Henry IV Part II by William Shakespeare

As promised, I have returned to The Bard.


Sir John Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters. A mucker of young prince Hal in the two Henry IV plays, he is a lecherous, booze-soaked criminal and braggart. He appears in three works in all and was so loved by the audience at the time that Henry IV Part II finishes with a promise that the old beast would be back in Henry V. There, he makes a single off stage appearance when Hal, now king, hears of his demise.

It’s not hard to see how that came about. Falstaff is a man for whom restraint is more than a bad word, it is the fatal weakness in those around him:

I would you had but the wit: ‘twere better than your dukedom. Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me; nor a man cannot make him laugh; but that’s no marvel, he drinks no wine. There’s never none of these demure boys come to any proof; for thin drink doth so over-cool their blood, and making many fish-meals, that they fall into a kind of male green-sickness; and then, when they marry, they get wenches: they are generally fools and cowards; which some of us should be too, but for inflammation. A good sherris-sack hath a two-fold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and delectable shapes; which, delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit. The second property of your excellent sherris is, the warming of the blood; which, before cold and settled, left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice; but the sherris warms it and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extremes: it illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm; and then the vital commoners and inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain, the heart, who, great and puffed up with this retinue, doth any deed of courage; and this valour comes of sherris. So that skill in the weapon is nothing without sack, for that sets it a-work; and learning a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil, till sack commences it and sets it in act and use. Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land, manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.

Sir John carries on drinking until the end, although his hopes on becoming a favourite of the new king are dashed when the Henry publically disowns him. Still, who needs fancy friends when you’ve got Sherry?

One Day by David Nicholls

I wasn’t sure what to expect from David Nicholl’s One Day, but the hype behind its release as ‘a major motion picture’ and the cheesy cover on my edition using a poster of the film didn’t fill me with enthusiasm. This was a shame, because although the device of recounting the lives of two young people on the same day each year seems a little forced at first (its full impact isn’t felt until the end of the novel) it is a wonderfully skewed prism with which to analyse the triumphs and disappointments of life between youth and middle-age.


Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley meet on their graduation day at Edinburgh University, 15 July 1988. They spend the night together before going their separate ways, promising to stay in touch. The book then follows them each July 15th for the next twenty years as their friendship develops into a ‘will they won’t they’ love affair.

By the mid nineties, Dexter is a successful presenter on ‘post pub’ television, front man for an oafish late-night show called largin’ it, and living a hedonistic high life in central London. Flush with cash, and knocking back the drink and drugs like they’re going out of fashion, on this particular 15th of July, he is supposed to be driving back to the family home to see his mother, who is dying. Unfortunately, he has been out on the tiles the night before with dubious acquaintances, pilled up the eyeballs on ecstasy:

On the 15th of July 1993 the sun rises at 05.01 a.m. Dexter watches it from the back of a decrepit mini-cab as he returns home from a stranger’s flat in Brixton. Not a stranger exactly, but a brand new friend, one of many he is making these days, this time a graphic designer called Gibbs or Gibbsy, or was it maybe Biggsy, and his friend, this mad girl called Tara, a tiny birdlike thing with woozy, heavy eyelids and a wide scarlet mouth who doesn’t talk much, preferring to communicate through the medium of massage.

Only a few minutes beforehand the drugs have worn off and in a flash of realisation, Dexter is acquainted with the fact that he’s in a flat in SW9 with people he doesn’t know and that he needs to get home immediately. After he’s had a drink that is:

It is starting to get light. Blackbirds are singing on Coldharbour Lane and he has the sensation, so vivid that it is almost an hallucination, that he is entirely hollow; empty, like an easter egg. Tara the masseuse has created a great twisted knot of tension between his shoulders, the music has stopped, and someone on the bed is asking for tea, and everyone wants tea, tea, tea, so Dexter disentangles himself and crosses to the immense fridge, the same model as his own, sinister and industrial like something you’d find in a genetics lab. He opens the door and stares blankly inside. A salad is rotting in its bag, the plastic swollen and about to burst. His eyes flicker in their sockets, making his vision judder one last time, and coming back into focus he sees a bottle of vodka. Hiding behind the fridge door he drinks a good two inches, washing it down with a sour gulp of apple juice that fizzes repulsively on his tongue.

Back at his bachelor pad, he tries to get it all together, with a spectacular lack of success:

Dexter’s bed is imported, Italian, a low, bare black platform that stands in the centre of the large bare room like a stage or a wrestling ring, both of which functions is sometimes serves. He lies there awake at 9.30, dread and self-loathing combined with sexual frustration. His nerve-endings have been turned up high and there is an unpleasant taste in his mouth, as if his tongue has been coated with hairspray. Suddenly he leaps up and pads across high-gloss black floorboards to the Swedish kitchen. There in the freezer compartment of his large, industrial fridge, he finds a bottle of vodka and he pours an inch into his glass then adds the same amount of orange juice. He reassures himself with the thought that, as he hasn’t been to sleep yet, this is not the first drink of the day, but the last drink of last night. Besides, the whole taboo about drinking during daytime is exaggerated; they do it in Europe. The trick is to use the uplift of the booze to counteract the downward tumble of the drugs; he is getting drunk to stay sober which when you think about it is actually pretty sensible. Encouraged by this logic, he pours another inch and a half of vodka, puts on the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack and swaggers to the shower. Half and hour later he is still in the bathroom, wondering what he can do to stop the sweating. He has changed his shirt twice, showered in cold water, but still the perspiration comes bubbling up on his back and forehead, oily and viscous like vodka which perhaps is what it is. He looks at his watch. Late already. He decides that he’ll try driving with the windows down.

His arrival at his parents home in a disgraceful state doesn’t auger well for the rest of the day, which gets progressively worse as he tops himself up with wine. Sent home on the train after his father tells him he’s too drunk to drive, he tries to phone Emma, but gets her answer phone instead. The course of true love, it seems, does not want to run smoothly...

The London Nobody Knows by Geoffrey Fletcher

To mangle a quotation by LP Hartley, the past looks distinctly foreign sometimes, especially when you consider the matter of licensing hours in the UK, which until living memory (and in my case, drinking memory) were quite restrictive. Getting a drink of an afternoon was hard work in a lot of the country, and if you wanted a beer after eleven o’clock at night, you could forget it unless you were prepared to pay money to go to a club or could find a hotel bar that wasn’t too fussy about serving guests only.


In this light, Geoffrey Fletcher’s descriptions of the pubs in London in his marvellous The London Nobody Knows, are almost despatches from a newspaper correspondent posted abroad:

If you have a mind for it, you can pretty well drink all round the clock in London pubs, by an elaborate system of timing which includes visiting dockyard pubs with special licensing hours and those of Covent Garden also with special arrangements for the convenience of market men.

A collection of drawings and pen sketches about the small places in London, easily missed, ignored or unappreciated, The London Nobody Knows lovingly describes the crumbling Victoriana and Edwardiana that Fletcher saw around the capital, which in the 1960s when he compiled this book from his newspaper column, was in distinct risk of extinction, swept away by the clean lines of glass and concrete brutalism. Fortunately, the city didn’t turn into this predicted mix of the Westway flyover and Paternoster Square, but a lot has gone since. I cannot find any trace of the King and Queen in West London, and fear the worst:

London pubs are rich in all the trappings of the Victorian age, which knew exactly how a town pub should appear. A fine one is illustrated here – the King and Queen in the Harrow Road. This is nineteenth-century Baroque at its most florid. Grey marble columns rise from a mosaic floor, raised a step above the pavement. There is splendid ironwork – iron letters and wrought iron – over the door. The words ‘Saloon Bar’ have a bucolic abandon, showing the influence of art nouveau... The architects of the late Victorian pubs and music-halls knew exactly what the situation demanded – extravagance, exuberance, and plenty of decoration for its own sake.

I believe that the late Victorian period was the highpoint in pub building and design in this country, especially in London, but then I like bevelled mirrors and dark wood with my beer:

The bar counter and its imposing fittings is invariably the pièce de résistance of the London pub. Mostly horseshoe-shaped on plan, the island rises in an infinite number of curly brackets, railed shelves with turned balustrades, brilliant mirrors and bottles (the display of bottles is a later innovation – during the nineteenth century spirits were kept in barrel shaped porcelain containers) – the whole thing rising up like a great organ, often surmounted by a clock under an elaborately broken pediment.

He finishes with a description of one of my favourite pubs, the Black Friar:

The Black Friar is Victorian above and art nouveau below. The door I have drawn is of white stone and marble with an infilling of coloured mosaic; the metal plates by the doors, ‘To the Saloon’ and ‘Worthington Ales on draught’, have figures of monks, and the interior is as rich as the exterior, slightly tinctured with an underlying hint the Art and Craft movement.

I realise that times, like licensing hours, have changed and things move on, but whereas the preposterous restrictions on pub hours have been replaced with something a bit more civilised, the loss of Victorian public houses and their replacement with faceless vertical drinking establishments is something to lament.