The Olive And The Caper by Susanna Hoffman

I’ve mentioned before that there are many joys to be found in reading cookery books, not just for the references to booze; a lot of them are also well written and contain much more than just recipes.


Hoffman’s homage to Greek cuisine is a rambling compendium of culinary history which often strays into culture and language. Wine has been an essential part of Greek life for millennia, and she devotes several pages to it, starting with amphora of the ancients, and running up to the modern day. A glass of local wine is now part of the main meal, however:

...in ancient times wine was reserved for the second part of the dinner, called the symposion, the time when conversation, games, and entertainment took over. There, after a first sip of undiluted wine taken as a libation to the gods, the wine was always diluted with water. Drinking undiluted wine was considered dangerous, with possible dire consequences.

The ritual of the symposion is described thus:

At the symposion, the wine part of the banquet, three kratirs, or mixing bowls, were thought the proper, moderate amount of wine to imbibe. The host was in charge of the pace of the drinking, and since rituals accompanied the first three bowls, he could even force guests to finish the number of bowls served. At some gatherings a wine watcher was in charge to see that all received an equal amount of wine. In a play by a writer named Euboulos, the god Dionysos describes the bowls: The first bowl, he says, is for health, the second for love and pleasure, the third for sleep. At this point wise drinkers go home. Should guests drink onward, the fourth bowl belongs to hubris, which in Greek means “boastful talk among males.” The fifth leads to shouting, the sixth to revelry, the seventh to black eyes, the eight to court summonses, the ninth to bile, and the tenth to madness and people throwing the furniture about.

They knew a thing or two did the Ancient Greeks. Along with wine, they were also known to imbibe beer, indeed, Aristotle notes its effects:

Aristotle compared the intoxication caused by beer to that of wine: Wine, he said, caused a drunk to pass out and fall face down, whereas beer caused one to fall belly up.

I think proof of this might require further research...

Flashman and the Mountain of Light by George MacDonald Fraser

I’ve had this on the bookshelf for a few years now, and having some time ago given up on a rather foolish attempt to read all twelve in order, I picked this up, reasoning that Flashman withdrawal was a good enough reason to break sequence.

MacDonald Frasers’s eponymous anti-hero is a liar, a bully and a toady, who ducks and skives his way through some of the more colourful parts of nineteenth century history. In this episode he finds himself caught up in the Sikh War of 1845, and once again, Flashman has unwitting found himself in a tight spot.

He volunteers for a political role in an effort to avoid the inevitable fight between the Sikh kingdom in the Punjab and the East India Company, but is instead sent off to the court at Lahore. He is supposed to report back on court intrigue from the lions’ den itself, but after being dramatically rescued from falling off a high balcony by his servant, Jassa, his mind is strangely elsewhere.

I’m not certain what line our conversation took, once I’d heaved up my supper, because I was in that state of blind funk and shock where talk don’t’ matter, and I made it worse – once I’d recovered the strength to crawl indoors – by emptying my pint flask of brandy in about three great gulps, while Jassa asked damnfool questions. That brandy was a mistake. Sober, I’d have begun to reason straight, and let him talk some sense into me, but I sank the lot, and the short result was, in the immortal words of Thomas Hughes, Flashy became beastly drunk. And when I’m foxed, and shuddering scared into the bargain ... well, I ain’t responsible.

Flashman has overheard that the safest place for him to be is the durbar room (court) and he makes a sharp exit in that direction. Surprised when he gets there by scenes of utter debauchery, he’s quickly accosted by Mangala, slave and chief adviser of the Maharani:

She said I needed something to warm me, and a lackey serving the folk in the gallery put a beaker in my hand. What with brandy and funk I was parched as a camel’s oxter, so I drank it straight off, and another – dry red wine, with a curious effervescent tang to it. D’you know, it settled me wonderfully... I took another swig, and Mangala laid a hand on my arm, smiling roguishly. “That is your third cup, bahadur. Have care. It is ... strangely potent, and the night has only begun. Rest a moment.”

That might be hard work. The durbar is in the throes of an orgy, and Flashman feels ill disposed to restraint. He’s quickly brought to a booth at the end of the room and realises that he was in the presence of the notorious Maharani Jeendan, Indian Venus, modern Messalina, and uncrowned queen of the Punjab.

She’s quite a character:

...she was simply the lewdest-looking strumpet I ever saw in my life. Mind you, when a young woman with the proportions of an erotic Indian statue is found reclining half-naked and three parts drunk, while a stalwart wrestler rubs her down with oil, it’s easy to jump to conclusions.

Indeed it is. And it’s all too easy to get carried away. Flashman has another close shave before the night is out and has to get rescued by an American... and the war with the Sikhs hasn’t even begun yet.

Drunkard’s Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

Last week’s post on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trek through Mitteleuropa prompted me to mention Joseph Roth and Jaroslav Hašek, so I thought I’d carry on the theme and return, once again, to Drunkard’s Tales, Hašek’s boozy stories from old Prague...

Mr. Motejzlík’s Fatherly Delights concerns the eponymous new father and reprobate, who in the run up to the arrival of his son and heir, has been putting it about in the bars and shops around town that he’s already got a little boy at home. Realising that his wife might give birth to a girl, he back pedals and tells everyone it’s a daughter, then twins, then...

Finally, when the moment came that he was to become a father, he disappeared in the neighbourhood even though his in-laws were present, and at the pork butcher’s, the baker’s the chemist’s, in two pubs and one wine house claimed that it is a done thing, and again in his lying ways – a girl, boy – boy, girl – twins, triplets – boy, girl – girl, boy – to cut along story short he left himself a back door open. And when in the wine house he had his fifth glass of vermouth tucked inside, he exclaimed, “You don’t know how happy I am!” and went home.

Back at home, the drunken father is presented with the newborn:

When the midwife brought in the red infant, Mr. Motejzlík took hold of him and was in the hallway in a jiffy. He wanted to show it to the neighbours next door. They wrestled it away from him, and Mr. Motejzlík, shouting at the whole house in the quiet of the evening, “I have a son!” ran down and out to the restaurant opposite. There he ordered ten beers and told everyone he has a son. Since he told them half an hour ago that he had a daughter, an argument arose while Mr. Motejzlík was shouting, “I know better, it’s mine!”

The in-laws aren’t happy and show him the door, so Motejzlík spends the night on the toot, before trying to kip at a friend’s house. When this goes wrong (he sneaks in through a window and startles the man’s wife...) he creeps back home and sleeps on the sofa.

Still, Motejzlík is a doting father, if a little prone to festivities:

When somebody becomes a father, there are many little delights... What a great joy to note into your diary every gram that your offspring gains, slowly but surely, according to the implacable rules of nature. Then a new pleasure – your boy wants to drink. You take him to his mother and get back to your guests, take another bottle of cognac out of the cupboard, and while your little dear drinks, so do you and your guests to his health.

Once again, the in-laws show him the door and he ends up out on the pop. He comes back with a hare-brained idea that he wants his lad christened Hector, after the Trojan hero, but the family put the kibosh on that pretty quickly and tell him there’s no way the boy is having the same name as a butcher’s dog. Motejzlík storms off in a huff, but comes back a couple of days later, seemingly repentant:

Then he got ignored, shut in a room and when he spoke up at the door all contrite, “Could I please see my dear little son,” he received a curt answer, “When you sober up!” – “Sorry, I am really not drunk today, I would really like to see my own blood, dearest madam." The dearest mother-in-law did not answer and started to whistle an aria from the Huguenots, the part when they are starting to slaughter the Huguenots.

Father-in-law decides that Motejzlík is sober enough to make himself useful and sends him out to buy a pram, furnishing him with 150 crowns to fund the purchase. Motejzlík dutifully shops around, comparing prices and finally sits in a coffee shop working out which one is best value. Unable to decide, he goes back out to the street, only to find that it’s eight in the evening and all the shops are shut. The shadow of opprobrium has been cast on the night and he doesn’t dare go home:

All of a sudden Mr. Motejzlík began to feel the need to distract the thoughts of a hunted man with a jovial talk with his true friends, whom he saw daily at the restaurant U Zvěřinů in Košíře, whenever he managed to escape from home. So there he tried to banish his dismal thoughts with good beer, but still it was not the real thing, some excitement was needed to forget his sad lot.

Some wiseguy suggests a nightclub where they play cards, and before he knows what he’s doing, Motejzlík is changing a 100 crown note. Before long he’s down to his last 20 so he goes all in – “Everything for my little son!” – and scoops a monkey:

It was the next day around ten o’clock, when Mr. Motejzlík came back to his family and home. But in what condition!

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

A couple of years ago I saw a remarkable documentary about a remarkable man, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who during the Second World War, led and daring raid on the German forces in occupied Crete, capturing the General stationed on the island and taking him into Allied custody. Then over ninety, he could still tell a good story about his travels, and I made a note to read his books.

To my shame it has taken a while to get around to this, but I am now enjoying his account of a walk from London to Constantinople, a tale so rich in detail that it sprawls over two volumes. A Time of Gifts is the first, chronicling how in the winter of 1933, at the age of eighteen, he set off from Britain with little more than a rucksack, a walking stick and a sturdy pair of boots.

The trek gets off to a good start: in Hook of Holland he stops for a coffee after getting off the boat. As he’s leaving, the landlord wants to know where he’s headed:

I put on my greatcoat, slung the rucksack, grasped my stick and headed for the door. The landlord asked where I was going: I said: “Constantinople”. His brows went up and he signalled for me to wait: then he set out two small glasses and filled them with transparent liquid from a long stone bottle. We clinked them; he emptied his at one gulp and I did the same. With his wishes for godspeed in my ears and an internal bonfire of Bols and a hand smarting from his valedictory shake, I set off. It was the formal start of my journey.

After following the Rhine upstream through the Netherlands and Germany, stopping in beer cellars and wine houses – “It is impossible, drinking by the glass in those charmingly named inns and wine-cellars, not to drink too much.” – he reaches Austria. In less than five years time the country would be annexed in the 1938 Anchluss, succumbing to the horrors of Nazism that he had already seen in his walk through Germany. In the early months of 1934, the old order of the Habsburgs lives on in the castles that line the Danube, and armed with letters of introduction, Fermor is invited to stay with the lower nobility from an Empire that disintegrated a mere fifteen years before.

They certainly have a lot to talk about, and Fermor soaks up stories about the old kaiserlich und königlich:

As I listened, the white gloved hand of the Lincoln green footman poured out coffee and placed little silver vermeil-lined goblets beside the Count’s cup and mine. Then he filled them with what I thought was schnapps. I’d learnt what to do with that in recent weeks – or so I thought – and I was picking it up to tilt it into the coffee when the Count broke off his narrative with a quavering cry as though an arrow from some hidden archer had transfixed him: “NEIN! NEIN!”, he faltered. A pleading, ringed and almost transparent hand was stretched out and the stress of the moment drove him into English: “No! No! Nononono – !” I didn’t know what had happened. Nor did the others. There was a moment of perplexity. Then, following the Count’s troubled glance, all our eyes alighted simultaneously on the little poised silver goblet in my hand. Then both the Countesses, looking from the torment on the Count’s face to the astonishment on mine, dissolved in saving laughter, which, as I put the goblet back on the table, spread to me and finally cleared the distress from the Count’s features too, and replaced it with a worried smile. His anxiety had been for my sake, he said apologetically. The liquid wasn’t schnapps at all, but incomparable nectar – the last of a bottle of liqueur distilled from Tokay grapes and an elixir of fabulous rarity and age.

As much as it is a cliché to say that Fermor writes exquisitely about a world that’s now gone forever, it happens to be true in this case. He also links us to the world of Jaroslav Hašek and Joseph Roth, and for that I will always be grateful.

The Book of Genesis

I’m not sure how this particular bibulous biblical reference came into conversation last week, but Noah’s infamous ventures with wine growing ended up scrutinised with a glass of wine over supper, so here it is in full.

Noah, having recently battened down the hatches on his ark and saved his family and the world’s animals from drowning in the flood, has now been told by God to multiply, and replenish the earth. He sets about this by becoming a farmer, along with which he plants a few rows of grapes. In the Old Testament’s first reference to viticulture, Noah gets disgustingly drunk and passes out in his gaff:

9:20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

9:21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

9:22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

9:23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.

9:24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

9:25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

9:26 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

9:27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

What happens when Noah passes out is clothed in biblical obfuscation. It’s pretty much open to conjecture but there those who suggest a serious misdemeanour, either after the booze gets the better of him, or before. At any rate, the other two brothers cover the old boy up and sit out the wrath of the grape the next day when Noah wakes up with the bible’s first hangover. Ham’s son Canaan gets it in the neck for what has happened between his father and grandfather, so it was obviously something worse than not putting him into the recovery position...

Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño

Another foray into South American literature, this time to Chile, and writer in exile Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño’s magnum opus is 2666, which has been eyeballing me from the bookshelf of the local library for a while now. At over 900 pages in translation, however, I have shied away from it in favour of one of his shorter pieces, Distant Star, the story of a poet-aviator Carlos Wieder, and his part in the murderous regime that took over in the 1973 coup.

Known to the book’s unnamed author as Alberto Ruiz-Tagle in the period running up to Pinochet’s takeover, Wieder is first encountered in various university poetry groups. A little older than his fellow students, he is an accomplished poet who claims to be an autodidact. More infuriatingly, to the author and his friend Bibiano O’Ryan, he is adored by the two stunningly beautiful Garmendia sisters, who fail to notice Bibiano or the writer at all.

After the fall of Allende, the writer is in a prison camp, when one afternoon he looks up to see a Messerchmitt sky-writing poetry. The pilot is Ruiz-Tagle, now know by the name Carlos Wieder. Following his release, finding himself expelled from university and unable to get a job in the country, the author leaves Chile, but on his travels he continues to hear about the poet-aviator Wieder and his exploits.

After a reckless display in which Wieder flies into a thunderstorm while writing a poem about death, the pilot invites a party of friends, fellow officers and socialites back a rented apartment where he has set up a photography exhibition. No one has seen the content, which is in a locked spare room that Wieder promises to open at midnight. The party goes pretty well, at first:

The first guests arrived at 9.00 in the evening. Most of them were old school friends who hadn’t seen each other for some time. At 11.00, twenty people were present, all of the moderately drunk. No-one had yet entered the spare bedroom, occupied by Wieder, on the walls of which were displayed the photos he was planning to submit to the judgment of his friends. Lieutenant Julio César Muñoz Cano, who years later was to publish a self-denunciatory memoir entitled Neck in a Noose relating his activities during the early years of the military regime, informs us that Carlos Wieder behaved normally (or perhaps abnormally: he was much quieter than usual, to the point of meekness, and throughout the night his face had a freshly washed look). He attended to the guests as if he were in his own home (everyone was getting along splendidly, too well, in fact, writes Muñoz Cano).

Come pumpkin time, Wieder assembles the guests and opens the door, ordering them in one at a time:

The room was lit in the usual way. There were no extra lamps or spotlights to heighten the visual effect of the photos. It was not meant to be like an art gallery, but simply a room, a spare bedroom temporarily occupied by a young visitor. There is, of course, no truth to the story that there were coloured lights or drum beats coming from a cassette player hidden under the bed. The ambience was meant to be everyday, normal, low-key. Outside the party continued. The young men drank as young men do, like the victors they were, and they held their drink like Chileans. The laughter, recalls Muñoz Cano, was contagious, without the slightest hint of menace or anything sinister.

The reaction of the first visitor to the exhibition, the beautiful and confident Tatiana von Beck, is memorable, to say the least:

Less than a minute after going in, Tatiana von Beck emerged from the room. She was pale and shaken – everyone noticed. She stared at Wieder as if she were going to say something to him but couldn’t find the words. Then she tried to get to the bathroom, unsuccessfully. After vomiting in the passage, Miss von Beck staggered to the front door with the help of an officer who gallantly offered to take her home, although she kept saying she would prefer to go alone.

A room full of half-cut officers looks on, unsure what to do next:

Wieder’s father broke the spell. He made his way forward politely, addressing each officer by name as he excused himself, then went into the room. The owner of the flat followed him in. Almost immediately he came out again, went up to Wieder, seized him by the lapels, and for a moment it looked as if he would hit him, but then he turned away and stormed off to the living room in search of a drink.

He’ll need it. Wieder has printed out photographs of dozens of atrocities committed by himself on behalf of the military regime, including the murders of the Garmendia sisters. They cover every inch of wall in the room.

Now disgraced, Wieder sinks into obscurity. His writings appear occasionally under pseudonyms in small journals in Europe and South America. The author thinks he has disappeared, until a private detective arrives on his doorstop in Barcelona and demands that they confront Wieder...

The Hireling by LP Hartley

These days Hartley seems best known for The Go-Between and its opening line, “The past is a different country: they do things differently there.” In his time, however, he was a renowned author, recipient of literary prizes and the CBE.

The Hireling, one of the more popular of a fairly prolific output and still in print, tells the story of Leadbitter, who has recently left the army after the war, and started out as a driver for wealthy customers. Misogynistic, uptight and doomed to a life driving the idle rich while paying the crippling hire-purchase on his car, Leadbitter becomes chauffeur for a bereaved young Widow, Lady Franklin.

Asked to take her to Canterbury, he drives her there from London, but declines to see the cathedral with her, which she is visiting in an act of remembrance for her dead husband. Instead, he sits in the car and mopes, before going for a quick sharpener:

Left to himself, Leadbitter turned on the wireless. A woman’s voice! The civilian world was a dull place, a tried three-piece orchestra, waiting for the word ‘fun’. Moodily he got out, locked the car and went to buy himself a coffee. On the way he passed a pub, and after a few moments hesitation pushed the door open. Few working men drink spirits in the middle of the day and Leadbitter was no exception, he couldn’t afford to and besides he didn’t want to smell of alcohol: he had his customers, and the police, to think of. But he felt very tired and the job with Lady Franklin would bring in several pounds, so he decided to take the risk. He chose whisky, a drink he didn’t often indulge in, for it made him feel ‘antagonistic’, as he put it. One double Scotch sufficed to set the hostility working in him, and looking round he spied a small fat man whose inoffensive expression irritated him. He stared at him until the man showed signs first of uneasiness, then of confusion, and at last, looking every way except at his tormentor, ignominiously scuttled out. But Leadbitter’s demon remained unappeased. Arguing the toss with himself whether he should have another whisky, he approached the bar and said the barman, who was a big, heavily-built, pasty-faced fellow, with a slight foreign accent: “Are you an American?” “No,” said the barman. “Well, what are you then?” “If you want to know, I’m Dutch.” “I thought you were an American,” said Leadbitter evenly. His voice made it sound like an insult, almost a threat: and a faint stir of interest went through the drinkers, the pleasurable anticipation of a quarrel, and they turned their heads, awaiting the barman’s answer. “It’s written Dutch on my passport,” he said expressionlessly. “Well, they should know,” said Leadbitter, inferring that such knowledge didn’t matter much, either way. The barman raised his eyes but didn’t answer and Leadbitter, dropping the subject as if any interest it might have had was now exhausted, decided not to have another drink. For a moment, while his will clashed with the barman’s, he had felt that life was worth living: it had been brought to the fine point of conflict that his nature craved.

It’s not set up to end rosily and when Lady Franklin later asks him if he has a family, he lies and invents a wife and children in an effort to give her satisfaction. As his stories get more and more involved, he unwittingly falls in love with his aristocratic employer, with tragic results...

Black Ajax by George MacDonald Fraser

George MacDonald Fraser is best known for the Flashman novels, and rightly so, but he also wrote other historical novels, as well as screenplays and biographies.

Black Ajax is the story of Tom Molineaux, a former slave who came to London from America with the aim of taking on the greatest bare-knuckle champion of all time, Tom Cribb. The book is written through the voices of various promoters, chancers, gamblers and aficionados of The Fancy who are remembering him posthumously to his biographer. The result is a glorious piece of historical ventriloquism.

One of the raconteurs is none other than Flashman Snr, who has been sent to a sanatorium by his son because of his drinking problem:

I am one of a select band of gentlemen resident in this charming rural establishment because we have lost the battle with delirium tremens – temporarily, I hasten to add – and are in need of a breather between rounds, so to speak. We are here of our own free will, at exorbitant rates, have the freedom of the grounds, and do not consort with the loonies, and ... I say, you don’t happen to have a drop of anything with you, I suppose? Flask, bottle, demijohn, something of the sort?

He’s determined to keep mum on the subject of Molineux, however. Only when he’s promised a drink will he sing:

What’s that? You could call again after luncheon ... with a spot o’ lush, no doubt. My dear fellow, what a capital notion. Put ‘em in separate pockets so that they don’t clink ... the attendants here have ears like dago guerrillas, ‘tis like being in the blasted Steel.

After inquiring as to how the biographer has found him – the man appears to have unwisely left his sister in the company of Harry Flashman – Flashman Snr gets to work:

Now, have you brought ... oh, famous! Sir, you are a pippen of the first flight! Brandy, bigod, that’ll answer. Fix bayonets and form a square, belly, the Philistines are upon thee ... Ah-h-h! Aye, that’s the neat article. Sir, your good health ...

And so to his account; another chapter in an exploitive and bloody story from the golden age of boxing...

All Quiet on the Orient Express by Magnus Mills

I first read this around ten years ago, finishing it in a single sitting. I was captivated by the sense of Kafkaesque menace that pervades the story, despite the fact that very little happens for most of the book.

Ostensibly the tale of a holidaymaker who gets trapped in a small village in the Lake District after procrastinating whether to go on his travels to India by motorbike, Mills imbues the book with an increasing feeling of menace. By the time winter has arrived and the unnamed narrator has found himself taking on numerous odd jobs including the local milk round, an ice cream franchise and painting a set of rowing boats in a hideous shade of green, the claustrophobia is unbearable.

It all starts off innocently enough; the narrator decides to stay on a week at the end of the holiday season. As the rest of the campers disappear home, Mr Parker, the farmer who runs the site, asks him to paint a gate in return for the next week’s rent for his pitch. It seems a reasonable deal, and it saves him a few bob which he can spend on beer:

After that there was nothing to do except go down the pub. I had a choice between walking and going on the bike. If I took the bike it meant I would have to drink less, maximum three pints. Or I could walk and have five. I thought of the money I’d saved by painting Mr Parker’s gate, and decided to walk.

Pretty soon, he is invited to join the darts team at the Packhorse, the livelier of the two pubs in the village. There’s a new barrel of bitter on tap, just for him, and he’s allowed to run up a sizeable slate:

My opponent from the Golden Lion was a portly bloke called Phil who didn’t seem the slightest bit bothered when I beat him, and instantly rushed off to buy me a pint of lager. When I asked if it would be alright if I had Topham’s Excelsior instead he looked slightly sorry for me, as though I hadn’t been properly weaned or something.

Well, it’s not as if he’s staying for long, just until he finishes the painting for Mr Parker:

When I walked to the pub at night I could hear seabirds out in the middle of the lake, squawking and arguing. It sounded as though there were thousands of them. I had no idea where they’d come from, but they seemed to have settled in for the winter. I thought about the seven boats waiting to be painted, the darts fixtures and the endless points of Topham’s Excelsior Bitter, and realized that I’d settled in for the winter as well.

But disaster strikes. He doesn’t realise that away matches take place on Tuesdays... When he gets to the Packhorse too late to make the game in the nearby village, he gets a distinctly frosty reception. It’s hinted that he ought to keep his head down at the other pub for a couple of weeks until it all blows over. Sadly, the Ring of Bells is a purgatorial dump of a public house:

That night I began my two-week sentence at the Ring of Bells. Two weeks of sitting in a pub with no women, no darts and no Topham’s Excelsior Bitter wasn’t very appealing, so I put it off until about quarter to ten... The same people sat in the same places and stared at their drinks, while the landlord (whose name, apparently, was Cyril) stood behind the counter and polished glasses. The conversation was at best desultory.

After a while of this, he begins to question if it’s worth going to the pub at all. He’s saved from this terrible fate when speaking to the captain of the Packhorse darts team while on the new milk round he has somehow acquired:

Tomorrow being Thursday evening I assumed he was referring to the next darts fixture in the Packhorse. I took his remark as meaning that my period of exile was over and I could begin drinking there again. My resolution of the previous evening about ‘not drinking anywhere for the time being’ had seemed very bleak in the cold light of day. After all, what was the point of working if I couldn’t go to the pub at night?

What point indeed? But by the time he finds that there is only one way to leave the village, it’s a bit late to be thinking about beer...

Wetlands by Charlotte Roche

Somewhat of a literary sensation when published in its native Germany, Wetlands managed to cause quite a stir when it appeared in translation over here. Its protagonist, Helen Memel, is an emotionally damaged eighteen-year-old recovering in a hospital proctology unit from an infected shaving cut that occurred when depilating an area not traditionally kept hair free.

The book never leaves the hospital or Helen’s head, and the next two hundred pages consist of a rant against the over hygienic de-odorised concepts of modern femininity, a catalogue of Helen’s erotic experiences and predilection for anal sex, and a desperate attempt to bring her estranged parents back together which culminates in an incredibly painful complication of the original wound. It’s fair to say that Wetlands is not for those of a queasy disposition.

At the heart of the book are Helen’s feelings of rejection from her parents. Her father his absent, she has no idea what he does, and her mother, with whom she lives, once tried to kill herself and Helen’s younger brother, leaving Helen behind. That said, her memory of this is distinctly hazy, something that can be attributed to both shock and the fact that she’s done her best to blot out the experience with drink and drugs.

One of her ex-boyfriends, Michael, was a small time drug dealer who kept his stash in a fake Coca-Cola can. He mistakenly leaves this round Helen’s friend’s house – not a good idea, really:

We blew off school, bought some red wine at a kiosk, and left a message for Michael on his answering machine: “If you’re looking for cola, we found a whole case in Corinna’s room. You won’t get pissed if we start drinking without you, will you?” ... Then began our race against time. The idea was to take as many drugs as possible before the first one took effect and before Michael showed up. Anything we didn’t slurp down we’d have to give back. At nine in the morning we starting taking two pills at a time, washing them down with wine. It didn’t seem right to snort speed and coke so early in the morning, so we made minigrenades out of toilet paper. Half a packet each for us – which is half a gram – poured onto a little piece of toilet paper, skilfully wrapped up, and gulped down with lots of wine.

Michael is not a happy bunny when he finally turns up, not that Helen and Corinna are in any state to care:

I guess everything started to kick in. I can only remember the highlights. Corinna and I laughed the whole time and made up stories set in a fantasy land. At some point Michael came by to pick up his can and cursed us out. We giggled. He said if all the stuff we’d ingested didn’t kill us, we would have to pay him back. We just laughed. Later we puked. First Corinna, then me from the sound and smell of hers. In a big, white bucket. The puke looked like blood because of the red wine. But it took as a long time to figure out why it looked like that. And then we realized there were undigested pills floating around. This seemed like a terrible waste to us. I said: “Half and half?” Corinna said: “Okay, you first.” And so for the first time in my life I drank someone else’s puke. Mixed with my own. In big gulps. Taking turns. Until the bucket was empty. A lot of brain cells die on days like that.

Helen is certainly one of the more interesting literary creations that I’ve encountered, and although Roche’s prose deliberately sets out to shock, she does have some valid points to make but ultimately, they are lost under a welter of bodily functions and a rather clunky translation by someone whose day job is writing for Playboy. It’s certainly not a book I'll forget in a hurry, though, and I'm not sure I'll ever look at an avocado in the same way again...

The Book of Judith

I was put onto the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes by my friend Pete who described her as an example of ancient girl power. Judith plays nemesis to Holofernes’s hubris, with the Assyrian losing his head both metaphorically and literally in the process...

The book of Judith is listed as one of the Apocrypha and has disappeared from modern printings of the King James Version, but it is still regarded as canonical by the Catholic and Orthodox churches, as far as I can work out. I’ve resorted to Gutenberg and their text from the Challoner revision of the Douay Rheims translation here.

The story begins with the onslaught on Israel by the Assyrian army, led by Holofernes. He puts the land to the sword and demands that the people follow his king, Nebuchadnezzar. Naturally, the Israelites are having none of it, a brave and noble stand to take, and one that seems increasingly perilous as Holofernes advances on Jerusalem.

In the city abides Judith, a widow of just three months, who has spent the time since her husband died locked in her house wearing a hair shirt and refusing to eat. Hearing of the threat, she puts on sackcloth and ashes and prays to God for the city’s deliverance:

9:12. Bring to pass, O Lord, that his pride may be cut off with his own

sword.

The plot is then hatched... Judith, an exceptionally beautiful woman, is sent to the Assyrian camp where she will wile her way into Holofernes company and do away with him:

10:4. And the Lord also gave her more beauty: because all this dressing

up did not proceed from sensuality, but from virtue: and therefore the

Lord increased this her beauty, so that she appeared to all men's eyes

incomparably lovely.

10:5. And she gave to her maid a bottle of wine to carry, and a vessel

of oil, and parched corn, and dry figs, and bread and cheese, and went

out.

Holofernes is duly stunned, and responds by asking her to stay in his camp, the old goat. After four days of her refusing to eat his food, he decides that enough is enough and he must seduce her; it’s now a matter of Assyrian national pride that he gets his leg over:

12:10. And it came to pass on the fourth day, that Holofernes made a

supper for his servants, and said to Vagao his eunuch: Go, and persuade

that Hebrew woman, to consent of her own accord to dwell with me.

12:11. For it is looked upon as shameful among the Assyrians, if a woman

mock a man, by doing so as to pass free from him.

12:12. Then Vagao went in to Judith, and said: Let not my good maid be

afraid to go in to my lord, that she may be honoured before his face,

that she may eat with him and drink wine and be merry.

And eat drink and be merry they do:

12:16. And the heart of Holofernes was smitten, for he was burning with

the desire of her.

12:17. And Holofernes said to her: Drink now, and sit down and be merry;

for thou hast found favour before me.

12:18. And Judith said: I will drink my lord, because my life is

magnified this day above all my days.

12:19. And she took and ate and drank before him what her maid had

prepared for her.

12:20. And Holofernes was made merry on her occasion, and drank

exceeding much wine, so much as he had never drunk in his life.

Silly boy has got a bit carried away, and has passed out on the couch, overcharged with wine:

13:1. And when it was grown late, his servants made haste to their

lodgings, and Vagao shut the chamber doors, and went his way.

13:2. And they were all overcharged with wine.

13:3. And Judith was alone in the chamber.

13:4. But Holofernes lay on his bed, fast asleep, being exceedingly

drunk.

13:5. And Judith spoke to her maid to stand without before the chamber,

and to watch:

13:6. And Judith stood before the bed praying with tears, and the motion

of her lips in silence,

13:7. Saying: Strengthen me, O Lord God of Israel, and in this hour look

on the works of my hands, that as thou hast promised, thou mayst raise

up Jerusalem thy city: and that I may bring to pass that which I have

purposed, having a belief that it might be done by thee.

13:8. And when she had said this, she went to the pillar that was at his

bed's head, and loosed his sword that hung tied upon it.

13:9. And when she had drawn it out, she took him by the hair of his

head, and said: Strengthen me, O Lord God, at this hour.

13:10. And she struck twice upon his neck, and cut off his head, and

took off his canopy from the pillars, and rolled away his headless body.

He probably never felt a thing... Judith then stuffs his noggin in a bag and decamps back to Jerusalem, and the city is saved.

St Pancras Station by Simon Bradley

I’ve had a thing for Gothic Revival for many years and still believe that one of the finest examples of the style can be seen in London: the Midland Grand Hotel, George Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece on the Euston Road.

Bradley’s book gives the history of the building that along with William Henry Barlow’s trainshed make up St Pancras Station. Now recently reopened as a hotel once again it has had a chequered past; it failed its fire safety inspection in the 1980s and for a long time British Rail were itching to get rid of it. They weren’t alone in their passion for cultural vandalism, the architectural trends of that century were seen as grossly outdated and impractical, even by the 1920s and 30s:

Even P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster got the drift, remarking somewhere that if he knew one thing about the Victorians, it was that they weren’t to be trusted around a pile of bricks and a trowel.

The trainshed is another marvel of its age, a cavernous space created by a single arch roof over the platforms. A stunning feat of engineering, its design is part of the changing drinking history in the capital:

Barlow’s first intention was that the spoil dug out for the tunnel should be used to infill the basement under his elevated platforms. Wiser counsels then suggested that this space would be better turned over to commerce, especially if this could be tied in with the railway’s own goods traffic. As it happened, there was growing demand in London for the fine ales of Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire, near the heart of the Midland system. The soft water and improved brewing techniques there allowed the production of a clear and stable brew very different from the capital’s darker and cloudier stouts and porters, a change in taste that also contributed to the slow disappearance of pewter tankards from pubs in favour of drinking glasses. The railway had already erected a beer trans-shipment warehouse for Messrs Bass alongside the nearby canal, a structure big enough to provide six acres of storage space: in brewer’s terms, enough for 100,000 thirty-six-gallon barrels; in drinker’s terms, enough for 28,800,000 pints. The huge void beneath the new station platforms, with its deep plan and stable temperature, was ideal for the same purpose and could easily be reached from the track level by means of hydraulic lifts.

Keeping this vast space stocked up with booze was hard work:

Such was the capacity of the new beer cellar that three dedicated trains loaded with casks arrived every day to replenish it, with even more coming in October, the peak month for brewing.

Best of all, the whole structure was purpose built:

The spacing of the columns at centres just over 14 feet apart was calculated to match the plans of the warehouses of Burton-upon-Trent, where the same figure derived from a multiple of the standard local cask. And so, in Barlow’s words, ‘the length of a beer barrel became the unit of measurement upon which all the arrangements of this floor were based.

Who said that the Empire was built on tea?

The Great Game: On Secret Service In High Asia by Peter Hopkirk

The advantage of an incomplete history degree is that the sense of unfinished business often prompts me to pick up a good history book. Aside from appealing to a sense of autodidactic self improvement, I feel that I’m making up for previous failure, in a small way.

The Great Game is certainly a good place to start for anyone with an interest in the history of Central Asia. The book is a cracking read, full of derring do and high intrigue, but as well as a fascinating story to relate, Hopkirk has the skill to tell it well.

One of the major players in what the Russians described as the tournament of shadows, was Alexander Bokhara Burnes, whose explorations of that desert kingdom made his name. In 1831, he was sent to Lahore to present a gift of horses to Maharajah Ranjit Singh from William IV, a ruse to survey the Indus river while transporting the animals.

Ranjit Singh ruled the kingdom of the Punjab and the British were keen to keep him onside, especially if, as they feared, the Russians were going to start pouring through the Khyber Pass and push them into the Indian Ocean. Burnes charmed the elderly ruler, who appeared to have been quite the bon viveur:

In all, Burnes and his companions were to spend nearly two months as Ranit’s guests. There were endless military parades, banquets, and other entertainments, including long sessions spent imbibing with Ranjit a locally distilled ‘hell-brew’ of which the latter was extremely fond. There was also a troupe of Kashmiri dancing girls, forty in number and all dressed as boys, to whom the one eyed ruler (he had lost the other from smallpox) appeared similarly addicted.

Burnes seemed sorry to leave, although he was sceptical as to how long the old chap would remain on his perch, especially given his penchant for booze:

‘Cunning and conciliation’, Burnes wrote, ‘have been the two great weapons of his diplomacy.’ But how much longer would he remain in power? ‘It is probable’, reported Burnes, ‘that the career of this chief is nearly at an end. His chest is contracted, his back is bent, his limbs withered.’ His nightly drinking bouts, Burnes feared, were more than anyone could take. However, his favourite tipple – ‘more ardent than the strongest brandy’ – appeared to do him no harm. Ranjit Singh was to survive another eight years – greatly to the relief of the Company’s generals, who saw him as a vital link in India’s outer defences, and a formidable ally against a Russian invader.

Ranjit Singh at least made it into old age. Burnes met a sticky end in Kabul in 1841...

Metroland by Julian Barnes

Growing up during the early 60s in the Middlesex suburbs, Chris and his friend Toni snigger at the Bourgeois world surrounding them and vow never to be that complacent themselves. Their time at City of London School is spent performing épats on unsuspecting shop salesmen and commuters, while wondering about the unsignposted life ahead of them and sex.

Chris later finds himself in Paris in 1968, researching in the Bibleotheque National for a post-grad paper on theatre and avoiding his fellow ex-pats, although his tone is mellowing a little:

I’d even, by this time, stopped sneering at my exhausted compatriots who clogged the cafés around the Gare du Nord, waving fingers to indicate the number of Pernods they wanted.

Lodging in the XIXe arrondissement, he’s at least in possession of a good drinks cupboard:

I was lent a flat up in the Buttes-Chaumont (the clanking 7-bis Métro line: Bolivar, Buttes-Chaumont, Botzaris) by a friend-of-a-friend. It was an airy, slightly derelict studio-bedroom with a creaky French floor and a fruit machine in the corner which worked off a supply of old francs kept on a shelf. In the kitchen was a rack of home-made calvados which I was allowed to drink provided I replaced each bottle with a substitute one of whisky (I lost money on the deal, but gained local colour).

The daily trudge through documents at the library is tiring stuff, and young Chris finds the lure of the nearby hostelries too much to resist:

...exhausted by the sight of mass scholarship in action, I’d knocked off early for a quick vin blanc cassis at a bar in the Rue de Richelieu which usually competed with the library for my presence. This wasn’t inappropriate: the atmosphere here was strongly reminiscent of the Bib Nat itself. The same soporific, businesslike attention to what was in front of you; the quiet shaking of newspapers instead of book pages; the sagely nodding heads; the professional sleepers. Only the espresso machine, snorting like a steam engine, insisted on where you were.

And sitting at a chair nearby is a delightful Breton girl reading Lawrence Durrell. He fumbles an introduction, buys her a coffee and gets himself a date. Things with Annick move slowly, as Toni points out in a letter, c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la chair. All in good time, Toni:

When we came out I mentioned, in a formally casual way, the stock of calvados at my place. It’s proximity was known. The flat was as I’d left it, which means as I’d half-arranged it. Reasonably tidy, but not obsessive either way. Books lying open as if in use (some of them were – all the best lies have an alloy of truth). Lighting low and from the corners – for obvious reasons, but also in case some eager, treacherous spot had come into bud during the course of the film. Glasses put away, but rewashed first, and rinsed not dried, so that the calvados wouldn’t have to be drained through its usual bobbing scum of tea-towel.

Chris spends the next few weeks in a haze of sex and French cinema. The relationship ends in tears, of course, and he throws himself into his studies, spending his remaining time in Paris in the booking gloom of the Bib Nat. And what of the riots and protests, les événements de Mai 68? Rien. Chris has missed the lot.

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Mitchell’s 1999 debut is an episodic musing on the nature of ghosts, a complicated inter-linked set of nine short stories, (starting in Japan just after the nerve-gas attacks on the Tokyo subway and wending their way through revolutionary China, post communist Mongolia, to a future war and artificial intelligence), and an exploration of the concept of free will and choice. The germ of Mitchell’s hugely successful Cloud Atlas appears in Ghostwritten with many of that later novel’s themes and motifs (including a reference to a birthmark shaped like a comet) appearing here first.

By chapter seven, the book finds itself in London, where musician and ghostwriter Marco wakes up in a bed that doesn’t belong to his on-off girlfriend and mother of his child:

My smirking hangover gave me a few moments to make my last requests, and to take in the fact that whoever’s bed this was it wasn’t Poppy’s. Whash! Then it laid into me, armed with a road-surface shatterer. I must have groaned pretty loudly, because the woman next to me rolled over and opened her eyes.

Connections, connections: the lady he has woken up with is the widow of a corrupt Hong Kong trader who died in chapter three, and Marco is about to save the life of a brilliant physicist who is fleeing to an island off the coast of County Cork in chapter eight... He’s blissfully unaware of this, of course, and is trying to piece together what happened to him the night before:

I’d been at the private view on Curzon Street. Oil paintings by some artist friend of Rohan’s, Mudgeon or Pigeon or Smudgeon or something. This redhead had come up to me then, and we’d done the old quantum physics equals eastern religion bollocks. Then – a taxi – a wine bar on Shaftesbury Avenue – then another taxi – that would be most of my money gone – and then another wine bar on Upper Street. Then to here, though how was anyone’s guess. What was her name... A little nest of tissues and condoms down my side of the bed, and a bottle of red wine with almost nothing in it, but 1982 on the label. Why do the best things happen when I’m too pissed to remember them?

Shown the door by his one-night-stand, Marco makes tracks to the subject matter of his book, an old spy who was part of a ring of double agents after the war. Hanging around long enough to hear a ghost story, he’s given the bum’s rush again when his host hears that a friend has died in St Petersburg. (We the reader have been aware of the man’s demise for at least twenty pages now...) Oh well, off to the literary agent, the well-to-do Tim Cavendish:

Glance at Tim’s desk and you’ll see everything you need to know. The desk itself was owned by Charles Dickens. Well, that’s what Tim says and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Terminally overpopulated by piles of files and manuscripts, a glass of Glenfiddich that you could mistake for a goldfish bowl of Glenfiddich, three pairs of glasses, a word processor I’ve never seen him use, an overflowing ashtray and a copy of A-Z Guide to Nineveh and Ur and The Racing Post.

He entertains Marco long enough to ladle him out a snort of whisky and explain that the act of memory is an act of ghostwriting before the phone rings with news that Cavendish’s brother has found himself financially embarrassed in Hong Kong and the proposed book is almost certainly off...

Dead Simple by Peter James

I have harboured a lifelong mistrust of stag nights and reading Peter James Brighton based crime novel hasn’t exactly made me change my mind. Detective Superintendant Roy Grace finds himself investigating the aftermath of a particularly messy night out which has left four men dead and one missing.

The stag and his mates have started the evening off with a pub crawl and a fairly bibulous one at that. Still, at least they’ve had the sense to keep a designated driver, Rob:

With three pubs notched up already in the past hour and a half, and four more on the itinerary, he was sticking to shandy. At least, that head been his intention; but he’d managed to slip down a couple of pints of pure Harvey’s bitter – to clear his head for the task of driving, he’d said.

In the back of the van, the stag, Michael, is blissfully unaware that his friends are up to no good and that there might be mischief afoot:

Michael, lolling on a tartan rug on the floor in the back of the van, was feeling very pleasantly woozy. “I sh’ink I need another drink,” he slurred. If he’d had his wits about him, he might have sensed, from the expressions of his friends, that something was not quite right. Never usually much of a heavy drinker, tonight he’d parked his brains in the dregs of more empty pint glasses and vodka chasers than he could remember downing, in more pubs than had been sensible to visit.

The stag night gag is that his mates have procured a coffin, which Michael gets put into and buried alive in a hole in the Ashdown Forest. The scamps! He won’t be there for long as they’ll only be going to another pub for an hour or so before letting him out, and they’ve left him a flashlight, a walkie-talkie, some porn and a bottle of scotch...

Unfortunately, Michael’s charming friends meet with a bit of an accident on their way to the next watering hole and in a scene straight out of a ‘don’t drink and drive’ campaign, plough straight into the front of a cement truck, killing them instantly. Michael is going to be down there a bit longer than anticipated:

He was desperate for water, his mouth arid and furry. Had they left him any water? He lifted his neck up just the few inches that were available before his head struck the lid, saw the glint of the bottle, reached down. Famous Grouse whisky. Disappointed, he broke the seal, unscrewed the cap and took a swig. For a moment just the sensation of liquid felt like balm in his mouth; then it turned to fire, burning his mouth, then his gullet. But almost instantly after that he felt a little better. He took another swig. Felt a little better still, and took a third, long swig before he replaced the cap.

After a couple of days, it’s getting obvious that his friends aren’t coming back, so Michael starts to dig himself out with the only tool he has:

He picked up the whisky bottle. Still a third of its contents left. He struck the top of the bottle hard against the wood above him. Nothing happened. He tried again, heard a dull thud. A tiny sliver of glass sheared off. Tragic to waste it. He put the neck into his mouth, tilted it, swallowed a mouthful of the burning liquid. God, it tasted good, so good. He lay back, up-ended the bottle into his mouth and let it pour in, swallowing, swallowing, swallowing until he choked.

Having to dig yourself out of a coffin with a broken bottle sounds bad enough, but things are about to get a lot more complicated for investigating officer Grace, and a lot worse for Michael, who is definitely not going to make it to the church on time...

Trespass by Rose Tremain

Dark goings on in the Cévennes mountains of Southern France. Rose Tremains’s novel Trespass examines the dark heart of two sibling relationships: Audrun and Aramon Lunel, living next door to each other in mutual antipathy; and Anthony and Veronica Verey, a writer and a failed antiques dealer who is looking for a new life in the rugged countryside of the Languedoc.

Audrun has put up with her violent and abusive alcoholic brother for her whole life but is secretly hoping that his health is finally going to fail him. Banished from the family home, an imposing mas on the side of a hill, she lives in a tiny bungalow on the edge of his land. Aramon lives in filth in the old house, permanently sloshed and surrounded by a fug of cigarette smoke:

She would see the strip-light blink on in the kitchen of the mas – that old green-tinged rod of light – and picture her brother stumbling to and from the electric stove, trying to fry lardons, gulping from his glass of red wine, dropping ash from his cigarette into the fat of the frying pan, picking up the bottle and drinking from that, his stubbled face wearing that fatuous grin it acquired when the wine excited his senses. Then, with a shaking hand, he’d try to eat the burnt lardons and a burnt fried egg, spooning everything in, with another cigarette smouldering on a saucer and outside in the dark the dogs in their wire pound howling because he’d forgotten to feed them... Upstairs he lived in grime. Wore his clothes until they stank, then hung them at the window to wash themselves in the rain, air themselves in the sun. And he was proud of this. Proud of his ‘ingenuity’. Proud of the strangest things. Proud that the father, Serge, had named him after a variety of grape.

Hoping to inherit the mas that she believes is rightly hers when her drunken brother pops his clogs, Audrun’s plans go distinctly awry when Anthony Verey is shown around by a local estate agent who has promised Aramon a price of several hundred thousand Euros for the family pile. Unfortunately, Audrun’s shack is spoiling the view and Anthony loses interest. Furious, Aramon comes down the hill to remonstrate. He is suitably fortified for any encounter with his sister:

He was drunk on pastis. His gaze looped and swivelled all around him. The sun beat down on his wild head.

He then makes a few wild threats before throwing up on Audrun’s freshly cut lawn. She refuses to budge... Watching his dream of impossible wealth slip away from him, Aramon dwells on the terrible deeds in his past and the unspeaking things he did to his sister:

He drank because of the weight of things. More and more, the alcohol was making him ill, he knew this, but he couldn’t find a substitute, any other way of sliding out from underneath the slab of memories that tried to crush him, crush him with guilt and with love the could never express.

He’s drinking himself into the grave and his body is protesting every inch of the way:

Aramon walked slowly, painfully back to the Mas Lunel. His feet hurt all the time. There was an ache in his hip. His gut churned with some kind of distress that wasn’t quite hunger and wasn’t quite sickness, but a mortal unease he couldn’t identify.

Still, if he thinks he’s got problems now, it’s going to get a whole lot worse when Anthony Verey disappears...

Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi by Geoff Dyer

Notionally a work of fiction, but peppered with a hefty amount of travel writing, Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi is a contemplation of life, love and enlightenment in the titular cities.

Jeff, a middle aged freelance journalist, has been sent to Venice to cover the 2003 Biennale for the magazine Kultchur. He meets up at the airport with the familiar crowd of hacks and arty types, who already getting stuck into the drink before the horrors of their budget flight:

It was like being on a school trip, organized by the art teacher and part-funded by a range of sympathetic breweries.

He’s ostensibly there to do an interview and cover the event, but things never entirely work out as planned:

That was the thing about the Biennale: it was a definitive experience, absolutely fixed, subject only to insignificant individual variation. You came to Venice, you saw a ton of art, you went to parties, you drank up a storm, you talked bollocks for hours on end and went back to London with a cumulative hangover, liver damage, a notebook almost devoid of notes and the first tingle of a cold sore.

As the group lurch from a free party to a bar, Jeff feels the artistic atmosphere beginning to rub off on him:

In the bar, waiting to get served, Jeff decided that, following the example of Tracy Emin’s Everyone she’d ever slept with tent, if he were an artist he would build a one-to-one scale model of all the booze he’d ever poured down his gullet. Beer, wine, champagne, cider, the lot. Christ, he’d need a gallery the size of an aircraft hanger just for the beer: the pints, the tins, the bottles. It would be a portrait not simply of his life but of his era. Some of the brands he’d started out with had since disappeared: Tartan, Double Diamond, Trophy, the inaptly named Long Life. And it would be international too; not just the domestic beers, but the ones you swilled when abroad – Peroni, for example, five of which he order from the busy barman.

Better than that, he meets a beautiful American lady called Laura, and he contrives to make sure their paths cross again. Even so, there are still artworks to view, interviews to conduct (badly) and parties to attend:

Inside, everyone was belting back bellinis as usual. The waiters were struggling to cope with the insatiable demand for bellinis. There was barely room to move and around the drinks table it was mayhem. Jeff had got it into his head that risotto has been promised. He assumed that he’d got this idea from the invite, but there was no mention of it there and, at present, no risotto was in evidence. In view of the numbers, producing risotto was an absurdly ambitious and labour-intensive undertaking, but it seemed that Jeff was not alone in expecting risotto. The risotto and its potential non-appearance was, in fact, the chief topic of conversation in the garden. People were counting on risotto to line their stomachs; a lack of risotto would have a significant impact on their ability to belt back bellinis.

Perhaps because of the lack of blotting paper, everyone seems more pissed than usual. Conversation gets increasingly complicated:

You could say anything at this point in the evening. It didn’t have to make sense and you didn’t have to wait for the other person to finish what they were saying before you said it, but, by the same token, no one had to listen to what you were saying, or wait for you to finish saying what you were saying. “Constable–,” said a woman Jeff didn’t recognise, but that was as far as she got because the Kaiser was saying, “There’s only one artist in the Biennale I care about.” Unusually, there was a pause as everyone waited for the result of this declaration. “Bellini!” he said, raising a glass in acknowledgement of the enthusiastic applause with which this remark was endorsed.

The evening is not entirely wasted as Jeff and Laura end up going back to the same hotel, and the rest of his stay in Venice is spent in a trance of athletic sex, endless bellinis, cocaine and art. The last day comes all to quickly and they say goodbye, promising to meet again but not exchanging numbers. Jeff wanders slightly shell shocked into the bar where they first met and tries to order a drink:

The bar was open, but quite deserted. Even taking into account the fact that it was a Sunday afternoon, it was surprisingly empty. Staff were stacking chairs on tables. It had the look of a place that had been looted. “What’s happened?” Jeff asked. “We run out.” “Ran out of what?” “Drink.” “You mean there’s nothing left to drink?” “Si, nothing.” “Nothing?” “Niente. Is all gone. Beer, wine, whisky. Finito.” He seemed exhausted, proud, amazed and a little appalled by what had occurred. He had, evidently, never experienced anything like this. Or expected it. If an English football team had been playing in Venice, then he might reasonably have assumed there would be a huge demand for booze, but he had seriously underestimated the insatiable thirst of the international art crowd.

After all this, it’s perhaps not surprising that the second section, set in Varanasi, is the more contemplative part of the book...

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez

A meditation on fate, a surreal journalistic account of an honour killing and a visceral account of the booze fuelled murder itself, Chronicle of a Death Foretold has been my introduction to the writing of Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez.

The plot itself concerns the killing of Santiago Nasar outside his house. Named by a bride rejected by her husband as the man who took her virginity, her twin brothers butcher him outside his house the morning after the ill fated wedding. The narrator, investigating the crime nearly thirty years later, discovers that although everyone in the town knew that the brothers were going to kill Santiago Nasar, the event itself could not be stopped. Even the victim, waking up with a hangover from the wedding, has a faint inkling that things might be awry, although he misinterprets his bad dreams:

Nor did Santiago Nasar recognize the omen. He had slept little and poorly, without getting undressed, and he woke up with a headache and a sediment of copper stirrup on his palate, and he interpreted them as the natural havoc of the wedding revels that had gone on until after midnight.

He gets up, leaves the house and walks past his executioners:

That morning they were still wearing their dark wedding suits, too heavy and formal for the Caribbean, and they looked devastated by so many hours of bad living, but they’d done their duty and shaved. Although they hadn’t stopped drinking since the eve of the wedding, they weren’t drunk at the end of three days, but they looked, rather, like insomniac sleepwalkers.

It has, by all accounts been quite a hooley:

He recounted that 205 cases of contraband alcohol had been consumed and almost two thousand bottles of cane liquor, which had been distributed among the crowd. There wasn’t a single person, rich or poor, who hadn’t participated in some way in the wildest party the town had ever seen.

As the narrator recounts the details of the story from what the surviving witnesses can tell him, he realises that small pockets of resistance have occurred here and there. The police chief takes the twins’ knives away from them, believing their threats to be drunken bravado. The twins themselves make sure to tell everyone they meet their intentions, but are unable to make anyone stop them. The lady at the local bar gives them more drink, in attempt to make them incapable of action:

The Vicario brothers came in a four-ten. At that time the only things to eat were sold, but Clotilde Armenta sold them a bottle of cane liquor, not only because of the high regard she had for them but also because she was very grateful for the piece of wedding cake they had sent her. They drank down the whole bottle in two long swigs, but they remained stolid. “They were stunned,” Clotilde Armenta told me, “and they couldn’t have got their blood pressure up even with lamp oil.” Then they took off their cloth jackets, hung them carefully on the chair backs, and asked her for another bottle.

Over-fortified and doomed to avenge their sister, the twins inexorably go about their duty and Santiago Nasar is hacked down at his front door. Like the hangover on the morning after, some things in life are just inescapable...

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

One of the most beautiful and haunting novellas of the twentieth century, Death in Venice is the tale of Gustav von Aschenbach, a famed German writer, who while holidaying in Venice falls impossibly in love with an entirely beautiful Polish youth called Tazdio, and remains in the city because of him, succumbing to cholera at the end.

Of course, it’s about a lot more than that. Mann’s text is about the conflict between reason and passion, the muse of art and the concept of beauty itself. There’s not much by the way of drinking, I can hardly imagine Aschenbach tipping back the proseco, but in a awkward moment at the beginning of the story, he comes across an old man, fraternising with a bunch of Adriatic youths on a the boat to Venice. The man wears a wig and dyes his beard to look young, which Aschenbach finds distasteful. The lads have all got tanked up on sparkling wine and are full of vim and bon viveur. The old boy can’t take his drink though, and is simply pissed:

The youths of Pola, perhaps also drawn to the military trumpet signals that echoed over the waters, had come on deck, and, enthusiastic from the Asti they had drunken, they cheered the Bersaglieri who were being drilled there. But it was repugnant to witness the state into which his faux communion with youth had brought the overdressed old man. His old and faded brain had not been able to resist the liquor to the same degree as the real youths, he was hopelessly drunk. Looking stupidly around, a cigarette between his trembling fingers, he swayed, barely able to keep his balance, pulled to and fro by his intoxication. Because he would have fallen down at the very first step, he did not dare to move, yet still displayed a sorry cockiness, holding on to everyone who approached him, speaking with a slur, winking, giggling, raising his ringed and wrinkled index finger to tease ridiculously, and licking the corners of his mouth in the most distastefully ambiguous manner. Aschenbach watched him with an expression of anger, and again he got a feeling of unreality, as if the world showed a small but definite tendency to slip into the peculiar and grotesque; a sensation which the resumption of the pounding work of the engine kept him from exploring fully, as the ship returned to its course through the San Marco canal.

Worse still, the old coot wants to speak to him:

He is unable to descend, as his trunk is taken with great effort down the ladder-like stairs. So he cannot get away for several minutes from the intrusiveness of the ghastly old man, who is compelled by his drunkenness to bid the foreigner good-bye. “We are wishing a most enjoyable stay. One hopes to be remembered well! Au revoir, excusez and bonjour, Your Excellency!” His mouth is watering, he winks, licks the corners of his mouth and the dyed moustache on his lips is ruffed up. “Our compliments,” he continues with two fingertips at his mouth, “our compliments to your sweetheart, the most lovely and beautiful sweetheart...” And suddenly the upper row of his false teeth drops onto his tongue. Aschenbach was able to escape. “To your sweetheart, the most pretty sweetheart,” he heard in hollow and somewhat obstructed speech behind his back while he descended the ladder.

Repelled, Aschenbach is glad to be shot of him, little thinking that in a few week’s time, and desperately stalking the beautiful Tazdio, he will also dye his hair and paint his face in a effort to recapture lost youth...

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Winner of the 2008 Man Booker prize The White Tiger is the story of Balram Halwai, son of a rickshaw puller and chauffer to his rich village landlord, who was born in the rural darkness of India, but his dream is to escape into the light of riches and freedom.

Narrating his story in a long rambling missive to Wen Jiabao, Premier of the People’s Republic of China, Balram sketches out the humble background of a half-baked Indian, taken out of school to work in the local tea shop, locked in the great chicken coop of a society that keeps the poor enslaved.

His luck starts to change when he gets a job as a chauffer, a role that also involves washing his master’s bad feet, looking after two small dogs and getting sent out on errands:

At least once a week, around six o’clock, Ram Persad and I left the house and went down the main road, until we got to a store with a sign that said: ‘Jackpot’ English Liquor Shop. Indian-Made Foreign Liquor Sold Here. I should explain to you, Mr Jiabao, that in this country we have two kinds of men: ‘Indian’ liquor men and ‘English’ liquor men. ‘Indian’ liquor was for village boys like me – toddy, arrack, country hooch. ‘English’ liquor, naturally, is for the rich. Rum, whisky, beer, gin – anything the English left behind... Coloured bottles of various sizes were stacked up on the Jackpot’s shelves, and two teenagers behind the counter struggled to take orders from the men shouting at them. On the white wall to the side of the shop, there were hundreds of names of liquor brands, written in dripping red paint and subdivided into five categories, Beer, Rum, Whisky, Gin and Vodka.

Passed on to look after his employer’s son Ashok, who has come back from America with a new wife, Pinky Madam, Balram moves from Dhanbad to Delhi, where he lives in the cockroach infested basement while his new boss lives in a plush apartment in the tower block above. As American born Pinky realises that Ashok isn’t going to take her back to the US, the marriage collapses, and Ashok hits the sauce. It’s the chauffeur’s job to clean up the mess:

“Stop the car,” he said. He opened the door of the car, put his hand on his stomach, bent down, and threw up on the ground. I wiped his mouth with my hand and helped him sit down by the side of the road. The traffic roared past us. I patted his back. “You’re drinking too much, sir.” “Why do men drink, Balram?” “I don’t know, sir.” “Of course, in your caste you don’t... Let me tell you, Balram. Men drink because they are sick of life. I thought caste and religion didn’t matter any longer in today’s world. My father said, ‘No, don’t marry her, she’s of another...’ I...” Mr Ashok turned his head to the side, and I rubbed his back, thinking he might throw up again, but the spasm passed. “Sometimes I wonder, Balram. I wonder what’s the point of living. I really wonder...” The point of living? My heart pounded. The point of your living is that if you die, who’s going to pay me three and half thousand rupees a month?

Balram realises that he has to make his move in the ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor and turns on the hopeless Ashok. An empty bottle of Scotch provides the perfect murder weapon:

I rammed the bottle down. The glass ate his bone. I rammed it three times into the crown of his skull, smashing through to his brains. It’s a good, strong bottle, Johnnie Walker Black – well worth its resale value.

Balram finishes his visceral account of 21st century India as an entrepreneur in Bangalore, running a taxi firm funded by stolen money. He has finally made the transition from darkness to light...

Bad Vibes: Britpop And My Part In Its Downfall by Luke Haines

I picked up this autobiographic tome on a recommendation, without any particular interest in the music scene in the title, or having knowingly listened to a single note by Haines’s group The Auteurs. I finished it sharing his disdain for his contemporary musicians and quoting sections of the book to anyone unlucky enough to get in my way. I even listened to a couple of his songs as well...

Haines starts his story in a band called The Servants whose career fizzled out in the beginning of the 90s. He’s been in the group a few years and likes a drink, although he’s nearly put off the sauce for good after a particularly bad experience on red wine one day:

On a dreary Tuesday autumn afternoon I line up three bottles of red wine. Three bullets, each with my name on. Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded. I down the bottles in just over two hours. I could probably do more but I’m wearier that usual. I pass out on the couch. I dream about red. Swathes of crimson red. I am Isadora Duncan, in a red car, on a red road, with a red sky, and a red scarf caught in a red wheel tightening around my neck. My long skinny dancer’s neck. I’m thrown out of a feverish sleep by the need to vomit. Blood. Throwing up fucking blood. I am by nature a hypochondriac, but to have an irrational fear of death turn into the actual possibility of dying is quite something. Without too much prompting I see a scornful doctor. A severe eastern European lady of retirement age prods at my sides and back. Tuts and shakes her head. Dispassionately she tells me what I already know. That I most probably have serious liver damage. (Tests conform this.) All self inflicted. Give up drinking and smoking. Or die.

Faced with sobriety, Haines gets some solid songwriting under his belt and starts a new band which eventually becomes The Auteurs. The diagnosis of liver damage proves to be wildly inaccurate, allowing him to go back onto the booze, while The Auteurs start to pick up some interest from the music business, and end up lumped together with various chippy Britpop bands. After a couple of successful(ish) years, Haines recalls their nomination for the 1993 Mercury Music prize. He starts the show as he means to go on:

I am already drunk by the time I arrive at Grosvenor House, which is a good start as it is my intention to get colossally drunk this evening.

Just as well that Suede win instead... The evening, already going badly, gets steadily worse. Haines and his friends are

...led upstairs to a private suite in the Grosvenor. It’s the usual bullshit. Cocaine, champagne. More cocaine, more champagne. I fall into a table of glasses generously filled with Perrier Jouët. I have achieved optimum inebriation and am acting like a peasant. Alice is trying to coax me out of the suite. Even Vinall, in his advanced state, knows I am falling apart. The lance corporal makes one final obsequious remark and l let fly. Haymaker. Unlucky sunshine. I am too drunk to connect. Instead my fist goes through a glass panel about three feet wide of my intended target.

Despite the boozy self destruction, the bouts of rage and megalomania and the drug taking, The Auteurs manage three respectable albums before things go totally pear shaped. Haines, like Mark E. Smith, is an unrepentant tippler, and also much prefers alcohol to other substances:

Alcohol became my drug of choice. I’m a good drunk – one of the best you’ll ever be lucky enough to meet. Uncle Lou [Reed] also knew about the booze when he wrote ‘The Power of Positive Drinking’. Booze is my muse. During the mid-90s the Britpop horde devoured the class As like hungry peasants at the eat-as-much-as-you-can meal deal. Really, some of the most unlikely sorts got Dequinceyed up to the gills. Proof, if ever it were needed, that heroin does not always unleash the dark creative beast.

Still, all good things come to an end, and the Auteurs finally disintegrate into an ugly mess of missed tour dates and recriminations. Still, there’s a fine body of work that’s aged a lot better than most of the tosh that was playing during the mid-90s, and by the end of the book, Haines is making music again, (although nothing that he can persuade anyone to buy...) this time with a man who wants to reintroduce absinthe to the UK:

...the potent wormwood spirit that helped turn the French army myopic during the First World War...

I’m rather looking forward to the threatened second volume of memoirs.