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9. If you think that all or most of the above is mere satirical fantasy, you cannot have been around much yet.

MEAN SLAG ’S GUIDE

The following menu is intended only as an example. Remember that there must be plenty of everything, and that the hot dishes must be hot, so as to forestall a couple of obvious complaints. •The mean sod can help by making faces and vague noises at a couple of wives to suggest that the mean slag is at a difficult time of the month.

Petits pains et beurre

Pouding de Yorkshire

Spaghetti poco bolognese

Boeuf à bon marché

Pommes bouillies

Navets vieux

Salade de fruits sans sucre

Café

Notes. (i) A good ten minutes with no food in sight but rolls and butter will, as restaurants know, take the edge off most appetites.

(ii) Explain that in your native Wales they often start a meal with plain Yorkshire pudding, and hint that it is a particularly working-class dish in order to appease, or at least silence, any lefties in the company.

(iii) This is just spaghetti with not nearly enough sauce.

(iv) If, after this broadside of almost unrelieved starch, any of your guests are still afloat, roast stewing beef with boiled potatoes and old turnips (new ones are very nice if properly done) should finish them off. The no doubt considerable unconsumed portion of the beef can be curried next day.

(v) Leaving all sugar out of a fruit salad built mainly on fresh pineapple and oranges will make it virtually uneatable. You cannot actually refuse to provide sugar if asked, but there is a good chance that, in their beaten state, your guests will not raise the matter. As before, the leftovers can be rescued next day.

(vi) Must be fresh, and the process of making should be the most elaborate and lengthy and hitch-prone that can be found, with as much of it as possible taking place in front of the guests. It is a job for sod rather than slag, for while he is fiddling with the coffee he obviously cannot be pouring drinks, and there is • value there too.

A little-known Central American liquor: “Cassiri . . . the local drink made of fermented cassava [a root vegetable].” He drank some and handed the bowl to Tony. It contained a thick, purplish fluid. When Tony had drunk a little, Dr. Messinger explained, “It is made in an interesting way. The women chew the root up and spit it into a hollow tree-trunk.”

—EVELYN WAUGH

* The more sophisticated, and troublesome, method, much used in restaurants, is to take a couple of handfuls of raisins, split them open, put them in a basin, pour some lousy brandy over them and leave for twenty-four hours. Strain and serve as, probably, a little-known cognac rather than Armagnac.

THE HANGOVER

WHAT A SUBJECT! And, in very truth, for once, a “strangely neglected” one. Oh, I know you can hardly open a newspaper or magazine without coming across a set of instructions—most of them unoriginal, some of them quite unhelpful and one or two of them actually harmful—on how to cure this virtually pandemic ailment. But such discussions concentrate exclusively on physical manifestations, as if one were treating a mere illness. They omit altogether the psychological, moral, emotional, spiritual aspects: all that vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure that makes the hangover a (fortunately) unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization.

Imaginative literature is not much better. There are poems and songs about drinking, of course, but none to speak of about getting drunk, let alone having been drunk. Novelists go into the subject more deeply and extensively, but tend to straddle the target, either polishing off the hero’s hangover in a few sentences or, so to speak, making it the whole of the novel. In the latter case, the hero will almost certainly be a dipsomaniac, who is not as most men are and never less so than on the morning after. This vital difference, together with much else, is firmly brought out in Charles Jackson’s marvellous and horrifying The Lost Weekend, still the best fictional account of alcoholism I have read.

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