Sitting outdoors watching the world go by in a foreign capital in the summer time, a beer glass is a shield and a bridge. As a shield it guards against thirst and heat, but it also represents enough ease with the alien culture to keep the outside world at bay. Like a bridge it also suggests the beckoning of belonging, a short stroll towards our neighbours, seen through the clear glass and amber gold.
Last week we had an in service day at work with various activities designed to further our professional and personal horizons, including a healthy eating workshop led by a nutritionist with “a light touch” and an “excellent delivery” in the words of some of the colleagues who attended it. I am afraid I was at an arts and crafts workshop at the time fashioning a Christmas tree ornament shaped like a restive seal aspiring to the condition of a plump bird, painted an ecumenically incongruous shade of watered down duck egg blue, so I missed the talk. Christmas decorations notwithstanding I am disinterested in, even hostile to, nutritional information, so I was highly unlikely to attend. Predictably, the speaker warned the participants of the perils of binge drinking, which is considered to be anything over three glasses of beer. Less predictably, however, this was, for those in attendance, the preface to our Christmas work do and, as an aperitif, it must have left a sour taste. Let’s just say that some of us had to drink more than three glasses of beer to forget just how terrible it is to drink more than three glasses of beer.
This is where I stop to make a disclaimer and apologise for any unintended flippancy in my writing about alcohol: I fully appreciate that alcoholism is a terrible affliction for those who suffer it and their families and friends. I am also aware of the ravages that excessive alcohol consumption causes on the body and, if anybody is in doubt, I recommend Will Self’s inventively terrifying treaty on the matter, Liver, whose short story, “Foie Humain” will put an end to any silly illusions you may have about a portrait in your attic absorbing the brunt of your libations. Further to this, I also know from personal experience that a lot of shite masquerades as deep thinking and heartrending revelation when in thrall to a few jars. But I cannot ignore the little poetry I find in the quotidian, folks, even if this poetry is to be found at the bottom of a highball containing redbull and vodka, so here it is, and may Charles Bukowski forgive me.
Alcohol transfigures: it alters and unlocks faces, loosens limbs, breaks pace, blows wind into sails, it makes us veer, sometimes with catastrophic results, most often though resulting in rough-and-tumble elation or irritation, and very occasionally, opens up an unexpected, although perhaps suspected or intuited, vista of an individual’s inner landscape. It is when I peer into one of these vistas that I appreciate the social value of inebriation and, the evening in question, as I was about to leave my work do, I experienced it from a surprising source.
This source was a fresh faced woman in her twenties: she fleets in and out of the staff room and her sweet smile and peachy complexion belie a discreet and winning disposition to the sardonic. Her sense of irony, given her looks, goes undetected most of the time or is mistaken for mild bonhomie, an interesting complaint, which will go unexplored here. I was about to leave the pub when she extended an arm from the high stool she was sitting on at the bar and cajoled me into staying for another while. It was obvious she had drunk more than usual and although her looks and youth were able to take the burden of alcohol with grace, her manner was altered, assuming that familiarity with strangers that makes spirits so tempting, and occasionally disastrous, at work events. “Don’t go. You remind me of my grandmother,” she said, and I must have registered offense at the suggestion that I was practically octogenarian in my lack of spontaneity and limited stamina, because she hastened to clarify: “You look so much like her. She was a glamorous woman. She had…” here she stumbled to find the right word, “…pedigree”.
Although the words “glamour” and “pedigree” had never been used to describe me before, it is not vanity that drives me to register them here, but rather her subsequent explanation that she had been taken aback by the similarity for a long time and that, although, long dead, her grandmother had always been an intriguing woman for her: formidable and full of character in her black and white portraits, a woman with backbone and her own ideas; one of those ancestors whose shadow looms large even over those who never knew them in person. As she continued to talk I learnt about her own farming background, her brother’s ideas about what constitutes a good romantic match, and her own attachment to her family, to the dead generations and those very much alive. I cannot claim this woman as my friend, or to have known her from any previous tête-à-têtes, but I can say that, at that moment, she became more human and real to me, yet also more complex and beautiful, like a well-written heroine in a work of fiction. This was, I think, because emboldened by drink, she took the risk of stepping further towards my acquaintance with the kind of observation that a sober person will never reveal for fear of appearing strange. Yet friendship is built on the risks we take to be warmer and deeper to one another and, we must recognise that alcohol, sometimes, gives us a nudge in that direction.
Unfortunately, the intimacy fostered by alcohol is evanescent and the following morning, as I went over to hug her good-bye for the holidays and remind her of our conversation the previous night, she blushed and admitted that, although she remembered she had stopped me on my way out to talk, she could not remember what she had said. “Nothing too embarrassing, I hope,” she added. I told her of course not, walked away, and turning towards her from a distance, wished her a happy Christmas as I left the building.
The party is over. It lasted for days. It lasted so long your bones still rattle to the drums. It was so loud your housemate, the pill-popping Beastie Boys-headbanging piece of work, had to sleep in his girlfriend’s car across the street. You took the right drugs and fucked the wrong man. You crossed the line of tired with your eyes open and your limbs loose. The world was sharp for hours and now it’s dull and smeared like the splash of vomit on the bathroom wall.
The party is over: there is no music and no strangers you can love with all your heart.
Look around you to see the faces of those who stayed behind to rinse up glasses, mop the floor and gently wake up the interloper on your couch. They are now your family.
Everything you wanted to know about drink and gender but never dared to ask. Okay, only five things: my own shaky, possibly prejudiced, and very personal observations but, let’s face it, more than you had five minutes ago.
5. A margarita is the perfect gender-neutral cocktail: equally suitable for a man to brush his moustache against its salted rim than for a woman to seal it with her brightly rouged lips. It is probably the sexiest cocktail of all: no other cocktail says I am up to no good as loudly and clearly as a margarita. It’s all in the uncompromising ingredients: salt, tequila, lemon or lime juice. Sorry-ass squeamish fusspots need not apply.
There are three things that I enjoy above all else in my spare time: having a meal, going to the movies, and a drink in a pub. The first two I can do by myself, although I would rather in company, the third one is unthinkable on my own. All three require a degree of concentration and ceremony. I’d rather watch a film in the cinema than at home: I like the darkness and quiet of the theatre, and I like the community of voyeurs. I like to plunge into the darkness so that I can enjoy watching films like I enjoy dreaming. I strongly disapprove of chatter of any kind in the cinema and disdain crunching and cracking noises, although not the consumption of food per se if done with a modicum of discretion. Again, I think of film like I think of slumbering: I do not mind the smell of coffee and toast drifting into my dream world, but hate to be rudely awaken by careless clatter in the kitchen. Today I went to the IFI and they dutifully warned patrons not to make noises during the film. A perfect silence reigned throughout the projection of Like Father, Like Son: you could hear the sizzling of Japanese dumplings on-screen above your neighbour’s breathing.
When it comes to eating, Ireland still has enough reverence for the rituals of restaurant dining and I have not come across any public dining ruined by the blare and glare of TV screens. The most frequent acoustic offender tends to be Muzak and this is quickly gobbled up by the growing din of conversation. Low lighting and convivial chatter are as essential to a good restaurant outing as good bread and wine. I wish the same could be said about pubs. Why is it so many publicans have decided to ruin their otherwise atmospheric pubs with television sets turned to an infernal blast? Is there a conspiracy out there to turn every bar in this country into the back room of a spin-doctor at the White House? Or perhaps they are aiming to recreate the sitting room of the hardest of hearing most cantankerous and socially inept grand-uncle in the land?
My latest outing to a pub would suggest this is the case. Last Tuesday I went out for a drink and found my straightforward plan to have a private conversation in a public place thwarted at every turn by televisions blasting the budget debate in the Dáil. Every sip of excellent stout, every line of riveting conversation was punctuated by the offensive banality and obdurate shamelessness of Noonan and company. A good conversation in a pub is the grease of a well-oiled relationship, and the Minister for Finance and his adversaries were hell-bent on making mine screech. The bummest note was struck when Noonan and one of his opponents quoted lines by W.B. Yeats in an effort to give complexity and gravitas to their shopkeepers’ rhetoric. I felt like the beast had quit slouching towards Bethlehem and was sprinting towards me to take a dump on my head. The evening turned into an unplanned pub-crawl as we chased the pipe dream of a TV-less pub. We sat in two and put our heads in four before finding one with a screen-less area. Some evenings the best course of action is to go home and read some Yeats in peace. We need some warnings to stop publicans from switching on their televisions at every turn. Even better, we need a campaign to ban screens from pubs. As with the smoking ban, it will be hard at first, but we will soon grow to appreciate the clean air(waves).
Is Romantic Ireland dead and gone? It bloody will be if they insist on installing a TV set in every pub
A Fistful of Olives 