I last wrote about The Compleat Imbiber on 15th April 2016. It’s time to turn to it again.
The first piece in the first Compleat Imbiber, published in 1956, specially commissioned, is by John Betjeman. It is a hard book to come by, so in the hope you haven’t read it and are unlikely to be able to do so, I’d like to share it with you.
Wise and Unwise Drinking
John Betjeman
There are such good arguments for teetotalism, that I cannot attempt to counteract them. Some of the people I like best, including my wife, are teetotal. I think if you are a strong character, you can enjoy the sensation of not having a drink. But suppose you are a weak character? Suppose you need a prop, like me, to your self-assurance and need stimulants to strengthen it? I expect you know that story of the ancient and reverend head of an Oxford college, a man of few words and those remarkable. Someone had brought a guest to the high table who was a confirmed teetotaller. At the end of dinner he was offered a glass of port, and proclaimed in a loud voice ‘I would rather commit adultery than drink a glass of port’. Then, that ancient and reverend head of the house broke the silence by saying ‘And who wouldn’t’? I don’t know whether this is an argument in favour of or against abstinence.
I am not a heavy drinker myself. How interesting it is that I have to express myself with that mawkish sentence. But if I stated simply ‘I drink’, you would think I was perpetually drunk. ‘Such a nice fellow – a pity he drinks’. I drink, as most of us do, for two reasons. If I am in low spirits I sometimes need to drink some more spirits to raise them. I also drink wine for pleasure and am, to be truthful, rather a wine snob.
But there are drink snobs whom I find as tedious as I am myself. None of you, dear cultivated readers, come into any of these categories, but I will enumerate a few to see whether you recognise them.
The beer bore. He boasts of how many pints he can put down and how fast he can do it. Constant practice has changed his complexion. He looks at you in a superior way if you take any time drinking your beer. And if you drink it fast, he looks at you with hostility as a possible rival. If by way of placating him, you offer him a glass of champagne, a double whisky, some expensive sherry, a delicate sip or two of Château Yquem (sic) – and you do this out of terror of offending him, not out of affectation, because he is obviously so dominant a personality in the bar – he tells you ‘I only drink beer’. And he says it in such a way that you feel you are a foreign agent, a spy, an outsider, a pretentious interloper for having dared suggest anything so un-English as any of the above-mentioned drinks. This beer bore has his appointed place at the bar to which he comes early and which he leaves late. It is impossible to drink at the bar itself because he takes up so much of the available space. I find there are two types of beer bore. The younger sort are splendid in club colours, old school ties and hairy tweeds. They are very hearty and the incipient puffiness of cheeks and tummy denote a previous athletic record now being padded out. They delight in imitation olde English and say ‘Mine Host’, ‘Gadzooks’, ‘eftsoons’ and ‘a brimming tankard of the goodlie beverage of the hop’. The older kind are larger and morose and Silent. Both are sad sorts of people, which reasonable drinking should never make a person. To what lonely bed-sitting rooms, I often think, to what ill-run houses where they are at once the terror and unloved liability of their families, do these poor creatures return? And do they ever rake out the stove before they go to bed? Probably not.
Then there is the refined and expensive drinker, generally a she. I suppose she must have started as a girl with gin and lime which, if mummy came into the bar, she could say was lemonade. But now you ask ‘What will you have’ and she replies’A double Zombie’. If you have any sense you order her half of bitter. I think these are the over-indulgers who one finds talking so loudly before closing time, or whooping and screaming on the last train home.
Third and most prevalent are those who do not drink wisely to enjoy the taste of a good drink, but solely to try and soften their sense of inadequacy, and I am often in this class. At a certain state that part of the mind which directs the functions of consideration for others disappears. The man is then his real appalling self. He must claim your attention. I know one who Brings out a little manuscript book of ‘funny stories’ – ‘heard this one about the Englishman, the Scotchman, the Irishman and the Jew’? – and whether you’ve heard it or not, whether you’ve ever thought it funny or not, you have to listen to it and many more. Or there is the man who has never had the courage until now to tell you what he really thinks of you … ‘to be frank, Betjeman …‘ Or there is the man who is gong to tell you about every single bed in his garden, or every single bit of bad luck that has ever happened to him, or a long, long disjointed account of how when he went to Torquay last summer first he and the missus put up at the … , and the didn’t like it there and why they didn’t like it, and what they said to the manager, and how they then moved to … which was not much better, but eventually found … ‘here’s the address. Got you diary on you? Jot it down’.
(To be concluded tomorrow)