Alcohology

Worldwide, drinking is seen as macho; it is usually part of a ritual; and its main purpose is to make sad people happy. In that sense it is an international equaliser.

When they catch sight of one another Alkibiades and Sokrates engage in a mock display of lovers’ jealousy (or maybe it’s real). Alkibiades proclaims that everyone should at once get as drunk as he is. He insists on contributing a symposiastic speech, not in praise of love but in praise of Sokrates. He drapes his garlands over Sokrates and begins.

The reason this level of consumption appeared normal to Hemingway is that it was a fairly accurate transcription of the amount of booze he was quotidianly ingesting: it’s no wonder that his responses had coarsened, or that his feeling for ordinary life-as-it-is-lived had gone wonky.

For sixthly he invites himself round for a drink one evening./For seventhly you consume two bottles of wine between you./For eighthly he stays the night./For ninthly you cannot wait to see him again./For tenthly he does not get in touch for several days.

When the effects of drink are not extremely funny, they do have a tendency to be a bit grim. For every cheerful fallabout drunk there is a lugubrious toper or melancholy soak, draining the flask for no better reason than to become more repetitive or dogmatic.

Hunger, suffering and tedium can be alleviated by simple and relatively available stimulants, which quicken the ebbing powers of the body and brain or, eventually, dull the pressing messages of hunger or pain.

In recognition of our different styles I bought him an ironic bottle of wine when he moved in, chosen to be ready to drink in 1997, on my 50th birthday. It was partly a small gesture of risk, but mostly I expected to be doing exactly what I was doing with it today: popping it into one of the card-board boxes of his belongings, well before 1997.

Edward FitzGerald transfused his own life, even as he deemed it a paltry thing, into the persona of Omar Khayyám, who would lift it from that paltriness and transfigure him. He was able to formulate through his Persian avatar an outlook, a world vision, a testament. Only someone who never drank would give drink such a positive role, with never a moment of self-disgust.

When she asked me about it, saying that our account showed it had been mailed and returned, naturally I lied. Three years of secret drinking continued and finally ended – I hope – with that sheet tied around a pipe in our closet.

No question: the cold simplicity of vodka is an invitation to toss the 100 grams down the back of the throat and then to wait, with eyes watering, for the lovely atomic spread in the gut as the liquor explodes within. Vodka is a great drink.