After Eight

After eight pints, when I was young, I was just starting to liven up, we all went out drank lots; we did not binge drink in those days, just got as drunk as a skunk then went for a curry.

Its funny how your drinking life changes over the years. My first solo foray into a pub was after I had taken my GCE exams. A few of us went up the road to the pub and I was elected, as I looked the oldest, to go to the bar. I don’t remember feeling nervous and they served me so perhaps I have always looked like an old soak. My first order was a pint of mild, I thought at the time it would make me look older and more mature.

I then moved on to my rum and blackcurrant phase. I wanted to go in the navy and as we all know sailors in those days drank rum, so there I was, drinking my rum and black and not sure whether I liked it, but it seemed the right thing to do.

Then as I got older I moved in to my gin and tonic days. I was mid twenties and thought myself sophisticated. All my contemporaries were drinking them as we went out for our meals in restaurants and pubs.

We got dressed up and did not get quite as drunk as I did as a teenager.

I then moved back on to beer again in my thirties. I drank Guinness. It was good for you and I found it good for me. I rarely had a headache with the black stuff. In my union days, sat in bars discussing the world, I believed it gave me gravitas, a certain style and look of experience that I could use to my advantage among the wise old hands that I met with in those smoke filled rooms.

As I got into my forties I gravitated on to wine, now a serious drink not just something for the experts. At first sweet wine, then getting on to the more subtle tastes of chardonnay. As a pensions trustee I went to dinner with people in grand hotels where I could not afford to buy a beer. They chose the wine, all very gentile and all on expenses.

Now I come to my fifties and I have learnt to appreciate the gentler taste of single malt whisky. Not with water but sipped and savoured.

I wonder where I will travel to next. The one thing I know now is that as I get older it gets harder for me to stay up ‘after eight.’