Obiter Dicta

Tuesday, November 27^th.

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.

Obiter Dicta

Sunday October 14^th.

My last blog, on the subject of my Director of Studies at Edinburgh University in the 60s, caused some amusement. Hence – another memory of the time.

Lectures were given in the George Square Lecture Theatre. Some lecturers were erudite in their subject but inexpressibly dull. But there was Dr. Hamilton, who lectured one unforgettable lecture on the subject of Troilus and Cressida, one of the highlights of the autumn term.

            To begin with, before he started his lecture, a university servitor set up over the lectern an angle-poise lamp, with its beam trained on where his notes would be. This beam was bright. A rescue team could have found a chimney sweep lost in a pothole by the light of it. This will underline the thickness of the man’s sight. Indeed, when he appeared a few moments later, hesitantly stepping out from behind the curtain with an oxterful of notes and moving towards the lectern, it was obvious to all of us that he was navigating by echo location.

            He wore spectacles with lenses of extremely thick glass and constantly smoked black cheroots in a cigarette holder gripped between his front teeth. He had an engaging smile, which betrayed the gap between these front teeth and gave him the air of a slightly more professorial version of Terry-Thomas. He slid his glasses off his nose and on to the top of his head, then placed his notes on the lectern and squinted at them from no more than three inches away.

            “Righty-ho,” he announced jauntily, sliding his spectacles back on to the bridge of his nose, “that all appears to be in order. I once arrived to lecture on Jonathan Swift to Junior Honours, you see, and found to my horror that I had not brought my notes on Swift but, instead, a batch of loose-leaf recipes that my wife had been sifting through, the night before, looking for her recipe for mulligatawny soup.”

            That got us on his side for a start. He next took a huge pull on his stogie and coughed a lung up before he found the ashtray by the side of the lectern and balanced the smoking stinker on its rim. Gradually, he brought the alarming wheeze under control and his  countenance lost some of the rich plum hue it had so quickly developed. “You will see,” he continued in a voice like a housefly, “that I have a visual aid with me.”

            In fact, including the refracting-lens glasses and the searchlight, he had several. He was, however, referring directly to an epidiascope which another servitor had set up prior to his arrival. This was a machine which projected images on to a screen behind him.

            “I intend,” he said, “to illuminate my talk today with some images relevant to the topics under discussion. Troilus and Cressida,” he continued, “is a play where neither group of characters deserves the reader’s or audience’s sympathy. The Greeks, to quote Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 And All That, are right but repulsive, whilst the Trojans are wrong but romantic.” He took a pull at the cheroot and grinned his Terry-Thomas smile. “The Greeks may also be said to be concerned with romance in the sense of teenage infatuation whilst the Trojans are just out for … dare I say it? … a good fuck.”

            The audience gasped, tittered or guffawed according to their breeding.

            “Now, I have here, to illustrate my thesis, some slides which I have prepared to add to your enjoyment of this appalling play. Had I had my choice, I would have been lecturing today on Measure for Measure, a far superior play and one in which I attracted some favourable reviews when I played Angelo as an undergraduate, many years ago. I mean that I was the undergraduate, not that I played Angelo as such.”

            Titters titted round the hall. He footered ineffectually about the sides of the epidiascope for a bit and then said, “Anybody know how to work this bugger?”

            A gung-ho and crew-cutted young man in an Arran sweater, whom I instantly loathed, leapt up from the front row and pressed a switch on the gizmo. Light was projected on to the screen and the audience gave them both a round of applause.

            “Well done, that man,” said Hamilton. “Now. Slides.”

            There was a long cardboard box of slides by the side of the lectern. Hamilton was obviously in quest of this now, because he slid his glasses back on to the top of his head, gripped the sides of the desk in both hands and approached his face very near to the surface of it, before sweeping it from side to side. People were stuffing hankies in their mouths.

“They’re by the lectern,” someone shouted.

“They’re where?” shouted back Hamilton.

“By the side of the lectern!” a chorus bellowed at him.

“Ah! Right. Good for you.”

            He swept a hand across the surface of the desk and capsized the box of slides on to the floor. They fell with a noise like a gravy boat full of teeth hitting a parquet floor. People were openly guffawing now. Two or three with the proper Christian attitude vaulted up on to the dais to help him retrieve them. They scuttered about on all fours while Hamilton stuck his cigarette holder in his teeth and favoured the rest of us with a bashful grin. “Oops,” he said. “Blind as a bat, you see.”

            Eventually, all the slides were picked up and replaced in the box but now, of course, entirely at random.

            “Thank you! Thank you all!” he beamed and swept his arms widely. “Now. Troilus and Cressida.” As he spoke, he footered a slide into the machine like Blind Pew threading a needle. “Now, let’s see…”

            The slide was of a crumbling frieze on a ruined wall, somewhere in the windswept plains of Attica. It featured men in helmets and tunics fighting with swords and shields. Hamilton peered at it like a mole playing Mr. Magoo, then remembered that his glasses were on his head and swept them back down on to his nose and peered even harder.

            “Doesn’t really help,” he muttered and walked over to the screen so that most of the slide was now projected onto his back and the effect was somewhat spoiled. “It looks like chaps,” he anounced, “fighting with swords. I can’t remember that one. Or indeed, why it’s there. Unless it’s because the Greeks and the Trojans were fighting each other with swords. Yes, that’s probably it.”

            He put in another slide. It was upside down. A howl of laughter made him look up sharply and grin the gap-toothed grin, while puffing on the cheroot. “Have I ballsed it up again? Par for the course, I’m afraid. Snafu.”

            “It’s upside down!” the students yelled, like kids at a pantomime.

            He looked long at the slide. It was of a vase. “You’re right,” he said.

            He put it in the right way up and then walked up to it again, with his glasses on the top of his head and stared at it. “Ah!” he said. “It’s a vase. A Greek vase, probably. No other reason why it would be there. And, as you can see, there are two more chaps on it. Hitting each other.”

            More slides followed, some correctly inserted, some requiring to be so. Each was of a frieze or a statue or a painting or a vase. All featured warriors hacking lumps off each other the Classical way. And, every time, Hamilton said, after some time for scrutiny and reflection: “Mmm. Yes. More chaps hitting.”

            People were pissing themselves. This went on for a time. The finest moment came when a slide showed what was obviously a younger Hamilton, with his wife and family, dressed up as Classical figures. Hamilton wore a coal scuttle on his head with a pastebrush tied to it, a short pleated skirt and sandals, and a blanket for a cloak, fastened at his neck by a cameo brooch. He was striking a suitably impressive Hellenic attitude, with a short sword – obviously plastic - in his hand. His wife, a woman of ample figure, was wrapped up in a bedsheet and had a string of leaves in her long and grey hair. Her eyes were hideously made up like some 1920’s vamp in a silent movie. One hand was placed against her brow and the other trailed in a languorous but heartrending manner behind her. Both wore expressions of utterly fervent gusto, as the totally deranged often will. Their children wore loose white gowns and sandals; one carried a carafe and the other a decorated vase. Their expressions were glum and glazed. You could tell they hated their parents.

            By this stage, grown men were weeping with laughter.

            “Ah, I remember this one. This is a tableau vivant …” (he pronounced the phrase ringingly in italics) “… that my wife and I mounted some years ago now, on the occasion of Haddington Miner’s Gala, to represent the fall of Troy. I am Paris, abductor of Helen. My wife could not be prevailed upon to play Helen and assumed the alternative role of Cassandra. My children are generalisations to represent the culture and the civilisation lost at the sack of Ilium.”

            The auditorium hummed softly with the throbbing sob of adult laughter.

            “I believe the townspeople were much impressed,” he said as a tailpiece.

            Oh yes, they were there. Some dog-faced and horny-handed sons of toil were assembled loosely in the background, staring in wild surmise at the unhinged toffs. The auditorium was ringing with laughter. Hamilton grinned his grin, clamped his holder between his gap teeth, slid his glasses down on to his nose and approached the lectern again.

            “Right,” he said. “Well, now that I’ve set the scene, consummated the marriage as it were, let us turn our attention to the play.”

            He took the top sheet of his notes in his hand, slid his glasses back up on to his head, held the sheet directly in the glare of the anglepoise lamp and brought his face to within a few inches of the paper. “Troilus and Cressida,” he said. “Written about 1602, and known to us in two versions: the 1623 Folio version, of course, and the Quarto version of 1609…”

            And the bell rang. Hamilton lifted his eyes from the page and said sadly, “Oh. Shit.” He was, on the instant, treated to a standing ovation. People leapt up from their seats, furiously clapping and cheering, whooping and hallooing. I’m sure the thought ran through their minds to mob Hamilton, lift him bodily from the dais and bear him shoulder-high from the hall. If they had had bonnets, they would have cast them high in the air and shouted, “Huzzah!”

Obiter Dicta

Monday, October 8^th.

Well, I seem to have shifted the cold/flu/grippe/ that was making me feel miserable, but it took a while. Head stuffed. Chest stuffed. Loaded. It’s a long time since I sat at a kitchen table, towel over my head, inhaling the fumes from a bowl of boiling water and menthol crystals. Herself made me do it, or I wouldn’t have done it. It helped, I suppose, but it wasn’t pleasant. That shit burns the lining of your beak if you do it too enthusiastically. It put me in mind of childhood, when the mater  made me do a similar exercise with a bowl full of  hot water and Vick’s Vapour Rub (now, unaccountably, called ‘Vapo-Rub’: American influence, I’m guessing.). I hated it, blinded and choking, and making snottering noises like a pig playing blow-football. But just one of the delights of childhood medication. Along with butter balls rolled in sugar and dipped in vinegar for a sore throat. (Some pretty original vomiting after that dose.) Oh, and rubbing a wart with a half potato. Prunes for constipation. Eating crusts for curly hair. (Worked spectacularly!) Carrots for eyesight. (‘You never see a rabbit with glasses’, my father assured me.) And a kaolin poultice for a boil. They didn’t tell me that kaolin had to be heated first, before it was slapped on a crepe bandage and then applied to your neck. It felt like lava. I screamed the place down but was told it had to be hot to ‘draw’ the boil.

            Happy days. My arse.

            But congestion, as referred to at the beginning of this rant, was always a problem for the younger me. I blew my nose till my pals nicknamed me Rudolph. Rubbed Vick on my chest. Sucked Zubes and Fisherman’s Friends (now, you’re  making up your own jokes.) Nothing seemed to work. Till I went to university. And met my Director of Studies in  my first week. (Names changed from here on in.)

            There were, in the opening days of term, adminstrative matters to be gone through before I could be considered a bona fide, paid up member of Edinburgh University. Some of these were Course Choice, Registration and Matriculation, all of which tedious matters had to be endured before I got my hands on the grant cheque. This I intended to be my passport to times of dissipation and debauch, some of which, hopefully, would involve nudity.

            A Director of Studies was the member of staff allocated to young greenlings coming up for the first time, to advise them on the subjects to study for their first year. Some students got, for example, Dr. Katie Hartley, the junior lecturer in the English Language department who looked like a slightly more Edinburgh version of Brigitte Bardot; or Tom Collins, the trendy young lecturer in Linguistics. I, on the other hand, got the Literature Department’s Dr Riddle, a piss artist of the 33^rd degree, a Grand Inspector General of lushes, renowned for it throughout the university, and when I came upon him as he skulked in his little room on the seventh floor of the David Hume Tower, he was togged up in a wine-coloured dressing-gown over his shirt and trousers, with a book on his knee, and drinking neat gin out of a horn.

            On the way up to his eyrie, I had scorned the lifts, each car of which, as it appeared with a ping at the ground floor, was woe-inspiringly packed with students and academics. I had taken the stairs. I knocked on his door, received the summons to enter and went in, puffing from my exertions and, on account of this, did not immediately give my name. (It would have been impossible to do so in anything other than a wheezing croak, in any case.) Being taken aback by the artifice in his presentation did not help my respiration problem. He looked at me for a second, placed the horn carefully in a little rack and said, “Yes, I know. A pint of oil.”

            Finessed, I said, “Dennis O’Donnell.”

            He consulted a list on his desk, and said, “Ah, yes - the Half past Two man. You come most carefully upon your hour. For this relief much thanks. ‘Tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart.”

            I simpered to let him know that I recognised the quotations from the opening scene of Hamlet and was therefore a suitable person to study English Literature. He looked at me and said, by way of introducing himself:

            “John Riddle – Jimmy for short. Well, not so much for short as for different. An alias. Care for a hooterful?”

            I hadn’t a clue what this man was talking about, but it was clever and amusing. The last thing I wanted to be was like one of my new flatmates: a bore; a religious bore; a provincial religious bore, droning his way through the best years of his young life. I wanted these years and the experience of university, to take me on to a higher plane. I wanted to breathe rarefied airs. (Being on the seventh floor of the DHT helped.) I wanted to sprinkle my discourse with Attic salt, like this man did. I wanted to leave the callow and unfinished boy from Bathgate far behind me, to emerge like a gorgeous creature from the pupa that was him. But what was this queer stick in the dressing-gown talking about? A hooterful of what?

            He tendered me a small japanned box, open and appearing to be filled with cinnamon, sand or some similar brown powder.

            “What is it?” I said.

            “What is it?” he repeated, drawing back the box in some umbrage at my ignorance. “It’s snuff. Finest Rhodesian snuff, dark-fired and sun-cured leaf, scented with musk oil, sandalwood and rose essence. Have you never partaken?”

“No.”

“Lamentable omission. Try some now.”

“What do you do?”

            “What do you do? So young and so untender?” He placed the book, which appeared to be called Seven Types of Ambiguity, on the desk. “What do you think you do? Here – take a pinch between your thumb and forefinger, like so … Then make sure any loose powder falls back in the box - it’s ruinously expensive – and apply it to one nostril, inhale; then apply it to the other and do likewise. Have you never seen anyone take snuff before?”

            Not in Bathgate. In none of the pubs or cafés that circled the Steelyard had I encountered periwigged dandies in fitted coats, kneebreeches and stockings, offering each other pinches of their freshly milled. I watched him - I saw now that the reveres of his maroon gown were liberally spattered with the stuff - and followed suit. The snuff tickled and pricked the tender skin of my nostrils and soon I felt my head approaching climax and about to detonate from within. He evidently devined my problem for he hastily snatched two or three man-size tissues from a box on the desk and handed them to me. And not a moment too soon. With an entirely involuntary screech, the biggest sneeze of my life rocked my head back and forth, and propelled half a headful of mucus into the paper hankies. A smaller, quieter aftershock followed and I emptied the other nostril.

            Now my head was become a light and hollow spheroid, like a bubble, and I could inhale three times the volume of air that I had been used to doing. On the other hand, I had never held a hanky quite so heavy in my life. It weighed like a quarter of Dolly Mixtures. He pointed to the tin bucket and I lobbed the hanky there. It hit the far side with a solid clunk and was gone from sight.

                        “Spectacular performance. You should be able to see quite distant objects now, I should think,” opined Dr. Jimmy Riddle. “Infernal cold, up here, isn’t it?”

                         I did not feel it cold, and told him so.

              “Ah. Young blood. What it must be to have young blood,” he mused half aloud. Then he addressed himself, through fumes of gin and snuff, to the matter in hand. “Right, young Half past Two. What do you want to study?”

                “English.”

                 “Naturally. You should read Skelton. No place for him now in the course, more’s the pity. Shocking omission. If I had my way, he’d still be there. Still, read him, anyway.”

                I had never heard of Skelton.

                “Now,” continued Jimmy Riddle, after a delicate sip at the horn of gin, “outside subjects. No interest in Japanese or Chemical Engineering or anything outré, I don’t suppose?”

                I had no idea what outré was, or in which Faculty you studied it, so I said no.

              “Right then. English Literature. British History. Philosophy and Literature. Good balanced course. See you next year.”

               He handed me a signed form which would indicate, to the next mandarin to whom I had to kowtow, that I was enrolled to study the three subjects mentioned, all at First Ordinary level.

              “I don’t know anything about Philosophy,” I mumped, rather childishly.

              “You will,” retorted Jimmy Riddle. “But I should forget any ambition to be a snuffer. You ain’t cut out for it.”

            He was wrong on both counts. After a year of Philosophy, I still couldn’t tell if red cabbage was green grocery, but my newly decongested heid had convinced me of the benefits of taking snuff. I can recommend it.