This Is This

I really wanted a drink last night. I haven’t got a problem with drinking, I just fancied booze. Like when you hanker after chocolate or crave tobasco sauce. It was more or a distant yearning than a need.

I’m normally quite well stocked in the booze department. We do the booze runs to France and buy everything anyone might want when they come round, so I can be the man of the house when they do and pat them on the back and say: “What’s your poison? We got everything,” and pray they don’t ask for Kalua.

Trouble is, in October you end up with bottles of all the stuff you don’t drink yourself.

I’m a pretty conservative drinker, and 95 per cent of my intake is made up of while I consider to be the three main booze groups: whiskey, beer, red wine.

If that sounds boring, think again. You could spend a lifetime of happy discovery on any of those tipples and never get bored. My favourites of the first two could take up entire entries, but that’s for another blog.

Rummaging around Withnail-esque, I discovered that the contents of my (not actually a) cellar are:

Champagne, 6 bottles
Gordon’s Gin
Pimms
Port, 2 bottles
Brandy
Absolut Vodka

Which is great if the officers of the Coldstream Guards are stopping by, but useless for sitting down to watch Lost with my feet up.

I found one bottle of red wine, but it was a Chateauneuf du Pape 2001, and I decided I definitely wasn’t worth it. It was a gift for my 30th birthday and would be very tasty and worth a bit.

I decided to save that and open it when friends came round, and when they will say: “Oh, don’t open that vintage bottle of wine for us,” whereupon I would retort: “What, this old thing? No, I often drink these when I sit down to watch Lost with my feet up. Sometimes I suck back a Lafitte and watch repeats of Third Rock. Pork scratchings?”

I had a camomile tea instead. Now that I am worth.

Note to non-British readers: Alcohol in mainland Europe is much cheaper than it is at home. People who live in the southeast of England find it cheaper to driver to Dover and buy a ferry ticket for a day return and fill their car with euro-booze than it is to buy your alcohol at home. British people find France is a nice place to have lunch. We also hold many of our wars there.

Note to American readers: next war we have in France, you guys have got to come over again. Cheap booze!

Also on This Is This
Dreamt. Does anyone else pronounce it “drempt”? Drempt. There’s a p in there. Drempt.
Read this post...

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2005 at 8:52 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or leave a comment yourself.