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.