of that most excruciating part of everyone’s lives, adolescence.

The rush to attract the attention of unsuitable boys takes up its fair share of the book and our fourteen-year-old narrator finds herself ‘going out’ with a boy at her school called Robin. He smokes weed and introduces her to his puff habit. Which is just as well, as she’s hardly a boozer:

He taught me lots of things and I preferred dope to booze. It didn’t make the room spin and it didn’t make me throw up. And when I woke up the next morning, it didn’t feel like someone had spent the night beating me over the head with a stick of hot candy floss.

Still, alcohol is a great social lubricant, and there are times when you need a little to get the party started. A good example being the end of term school disco. Frumpy friend Dawn has come along and working with the theory that alcohol does funny things to people’s eyesight, our lass tries to get Dawn out on the pull. However, she has to get her pissed first:

We stopped at the Wine Cellar, past Audiovision and just before Boots. I bought a six-pack of alcoholic lemonade and made her drink two of them on the trot. I watched her gag as she finished the second. “See? It’s nice, really, isn’t it?” “No.”

Still, Dawn’s gently drunk before long and we are taken along to find what’s happened to Robin, who appears to have imbibed a little too much loopy juice:

Robin was drunk... He wasn’t just tipsy or merry. Robin was rolling around drunk, and it kind of put Dawn into perspective. I almost felt like a prude – the only person who wasn’t going to spend the last of the evening vomiting up their cash.

Slightly more realistically than in previous posts, anti-peristalsis kicks in:

All of a sudden Robin was pretty much preoccupied. “Shit,” he said. Very dead-pan, and it would have been funny if he hadn’t stumbled away a moment later and vomited onto the concrete.

He’s quickly dumped for his troubles as well. Unfortunately, the next unsuitable boy turns out to be thirty one years old, and this explicitly frank but brave novel neatly ups the dysfunction factor to the completely disturbing...

Breathe by Anne-Sophie Brasme

A minor publishing phenomenon in France, Breathe was published when the author was seventeen and went on to sell stacks. Inevitably translated into English, this novella finds itself in the teenage-fiction section of the Barbican Library (confusingly labelled ‘Skills for Life’) looking a little forlorn without the attendant hoopla that greeted its arrival back in 2001.

Charlene Boher is a typical teenager: grumpy, hormonal and full of existential angst. She reads Camus and realises that the part of Meursault was written for her. Unfortunately, she takes the whole L’Etranger thing a bit too far: the story is narrated retrospectively from prison.

After she tries to kill herself when she is thirteen, Charlene is befriended by Sarah, a gregarious red-headed girl at her school. Charlene shares her life with Sarah, but when she takes Sarah on holiday with her family, Sarah carelessly tosses her aside for the attentions of a local boy. Charlene’s response is to get more than a little clingy...

Despite being bestowing her with the title of ‘best friend’ Sarah persecutes Charlene and treats her like dirt. Away for New Year, she bosses her around in front of her mates and the depressed Charlene decides to get drunk:

I was bored silly. I reckoned if I knocked back a lot of booze and got pissed then Sarah and the others might notice me. I started drinking. Glasses of spirits, white wine, cherry liqueur, red wine, beer, it all went down the same way. I was enjoying losing control. I let myself slip slowly into an almost comatose sort of happiness. The more I drank the more I enjoyed myself, so I carried on drinking. And suddenly Sarah noticed.

Uh oh. Sarah’s none too pleased that her little friend is acting up. Charlene carries on regardless:

One more drink, let’s see what happens... Then I drank that one too many.

Usually, and I speak from experience here, the adolescent reaction to mixing alcoholic drinks is to spend the rest of the night talking down the big white telephone in the bathroom. Charlene should count herself lucky that she only gets locked in a cupboard by Sarah, and doesn’t even appear to wake up with a hangover...

As for Sarah, she should have run while she could. Charlene goes from needy to obsessed in little over a year and by page 117 is suffocating her best friend with a pillow.

What Did I Do Last Night by Tom Sykes

What Did I Do Last Night is Tom Sykes’ history of his drinking problem, starting 5,214 days before he gets sober aged thirty, the title a reference to his propensity for blackouts, or as he once puts it in the book: I’m told it was a night to remember.

A successful columnist first in London, then in New York, Sykes started on the sauce at Eton, drinking in the college bar, a cross between a tuck shop and a gin mill, and nicking wine from the housemaster’s cellar using a Heath Robinson combination of a pole, a piece of string and an umbrella. After being booted out of Eton, he goes on to a sixth form college, smoking weed and drinking even more, until eventually he ends up at Edinburgh University, chosen because the pubs opened for longer.

Edinburgh was just like me – it was either getting drunk or in the throes of a ruinous hangover.

In retrospect, it’s here that things start to go dangerously awry:

When I went to Edinburgh I was a social drinker – a heavy one, given to frequent binges, but definitely a social drinker. I could go a few days without alcohol, and when I wanted to stop I would go home to bed. But somehow, by the time I left, I had lost control. I would wake up in the mornings suffering memory loss, wondering what I had done the night before, nervous about finding out the answer, ashamed. Somewhere during those four years of indulgence I stepped off the ledge and into the deep water. I spent a lot of time later in my life trying to work out just where that point was.

Leaving university, he ends up on the Evening Standard, ideal as it was a drinkers’ newspaper, and it was largely staffed by drunks. When he leaves there in a hurry he ends up at GQ, filing highly unpredictably copy and again, drinking, smoking and snorting coke like there was no tomorrow. Inevitably, it all goes down the gurgler and he quits before he is sacked, getting a job in New York:

In most New York stories the hero arrives in Manhattan with a suitcase and a dream. I pitched up with a suitcase and a hangover.

His job on the New York Post gives him access to bars and clubs and oceans of free drink. Then he starts a bar column for the paper:

If I thought I had the greatest job in the world before, now I really did. I was the bar columnist for the New York Post. My drinking problem was no longer a liability. It was a qualification, a vocation, a career.

Two or so years of drinking continuously and ingesting prodigious amounts of toot, not to mention all the marijuana he’s smoking, finally take their toll. Sykes is convinced that the moment he realised things had finally got out of control was when he smashed up a games console in his favourite bar, pretending to be Ozzy Osbourne. My theory is that the balloon went up a few weeks before. At forty days to go until sobriety, Sykes pays a visit to the cash machine, only to be told that there are insufficient funds:

I felt sick, which was all I seemed to be feeling these days. £40,000, vapourised in two years. Where had it gone? I had drunk it, I had smoked it, I had sniffed it. I had spent my inheritance on drugs, taxis and tips. I felt blanketed in shame and stupidity.

Having laid waste to his inheritance, his days were probably numbered anyway as he couldn’t even afford the rent on the flat he shared with his wife Sasha, let alone keep up the drinking and drug taking. The incident with Pac Man in the pub leads him to the inevitable conclusion and he finds himself at an AA meeting. Apart from one relapse four days in when he finished off a half-smoked joint he found in his ashtray, Sykes has been sober since.

He expends far fewer pages on his recovery than on his revelry and I wondered a couple of times if he was ever going to give an indication if he felt he’d learnt anything from his experiences. He does however give an interesting insight into what he reckons makes an alcoholic - I'll let him have the last word:

I always remember when I thought that was what an alcoholic was – someone who had to have a drink in the morning. Over the past year, I’ve heard a better definition; that an alcoholic is someone who, once they have one drink, develops an overpowering craving for another. Now I see that is what always separated me from Sasha. She could stop.

An Empty Room by Talitha Stevenson

Stevenson’s impressive debut follows rich Londoner Emily, back from several months abroad and about to go to university. Her good looking boyfriend Tom is possessive and manipulative, and despite his protestations of love, she doesn’t love him back. Clearly attached to him out of habit, she inhabits his world of long meals at Italian restaurants and late night drinking and cocaine at Raf’s, a seedy West London club.


Emily is, to put it tactfully, spectacularly naïve, although she herself thinks that she’s just emotionally detached. Looking back on it all, she realises that her time with Tom really was dreadful:

Now I think there was nothing that added up to anything in our times together. They were all broken – broken sentences, forgotten names, split drinks – blackouts.

Tom likes to impress, spend money, be the centre of attention. He certainly isn’t the sort to take disappointment on the chin:

We sat down. Tom ordered two bottles of red wine and the thin waiter gave us a wink. “A man who does not like to hold back,” he said.

Emily falls instead for Tom’s cousin Simon, several years older, talented, and married. A raging affair begins, its intensity matching that of the summer heat. Emily thinks that he’ll leave his wife and fantasises about going to college with him but it’s no great surprise that in the end he doesn’t. Still, it was good while it lasted. One night they walk out along the Embankment, drinking a bottle of whisky together:

We drank the whole bottle that time. We followed the river, watching the black water lighten to grey. Lights came on in the office blocks. An hour or so later, we were laughing and stumbling against each other near Battersea Bridge. The sun was coming up and the early-morning big lorries were on the road, heading out to the motorways. We were comic figures suddenly – drunk before breakfast, out of place in the early morning people. We stopped on the bridge. Simon held up the bottle and shook the whisky around. “One last drink each.”

It will all end in tears of course. Emily tells Tom she doesn’t love him and he storms off in a tizzy, getting himself completely slaughtered before nearly killing one of his friends in a drunken car crash. His discovery of Emily and Simon’s affair is the final nail in a nasty coffin, and Tom reveals himself for what he truly is, a spoilt narcissistic rapist.

An Empty Room is a powerful portrayal of a vacuous, disconnected world, filled with alcoholic excess. A sales pitch for Holland Park it is not...

Some Account of the Life and Death of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester by Gilbert Burnet

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, “It is a sobering thought that when John Wilmot was my age, he had been dead for two years.” Restoration dandy and wit, Wilmot, better known as the 2nd Earl of Rochester, was a sea hero, poet, satirist and playwright as well as a patron of the arts. By the age of thirty three, he was dead, his body having given up the fight against alcoholism and syphilis.

In the last months of his life, obviously aware that he had pissed his numerous talents up against the wall in what was a short life even by the expectations of the 17th Century, his thoughts turned to the hereafter. Unwell and close to death, he sought the counsel of Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, and renounced his hell-raising past. Burnet rather helpfully wrote their discourse down in this booklet, allowing Wilmot’s faults to be exposed for the benefit of others with the purpose of doing what I can to reforming a lewd and loose age.

A naturally scholar, Wilmot excelled at Latin and was a diligent student, that is, until he went to university, just after the restoration of Charles II:

When he went to university, the general joy, that over-ran the whole nation upon his majesty’s restoration, but was not regulated with that sobriety and temperance, that became a serious gratitude to God for so great a blessing, produced some of its ill effects on him: He began to love these disorders too much.

He managed to clean up his act and won great acclaim fighting the Dutch at sea. Sadly, it wasn’t to last. Back on land he fell in with the old crowd:

He had so entirely laid down the intemperance, that was growing on him before his travels, that, at his return, he hated nothing more. But, falling into company that loved these excesses, he was, though not without difficulty, and by many steps, brought back to it again; and the natural heat of his fancy, being inflamed by wine, made him extravagantly pleasant, that many, to be more diverted by that humour, studied to engage him in deeper and deeper intemperance; which at length did so entirely subdue him, that, as he told me, for five years together, he was continually drunk.

Staggeringly debauched and perpetually drunk while in and out of favour at court, Wilmot, along with his sharp satirical verse, wrote large amounts of bawdy poetry, (“I fuck no more than others doe, I’me young and not deform’d”) and the infamous poetic work Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery is sometimes attributed to him. Admired by many, Wilmot’s life is also seen an example of wasted talent and opportunity. A cautionary tale, then...

Drunkards Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

I began this blog with Hašek’s most famous work, The Good Soldier Švejk, but he also wrote a prodigious amount of short stories, some of which are collected in Drunkard’s Tales From Old Prague.


Appropriately enough most of them revolve around the pub, although the first story An Attempt at a Temperance Social or a Yankee Do starts the other way entirely. Fresh back from America where she had married a high preacher of some religious sect, newly widowed Mrs. Piccknown has come home with a fervour for abstinence and is determined to hold a social event sans drink to show the townspeople how they can enjoy themselves without getting drunk.

Her choice of venue is provocative to say the least:

...the town was filled with indignation, best summed up by the somewhat harsh declaration of the retired old forester Mr. Polívka, “Such a thing does not belong in the pub, why don’t they take it to some clearing in the woods.” Bandleader Vořech went further and said in the railway station pub, “I am going to go there and get pissed as a parrot.”

Everyone ends up at the hall in the back of the pub and Mrs. Piccknown berates them for drinking, urging them to give up the sauce and read the bible instead. The men aren’t impressed:

A few individuals wanted to slip out and go the taproom for some liquid refreshments, but were apprehended at the door and sent back by Mrs. Chief Railway Auditor, who guarded the exit, but all in vain, since several gentlemen popped across to garden through a window, from there to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the taproom.

Once inside, the men drink as quickly as they can before the ‘games’ begin back at the social:

The participants poured it into themselves at such a pace never before seen in the town. Before a new game started one gentleman – who usually drank four glasses of beer a day at the outside, drank half a bottle of spirits and in his intoxicated state almost burned down the pig sty at the courtyard, while looking for the hall’s entrance with a lighted match in the daytime.

Needless to say, the event turns into a farce and the hall gets trashed. Still, it isn’t all bad news. The barkeeper notes that after all the excessive drinking between the games, the teetotal night actually turned a large profit:

Mr. Vašata, despite the damage he suffered at the end of the last chapter, declares publicly, that the bad financial showing of the public establishments can be improved only by holding temperance socials and Yankee dos.

Hašek wisely declines to say whether there is a moral to this story or not...

A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle

Either the beginning of a hugely successful publishing and real estate phenomenon, or the moment the rot set in, depending on your point of view, Mayle's A Year In Provence charts the gentle ups and downs of the author and his wife during their first year in the south-east of France.

Mayle still lives in Provence, twenty years on ("I've been accused of causing everything from the village baker running out of bread to a surfeit of Germans in the café") and comes across as a genuine Francophile. The book is a relaxed account of the year; disappearing builders, their fox eating neighbour and a stream of visitors from back home. At heart it is a testament of two people who had bought a house, taken French lessons, said our goodbyes, shipped over our two dogs and become foreigners.

My reasons for its inclusion in 120 Units revolve around the French appreciation for wine and food. Especially wine. And other alcoholic drinks... An account of a very long dinner at a neighbour’s house finishes with a slug of firewater. Mayle isn’t entirely sure it’s going to sit too well on top of a seven course meal.

With the coffee, a number of deformed bottles were produced which contained a selection of locally-made digestifs. My heart would have sunk had there been any space left for it to sink to, but there was no denying my hosts insistence. I must try one particular concoction, made from an eleventh-century recipe by an alcoholic order of monks in the Basses-Alpes. I was asked to close my eyes while it was poured, and when I opened them a tumbler of viscous yellow fluid had been put in front of me. I looked in despair round the table. Everyone was watching me; there was no chance of giving whatever it was to the dog or letting it dribble discreetly into one of my shoes. Clutching the table for support with one hand, I took the tumbler with the other, closed my eyes, prayed to the patron saint of indigestion, and threw it back.

Fortunately, it’s a fake glass (ho ho!) which has everyone in stitches. Still, the propensity to crack open a bottle of wine at any given social opportunity is mentioned frequently. Giving blood in June comes to mind. An old man in the line in front of them has just had a sample taken from his thumb, but the nurse is not impressed with the contents of his arteries:

“How did you come here?” she asked the old man. He stopped sucking his thumb. “Bicycle,” he said, “All the way from Les Imberts.” The nurse sniffed. “It astonishes me that you didn’t fall off.” She looked at the tube again. “You’re technically drunk.” “Impossible,” said the old man. “I may have had a little red wine with breakfast, comme d’habitude, but that’s nothing. And furthermore,” he said, wagging his bloodstained thumb under her nose, “A measure of alcohol enriches the corpuscles.”

Pronounced sober and fit to give blood, Mayle and his wife take their place in the line. They notice that instead of the cup of tea and a biscuit they are used to at home, after a donation of claret is given, donors get to fill their boots with croissants, brioches, sandwiches of ham or garlic sausage, mugs or red or rosé wine...

A young male nurse was hard at work with the corkscrew, and the supervising doctor in his long white coat wished us all bonne appétit. If the steadily growing pile of empty bottles behind the bar was anything to go by, the appeal for blood was an undoubted success, both clinically and socially.

Undoubtedly, a lot has changed in France in the past two decades, including reports that wine consumption is down. I somehow doubt that blood drives are as much fun these days...

Nina Hamnett: Queen of Bohemia by Denise Hooker

I threatened a return visit to Fitzrovia about six months ago, and if anyone’s life encompasses the three criteria of 120 Units – pleasures, pains and perils – then it’s Nina Hamnett’s. In Denise Hooker’s revealing and poignant biography she comes across as one of the truly great characters of her age, but one whose undisputed talents were ultimately wasted by drink.

Born in 1890, Nina had a miserable childhood but her skill at drawing allowed her to escape the stifling background at home. She began exhibiting in London and hanging around in arty circles in the 1910s. The Bohemian culture in Fitzrovia was fairly well established by then. Augustus John, who knew how to put away the drink himself, was one of its denizens:

If not drinking his favourite hock and seltzer, John was known to demolish a bottle of brandy with little apparent effect and it was said that he had the drinks while his friends had the headaches.

Nina modelled for John, as well Roger Fry who admired her queer satyr-like oddity and grace, and numerous other artists, as well as painting herself. She found herself in Paris before the first world war where Modigliani introduced himself to her.

It’s a matter of conjecture as to when the wheels come off in Nina’s story, but for my money, things are on the wane by the time of her second visit to Paris in the 1920s. She is distracted more and more by the bottle, doing the rounds in Montparnasse, where:

...they drank a lethal concoction called Pernod Suze Fine, consisting of Pernod, gentian and Brandy.

Back in London, Nina embedded herself with one foot in the art word and the other firmly in its café and bar society:

Despite her need to be liked and admired, the more she gloried in her immense social success, and the more she frittered her talent in oceans of drink and casual debauchery, the clearer eyed she became about the futility of it all.

Not that it slowed her down.

By the mid thirties Nina was producing very little work beyond quick portrait sketches in pencil or chalk... Distracted by life, Nina had not been able to develop her talent and fulfil the faith that people had in her... Always willing to tell another anecdote in return for the next drink, gradually Nina Hamnett the personality, the celebrated reine de bohème, took over from the serious artist.

Nina took up residence in the corner of the bar at the Fitzroy Tavern and held court there for the best part of two decades:

On a good night, with the right company and a suitable amount of alcohol, Nina was very amusing. She was always on show, always playing to the crowd, and at her best she gave command performances. With a little too much to drink she could be disconcerting – as when she would boast that Modigliani said she had the best tits in Europe and pull up her old jersey to show them off.

After the war, the slow path to the dying of the light. Bombed out and under redevelopment, Fitzrovia was a ghost of what it once was. As was Nina:

The years immediately after the war saw the last flickering of the dying flame of Fitzrovia... More than ever Nina became a monument of a lost Bohemia and was affectionately valued as such by some, considered a boring irrelevance by others. Sitting back on her bar stool, a little drunk, she would talk straight ahead of her, barking out stories or exclamations before demanding, “Who’s going to buy me a drink?”

She made appearances in Soho as the arty crowd moved south of Oxford Street, but Nina in her last years was drunk and unpredictable, peeing on the furniture and throwing up in her handbag before staggering home to Paddington. Her second biography, Is She A Lady, was described as rambling, disjointed and inconsequential; sadly, so was Nina.

In December 1956, Nina Hamnett fell over forty feet from her window and was impaled on the railings below. The Queen of Bohemia died a few days later.

E Squared by Matt Beaumont

I’ve decided to post on a sequel because, frankly, it’s too good to pass up. And also because it gives me an excuse to read a few more Flashman novels for the purposes of 120 Units...


Picking up almost a decade later from e, E Squared is basically more of the same, only this time the format has been expanded to include text messages, blogs, MSN, etcetra along with e-mails to tell the story. The remains of the cast from e are employed at Meercat360, an agency so cutting edge it employs a hairdresser. That said, Brett and Vince are still in the pay of Miller Shanks, although they have found themselves posted to their Dubai Office:

When we joined, we got the standard Miller Shanks letter about the need to show ‘cultural sensitivity’. Vince reckons that cuts both ways and when the Dubai police start showing sensitivity towards his need to throw up outside the Grand Hyatt after half a dozen banana daiquiris, he’ll return the favour.

Needless to say, things quickly go downhill:

Vince and I are lying low today. Bit of a kerfuffle last night. You know that complex of artificial islands they’re building in the shape of the world? Vince got a bit ADHD on whisky sours and emptied a very large dumper truck of rocks into the sea. Now the toe of Italy is sporting an outcrop that looks like a severely inflamed bunion. I’ve Google-Earthed it and you can see it from space. Dubai’s Finest are out in force.

Meanwhile back in London, Liam O’Keefe is flogging off the office fixtures and fittings on e-bay to settle his astronomical gambling debts, the creative assistant is on the window ledge threatening to jump, another member of staff is in Guantánamo Bay and director David Crutton’s son has gone AWOL while his teenaged daughter is in hospital with an infected tattoo... Things are looking ugly:

No calls or disturbances from anyone, including you. Except get me a bottle of vodka from the special cupboard. Then no disturbances.

It requires a little perspective. Over in France, Simon Horne, formerly of Miller Shanks, is now living in the Dordogne being abused (verbally and otherwise) by his disgusting housekeeper Papin. He has however, started a blog, Crépuscle dans le Périgord, where he keeps note of all the little things that happen to him, like a letter from his wife’s lawyers:

After such a start to the day, there is only one thing for it, I’m going to have to uncork the ’59 Armagnac. I shall post later with an update.

That said, compared to an office full of suicidal staff and an operation to catch the office thief using interrogation by Serbian paramilitaries, Hornblower’s tribulations in France are a walk in the park.