One of the treats I picked up for myself while buying Christmas books for friends and family this weekend was Everyday Drinking, a little compendium of articles about booze by the late Kingsley Amis.
Talented novelist, enthusiastic womanizer and jovial tippler (as well as father of the somewhat less jovial Martin), Amis had all the qualities I require of an icon. He even had a Bond fixation, and wrote a novel about everyone's favourite spy under the pen name Robert Markham. (It's called Colonel Sun and is not half bad.)
Everyday Drinking is a useful antidote to our increasingly health-conscious world, because it is wholly unrepentant about the pleasures of consuming alcohol. Amis clearly sees drinking as a natural, sociable and entirely acceptable pursuit, although the book does include a chapter on hangovers. This suggests that hangovers combine two elements: the physical (headache, nausea, dehydration) and the metaphysical (guilt, shame, paranoia).
Perhaps what makes the rest of the book so shameless is the fact that it is slightly out of date. It has a late 70s "mine's a Cinzano and she'll have a Babycham" feel about it that adds to its charm while keeping the reader at a distance. This may also explain Amis's somewhat baffling approach to cocktails. For example, in lieu of an olive or a twist in his dry martini, he insists on two of those pallid and disgusting cocktail onions, which have surely been banned since. And in an even more off-putting moment, he suggests adding "cucumber juice" to the mix; perhaps - God help us - floating a slice of cucumber on top of the resulting concoction.
Still, most of the rest of the book is a laugh-out-loud series of observations about drink and drinking folk. By the way, Amis has found the ideal way of drawing attention to the fact that the host at a party is being a bit mean with the wine. You simply drop your glass on the floor and say: "Oh dear. Lucky it was empty."
Comments