Dry January?

I went to lunch and ordered a Panang (sic) Curry. It was, no doubt about it, road-kill. I didn’t need to be a mortician to recognise those little squirrel bones – well maybe it was something else …

I, for the moment, forget which PG Wodehouse has the story of the slapdash French cook who finds a dead hedgehog on the road and cooks it for his employer. The point of this deeply moral tale is that the chap who had given up the bottle died while the rest of the party, all topers, had the leftovers fricasseed for lunch the next day.

I’m not doing Dry January. If you are, just read this and be tempted to slip off the wagon.

“It was suddenly borne in upon me that I was dying of thirst. What with the warmth of the day and the fact that I had so recently been taking vigorous outdoor exercise, the epiglottis seemed to have become composed of sandpaper. Already I was gasping painfully like a stranded fish, and it seemed to me that if I didn’t climb outside something moist in about half a jiffy, I should expire in dreadful agonies.

And this thought had scarcely flitted into my mind when I noticed that all the materials for a modest binge were hospitably laid out on a table in the corner. There was the good old decanter, the jolly old syphon, the merry bucket of ice, and, in brief, the whole bag of tricks. They seemed to be beckoning to me, and I tottered across like a camel making for an oasis and started mixing.”

You will remember, although I didn’t, that this is from Laughing Gas, published in 1936. If you like reading about the joys of a good stiff drink you need look no further than this, woof woof.