Tuesday, November 27th.
My good friend, Tony Constance – known to everyone but
his immediate family as Cisco – died ten years ago. He and I were members of
‘The Grousers’, a company that drank in the Blackburn pubs of the 80s and 90s.
Writing about him last week, I remembered my project to write a book about the
life and times of myself as a drinking man. This is a draft of one of the
chapters I started…
It was some time
in the 1990s that absinthe began to make its reappearance on the UK drinking
scene. Never having been actually banned in this country, the Green Fairy got
into the news at that time when a company began importing it from the Czech
Republic. Sophisticated drinkers such as myself and Ali were immediately
interested.
“That’s
the shit that Van Gogh was on when he cut his ear aff, isn’t it?”said Ali.
“It was,” I agreed.
“Need to get some o’ that, then,”
said Ali.
(I
had taken to drinking with Ali because I liked his wit and his outlook on life.
I also admired him tremendously as a drinker. Ten years younger than me, he was
already a Black Belt in arm-bending. The first time I bought him a drink, he
asked for a double gin. With a mixer of Hooch. This was an alcopop in vogue at
the time, though now long vanished. When I asked him why he mixed gin with
Hooch, his reply was one that brought joy to my heart: ‘There’s no’ enough
alcohol in gin.’)
We had a word with Billy, the man who ran the
Croon at that time.
“Absinthe?”
“Aye.
It’s a serious drink, like. Very high in alcohol content. It used to be banned
in loads of countries. Maybe still is.”
“Why?”
“Because
it drives you daft, basically. They used to call it ‘The Green Fairy’.”
“Did they?”
Now,
Billy no more knew what the Green Fairy was than he knew what the Sugar-Plum
Fairy was. The Cookeen fairy was about the extent of his fairy knowledge. But Ali and I looked so
serious and yet, at the same time, so enthusiastic, (and we put so much money
into his till on a regular basis), that he promised to try to obtain a bottle. I’d
asked him to source a bottle for my own personal use, too. It took some weeks.
But not a one of them passed without either Ali or myself asking Billy on a
Friday night, ‘Got that absinthe yet?’ His reply was the invariable,‘Working on
it; working on it.’
I fancied trying it simply
because I’d heard of it as the favoured tipple of all those fin-de-siecle writers,
artists and piss-artists like Baudelaire, Verlaine,
Rimbaud,
Toulouse-Lautrec, van
Gogh and Oscar Wilde. That, and because it
was a drink I hadn’t tried yet.
Billy produced a
bottle one Friday night, weeks later. Ali and I were seated at the fire, with
two other regular drinking companions, Kenny and Doug. Also present in the bar
at that time was Terry, a Liverpudlian who was working locally, and going out
with a Blackburn girl.
“Got you that absinthe,” said Billy.
“Excellent. Four of that, then, toot
de sweet,” I said.
“Okay. It’s dear, though. You can
have the first one free, but it’s £3 a shot after that. D, I’ve a bottle here
for you. It’ll set you back thirty quid.”
Now,
these were exorbitant prices at the time for a drink, certainly in the village
of Blackburn. But nobody demurred.
“What is it, D?” asked Kenny.
“The drink of artists, writers and assorted other bohemians.”
“Like us,” added Ali.
Billy brought four shots of absinthe to the table. You could see why
it had been nicknamed ‘The Green Fairy’. It was a pleasantly electric lime
shade. It had a satisfyingly unusual aroma. We drank it, smacking our lips and
congratulating ourselves on our cosmopolitan personalities.
What
we didn’t know, myself (the sophisticate) included, was that the standard
method of drinking absinthe is to place a sugar cube on top of a slotted
spoon, on top of a shot glass of absinthe. Iced water is then poured
over the sugar cube and slowly into the spirit, so that what you end up
drinking is one part absinthe to four or five parts water. The water not only dilutes the absinthe, it clouds
it. The pearly appearance it then takes on is called the louche
(French for ‘cloudiness’). This process also brings out subtle fragrances and
flavours in the drink. (An alternative method involves setting fire to the
sugar cube, which has been soaked in the spirit. You drop the flaming cube into
the glass, which sets the absinthe in there alight, and the you put out the
flames with a shot glass of iced water. )
We
didn’t bother with any of that shit. We just drank it. Ninety percent proof, as
it was.
It
was like drinking yacht varnish. Or the stuff that window cleaners add to their
buckets of hot water to dissolve built-up grease and grime, while at the same
time allowing easy squeegee glide. I have never experienced anything like that
first sensation. It burnt the mouth, tongue and throat pleasantly as it went
over. But the smouldering effect it produced in the chest was terrifying. Terrifyingly brilliant. We all finished the
shot we had.
“What the fuck!…”
“Jesus!”
“That’s like drinking fucking
paraffin!”
“That’s fucking weed-killer, that.”
“Four more absinthes!”
Terry
at the bar wondered what we were drinking. Absinthe. He wanted some of that. He
joined us at the fireside and the round became five absinthes. I bought the
first round. Then everyone else bought one. So, in the short space of perhaps
thirty minutes or possibly three-quarters of an hour, we had six raw absinthes.
On top of anything else we’d had up to that point.
It
was instant dementia.
I found myself
sitting on our kitchen floor at home, with the telephone in my hand. A voice,
from somewhere outside the mist surrounding me, asked me what I thought I was
doing. The voice was awfully far away. When I managed to formulate a reply, so
was mine.
“Phonin’ Ali,” I replied. It took an
inordinate length of time for me to put those two words together into a
grammatically correct English sentence. It took me a lightyear to add, by way
of explanation, “It’s Friday.”
“You
arsehole!” the voice continued. It was distant and booming, and I thought it
might have been the voice of God. Oh, where could I hide from the awful wrath
of the Lord God? Then the voice got
nearer. It was Joan’s. Her wrath was awfuller than God’s could ever have been.
“You’ve
been out with Ali. You were drinking
absinthe! You don’t know if it’s New Year or New York, do you? You’ve never
been home on a Friday before seven o’clock in your life. Gimme the bloody
phone.”
She
wrenched the phone from my grasp and
explained to Ali’s wife, Jackie, who had answered my call (how the hell did I
manage to hit the right speed-dial button?) that I was out of it, totally gone, away with the fairies
– the green ones, no doubt – and that she was sorry I’d disturbed her. That was
all right, Jackie explained; her one was just as bad; he’d fallen asleep on the
john.
Absinthe’s
characteristic ingredient, wormwood, has been used over the centuries as a
tonic, an antiseptic and an antispasmodic. I’m prepared to believe that, that
Friday, I had no sepsis in my body at all. Far from going into spasm, I had
relaxed to the extent I could have been exhibited in a travelling freak show as
a boneless wonder. And a tonic! A pick-me-up? You’d have needed four strong
laddies, or one block-and-tackle, to do that. According to the list of positive
medicinal qualities that wormwood further provides, I should have been free
from wind that night; experiencing no fever, indigestion or gastric pain; be
resistant to malaria; have considerably moderated labour pains, and
immeasurably improved blood circulation. I’m not sure just how improved my
circulation was, to be candid. It wasn’t reaching my brain; that much I am sure of. And how I
got home remains a mystery to me to this day. Presumably, gliding like a
squeegee.
I’ve
never drunk it since. Not even with the sugar cube.
