• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

2. Avoid non-alcoholic additives, apart from water and soda. Slimmers’ tonic water may well be less damaging to your figure than the ordinary kind, but I have conducted no controlled experiments in this field. Juices, especially tomato juice, are great fatteners.

3. Drink diabetic or low-calorie beer; so much the better if you can substitute some for your apéritif or after-dinner drink. There is an excellent one called Diät Pils (short for Pilsner, not pills) obtainable through some off-licences and groceries or direct from Holsten Distributors Ltd, 63 Southwark Park Road, London SE16. There are shags who would attack this brew as artificial, non-authentic, etc., on which point consult G.P. 7 and ignore them. Diät Pils is very adequately alcoholic, pleasant to the eye, at least as tasty as most ordinary beers, and totally wholesome: approved, indeed, by the British Diabetic Association. It is admittedly a bit pricey, but, to my mind, worth every penny.

4. Alcohol science is full of crap. It will tell you, for instance, that drink does not really warm you up, it only makes you feel warm—oh, I see; and it will go on about alcohol being not a stimulant but a depressant, which turns out to mean that it depresses qualities like shyness and self-criticism, and so makes you behave as if you had been stimulated—thanks. In the same style, the said science will maintain that alcohol does not really fatten you, it only sets in train a process at the end of which you weigh more. Nevertheless, strong drink does, more than anything else taken by mouth, apart from stuff like cement, cram on the poundage. If you can face it, if you really want to be shapelier faster, if you are dissatisfied with zipping up your trousers at 45 degrees instead of vertically, cut down on hard liquor. Doing so will carry the bonus of—dare I say it?—conducing to your general health.

Such power hath Beer. The heart which grief hath canker’d

Hath one unfailing remedy—the Tankard.

—CHARLES STUART CALVERLEY

HOW NOT TO GET DRUNK

THIS IS STRICTLY two topics—how to keep sober (or at least relatively in control) at a drinking party, and what to avoid with the morning after in mind—but they overlap so much in practice that I will treat them under the same heading.

Staying away altogether is a stratagem sometimes facetiously put forward at the outset of such discussions as these. To move at once to the realm of the practical, eating has much to be said for it. As well as retarding (though not preventing) the absorption of alcohol, food will slow up your drinking rate, not just because most people put their glasses down while actually chewing, but because you are now satisfying your appetite by eating rather than drinking: hunger makes you drink more than you otherwise would. According to some, oily foods are the most effective soakers-up of the drink already in your stomach, but others point to the risk of upsetting a digestion already under alcoholic attack.

There is a great deal of folklore about taking some olive oil or milk before joining the party. This will indeed retard absorption of alcohol, but, as before, it will all get to you in the end. Do not, in any case, overdo the fatty prelude. An acquaintance of mine, led astray by quantitative thinking, once started the evening with a tumbler of olive oil, following this up with a dozen or so whiskies. These, after a couple of hours of nibbling at the film of mucilage supposedly lining his stomach, finally broke through in a body and laid him on the floor of the saloon bar of the Metropole Hotel, Swansea, fortunately after I had left. I would be chary of this tactic. The principle does, however, work well the other way round. In the middle of a greasy meal, a quick neat double brandy certainly seems to hose down your stomach wall and give you heart and strength to continue eating.

Diluting your drinks sounds a good idea to many, and will help to reverse the dehydration that all alcohol brings, so that you will be better off next day. But, again, the alcohol