End piece
Just the one
Jeffrey Bernard
A quiet word with you about drinking. The day Mr David Ennals, the Social Services Secretary, got it into his head to tell us that it was about time people faced up to the fact that we now have a very serious drinking problems, growing year by year, the phantom graffiti writer in my local boozer struck again. He was bang on target. The message he left reads, 'Reality is a Delusion created by a lack of Alcohol'. Now, before you jump down my throat and accuse me of being flippant about something that brings tragedy to innumerable lives, I'd like to point out that I too have a drinking problem. (Dreadful phrase that, 'drinking problem', isn't it?) That's to say I prefer drinking to almost anything else I do when I'm not drinking.
If you weren't born in that condition you probably won't be all5le to understand it, but I can tell you it's not a pretty picture. Oh, no. For one thing, presuming you've got a hangover, which you will have if you drink too much, the morning, between rising and opening time, is a sort of limbo. Of course, I'm mainly referring myself to the selfemployed drinker who can survive the horrors of day-to-day existence by working in short, sharp, painful bursts, but it really is like something of a dream world to me until those bolts slide back all over England.
Mr Ennals goes on or at least went on to attack what he called the 'sometimes murderous habit of expecting that everyone except the skinflint has to buy a whole round of drinks'. Too often a drink with friends became six drinks. Let us pray that the Government never tumbles the fact that too often six drinks with friends can become sixteen. They'd have to put health hazard warnings on the coin of the realm in that event.
Anyway, the buying of rounds is an old British ritual which isn't simply and solely confined to the business of drinking. Rather in the same way that sexual intercourse is an extremely pleasant way of meeting people, buying rounds of drinks enables you to go on and on meeting them: Admittedly it's an expensive lark, but unlike sexual intercourse, everyone involved breaks even in the end.
Inevitably, Ennals went on to castigate those who think that drinking is manly, heroic or glamorous. I don't really know any boozers who think it's any of those things, but prohibitionists always trot that chestnut out. What is irritating though is Mr Ennals' remarks that drunkenness in men 'is crude and embarrassing', and that in women 'it is plain sickening'. Well, I don't know what sort of women Mr Ennals acquaints himself with, but one can imagine. Presumably female workers in Whitehall and the corridors of power must either drink endless glasses of white wine which can result in the recipient beginning to smell like a drain after a few weeks at it, or they must be the gin and pity drinkers who have difficulty in keeping their mascara in line. Come to think of it, why shouldn't people cry if they feel like it? I don't find it at all sickening or embarrassing. Many years ago, when I first realised that I was lumbered witl? journalism for life since it was the only occupation I could think of that would enable me to nip out for a drink whenever I wanted one, I had a horrendous spate of crying. No one ever minded as much as I believe Mr Ennals would. In fact I remember crying slumped over the bar of the Club des Caves de France in Dean Street one day when a tourist came in and said to the barman, 'My God whatever's happened? Has a relative died or something?' Good lord, no,' said the barman. 'That's just Jeff having his weekly cry.' But the point is, I fail to see why a woman behaving in a maudlin way should be any more sickening a sight than a man. As I say, they must have some extraordinary women in that afternoon club they call the House of Commons. The ladies I drink with are a magnificent bunch. They only cry when the gm/nor shouts, 'Last orders, please.' They swear ever so quietly, fight only among themselves and, to paraphrase Elizabeth I, they may only have the bodies of women but they have the cheque books of lions.
It has suddenly occurred to me that the health warnings on bottles could be a bles sing in disguise. Presumably they must be seen to be read and to facilitate that towards the end of a day they're going to have to be very large warnings on suitably large bottles. Could it possibly be that Mr Ennals is only joking and is really getting us all at it?
And might I at last land the job myb brother has recommended for me, to wit, wine correspondent of the Cork Examiner? Who knows. I shall go and mull it over. Over a drink I mean. Just the one, of course.
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