Vivian and Michael and I got a bit carried away last night.
I sort of knew that that twenty-fourth pint was perhaps not a great idea.
Category Archives: drinks
Will you be our Valentine?
Pepe hesitated for approximately 1 nanosecond when he heard that boeuf bourgignon was on the menu.
Then the Lindt chocolate balls clinched the deal.
He is off chocolate for lent. But it seems that the self-denial of chocolaty pleasures only applies to the cocoa treat when it is in bar or square form. Thankfully chocolate balls (or profiteroles) seem to escape the ban.
Pepe is quite inventive when it comes to creating liturgical loopholes.
Let the good times profiterole!
On the tear
Unlike the hysterically happy beardy guy who was only too glad to promote the delights of beer guzzling at 9.30 AM as I was walking in to work this morning, Mr. Jean-Claude Decaux is not a happy camper.
First, he had to design posters on some sort of plastic film, to withstand the typical Irish rainfall extravaganza (the wet-glue/paper ones inevitably ended up in a mulch of, well, paper and glue, heaped underneath a bare metal billboard).
Now he has to go back to his engineers, to design plastic posters that will withstand winds gusting at 3 million miles per hour. Two to three times a week…
It’s a good thing that there is no shortage of cash in the happy-beardy-hoppy-bear industry. `
For those of you not necessarily familiar with the “on the tear” of the title, you will find a rather useful list of Irish idioms and expressions here.
6.15 PM update:
Question: Who’s laughing now?
Answer: That bollix, still.
Just about.
The Glitch Theory
Quality pintage, and choice company.
The Big Nose Club spring meeting took place in Slattery’s of Rathmines.
All was perfect.
Until I came up with the Glitch Theory.
It’s going to take significantly more pintage to get the lads to see the light…
The chairman
has left the building.
This year again I witnessed some heartbreaking scenes of panic alcohol buying in the local supermarket.
Tomorrow is indeed the day (with Christmas day) when the sale of alcohol is illegal.
A day when Ireland is at loss.
And, in the absence of any alternative, turns to religion.
Local gossip
Just saw the new tennents moving into O’Brien’s.
I shouldn’t judge on appearance only but they look the rough sort…
The Frothy Foot – a wetherspoonful of cheap lovin’
Look at the head on that! (this is not our usual Guinness)
The lads and I (collectively known, except to them, as the Big Nose Club) decided, at my instigation, to break away from tradition and venture to the UK for a couple of hours.
Yes, we paid a visit to Satan’s den and checked one of the links in the chain that is rumoured to have tied the pub industry to the ground before kicking it in the face. We… ahem… drank in a Wetherspoon pub.
Let me put the record straight. It was obviously more of a sociological study then an implicit endorsement of the small publicans slayer.
We did fit in a half dozen pints each though (but Chica, it was SO cheap) and some delicious food (more on that later).
I must admit to having been in the 40 Foot once before, and having really enjoyed the selection of beers. This is the reason why I was curious to see the lads’ reaction.
We have over the years done enough for the shareholders of Diageo, and their marketing people can work their wonders and turn an alcoholic beverage into a national icon (a black and white creamy pint is a lot more photogenic than an enlarged cirrhosed liver), at the end of the day Guinness is a beer. Among hundreds of very drinkable beers.
We agreed on our first impression of the place: it is bright. Way too bright. Somehow brightness does not suit pubs.
The 2 fundamental rules of the Irish pub are: it has to dimly lit and you cannot be seen from the outside. How else could it be a semi-illicit pleasure? It has to have the taste of the forbidden fruit (or cheap apple pulp if you are a cider drinker).
But the 40 Foot is not quite a pub. It is more of an eat-and-drink cheap cheap cheap place (even if your intention was not to eat in the first place).
The price list is the number one pulling factor, just like people do not fly Ryanair because of their love for the yellow/blue colour scheme.
I mean, getting EUR2.50 change from a tenner for a round of three drinks is unheard of. Each time we went to the bar we just couldn’t believe how cheap a round was (even when we tried the more expensive pints, at an eye-watering EUR2.95)
The selection is good (although 3 of the beers that we had intended to try were not available last night). And the beers were closely scrutinised.
All in all, we had a good time, sampled quite a lot of beers that we wouldn’t normally have access to and talked shite as we usually do. It felt a little bit as if we were abroad. Except that everybody spoke with an Irish accent. A bit like in Molly Malone’s pub in Lanzarote.
The place is too bright and the table are too high. As if the place was designed more for eating than having a conspirational conversation on low stools at a low table with a bag of Taytos and dry roasted peanuts.
And the thing is, it was. Designed as a place for the munchies. For this is the genius bit in the Wetherspoon business model: you will inevitably end up eating mass produced shite that you would not touch with a barge pole while sober, but that tastes absolutely delicious after four pints. And so packed full of salt and spices that you will feel compelled to drink at least another 4 pints to quench the gargantuan thirst. And then you’ll get the munchies again. And on and on until you succumb from a coronary disease, aged 47.
The food isn’t great. But it is cheap. Well, EUR12 for 3 starters seems like a decent price after ingesting a few thousand millilitres of water turned into something delicious thanks to hops and fermentation. And it keeps the business model ticking along (a bag of Taytos cannot be procured for love nor money)
To be fair, we had a great evening (but then again the company is great – wherever we decide to take it) in a place with no TV or music (a refreshing change for those of us who still practice the ancient, slightly old-fashioned art of oral communication).
We had our six pints each (and food, well… 2 prawns each encrusted in a crusty thirst-inducing substance, 2 chicken strips each soaked in Drink-a-Lot sauce, and 3 spicy wings each that explain the pungent smells that one has to battle with in communal toilets in the Mistake Factory – I know now which of my colleagues eat and drink in the 40 Foot) for just a little over EUR20.
You’d have to get in touch with the IMF before hoping to do the same in a city centre pub, or sell one of your kids’ kidney on eBay.
We will go back again.
BUT, we’ve made the solemn promise that:
– at least one full year shall have elapsed before we go back, and our next meetings will be in locally owned, locally operated pubs
– we will smuggle in our own Taytos and peanuts (Scampi fries if we are feeling extravagant), as I do not wish to inflict on my work colleagues’ nostrils the Morning-After-Spicy-Wings-and-Revisionist-Craft-Stout biological bomb
We are only too aware that the attraction for the cheap drink is going to mean in the not-so-distant future the death of several local public houses.
What shite satellite TV and comparatively cheaper off licence drinks have started will be reinforced by mega pub chains: the death of the Irish pub, as a social space, dim lit, away from prying eyes, with a sense of convivial conspiracy.
As we were hoovering the last drops of our chilled Russian Baltika, we were pondering the inevitability of standardisation, and the reduction in variety, and the darwinian nature of life.
Wetherspoon is without doubt going to kill off many a small establishment.
Their decline is partly their fault. The omnipresence of shite, loud TV in pubs has been a problem for many years.
The publicans’ reaction to seeing their custom base shrink has been to increase prices in order to try and maintain revenue, making a night on the tiles quite literally beyond the reach of most, in a society riddled with debt (both national and personal.
A touristy excursion to the 40 Foot was both fun and educational. And cheap.
But a pub scene with no alternatives is a scary thought. A scary thought indeed.
You have no idea how asphyxiatingly awful those spicy wings are on the way out, when you are hungover and feeling sorry for yourself in the Cubicle of Doom.
Related reading:
Elbow room
Today I was inside the Wii on the Sii.
It’s niiiiiice.
And I learned about politics and ideology in children’s literature, and the way it can influence their vision of the world.
Scary stuff. I’m glad that my kids are being kept well away from children’s literature, and all its underlying messages and propaganda.
It has to be said that they are too busy watching Russian dashboard footage of car crashes on YouTube.
To give them a well-rounded, sound vision of humanity.
Thanks Aine for the invite. It was good to see you on your flash visit to the motherland.
In and around Dublin 