the seven ages of booze
class_worrier says the ‘seven ages of booze’ are: Sneaking small sips of the dregs of cheap whatever leftover at your parents parties, Snakebite, Lager, Heavy/Stout, Wine, Cognac/Brandy etc. The missing age is the Wildcard: The discovery of your common-or-garden spirits. This can lead to a year or two of going-off-the rails, and can be slotted in-between any of the other ages. It is most commonly found between lager and heavy. He’s made me think about my ages of booze.
I’m not a great drinker. Actually that’s a lie - I am a great drinker because I get tipsy after my first drink, and entertainingly rowdy after my third. I used to drink regularly, but stopped when I bought my first car, and more specifically after a night of such potent consumption that I had to be sat down in the toilets of Ritzy’s nightclub and forced to be sick in a plastic potted palm. I have a phobia about being sick, so it put me off alcohol for a while. By the time I’d got over it I was so auto-reliant that I couldn’t go back.
Dunstable’s only nightclub then, Ritzy’s was previously Cinderella Rockerfellas, during which time my step-mother was its accountant and I was allowed to run around the empty dancefloor during school holiday afternoons. She was later the accountant at the Queensway Hall civic centre, and in the following summer holiday I was allowed to prowl around that. Usefully, it was closed to the public for renovation at the time, so I could stare moodily out through its glass walls at the people shopping in the open market beyond. Sometimes I pretended I was the daughter of an oil baron being held captive in my steel and glass castle, and sometimes - because there was a piano in the lobby - I pretended to be a child prodigy rehearsing for the reopening night. The elderly shoppers would gawp at me and on some days I’d get quite an audience. (Good job they couldn’t hear me - I was just banging out The Entertainer over and over again.) Occasionally I played detective because I’d heard the Queensway Hall had an atomic bunker underneath it (more of that here) but sadly I never found any hard evidence - just some sharply dipping tunnels, which could just as easily have led to a beer cellar.
Prior to being Cinderella Rockerfellas, Ritzy’s was Tiffany’s, and I can remember much excitement in the school playground on the day a small aircraft flew overhead trailing a banner saying “See Sam Fox at Tiffany’s Tonight!” All the boys stopped burning each other’s hands on the pipes leading into the boiler room and started planning how they’d pass their nine year old selves off as 21 year old men about town to the hulking great bouncers.
Ritzy’s was subsequently Ikon and is now Jumping Jacks (”Jumpin Jax?”) and vies with two other nightclubs for the custom of Dunstable’s Ben Sherman shirted youths. Since I’ve not been for ten years, they’ve stopped sending me the free entry tickets for my birthday and interim ‘un-birthday’. Birthday girls and boys would also get a cheap bottle of perry - screw top, naturally - which if memory serves is where all the trouble started on the potted palm night.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The potted palm night ushered in my fourth age - being near teetotal.
The first age was enjoying Advocaat-based Snowball cocktails at Christmas. The second age was my first taste of vodka, age 13 and standing with my best mate on the edge of the pavement of a Dunstable suburban street. We’d coerced some poor stranger into buying us a half bottle of economy vodka and 20 B&H from Victoria Wine, and were attempting to enjoy them. Sarah stuck to the tabs, and I stuck to the neat vodka, despite it tasting like hairspray. Later that night, we met up with a couple of boys from school and were innocently idling outside The Golden Griddle kebab house when we were wrongly charged with being part of “The Bunhill Posse” (Bunhill being a local council estate) by a gang of 30 hard kids. Naturally we denied it and wandered off eating chips. But our aggressors were spoiling for a fight and it quickly became clear that four middle-class nice kids against 30 mental cases from the wrong side of town = unfair odds. So we legged it. They followed, cornered us in the walled-in car park of a block of flats and proceeded to beat the living daylights out of us. Sarah and I were luckier as there were less girls in the gang, but still enough to hold us down while a couple took turns in punching us. The boys were invisible under a flailing mass of parkas and baggy jeans. I like to think that the girl I am now would have fought back - in fact I like to think I’d have delivered them a stern lecture outside The Golden Griddle which would have inspired them to go off and do good work for the community, or at least give the VW signs round their necks back to their rightful owners. But me then did the only think she could do - opened her mouth and screamed blue murder. Someone in the flats called the police, who arrived within minutes and the hard kids magically vanished into thin air.
I didn’t try vodka again until the third age; my golden age of drinking (1989-1991) when we became regulars of The Wheatsheaf, then The California and finally The Bird in Hand, which were all owned by a landlord with itchy feet and a taste for alternative rock. Many relationships were made, broken up, remade, broken up again etc in the gardens of these pubs to the dim sound of L7 being played in the bar. Usually the evening would end with a screening of a bad film at someone’s house, or on the nights when one of our gang had been slighted by a foolish man, sitting in the car park of Dunstable Downs eating chicken chow mein and blubbing ferociously. On special nights, it would end at Ritzy’s, and so began the fourth age.
I suppose I’m in the fifth age now; still mainly teetotal but open to the occasional cocktail or two now I can afford an evening on the Watermelon Martinis at the Eagle Bar and Diner. I intend to drink tomorrow night at the Eurovision Party; possibly some kind of Eurococktail? Suggestions for themed drinks would be most welcome.
My sixth and seventh ages of drinking are a fuzzy mystery as yet. I don’t like wine or lager (though I occasionally have a craving for fizzy beer on hot days) and it won’t be classy for me to be drinking blue alcopops when I’m drawing my pension. But by then perhaps some new-fangled modern alco-pill will be all the rage. Or maybe I’ll just stick to tea.
I’m not a great drinker. Actually that’s a lie - I am a great drinker because I get tipsy after my first drink, and entertainingly rowdy after my third. I used to drink regularly, but stopped when I bought my first car, and more specifically after a night of such potent consumption that I had to be sat down in the toilets of Ritzy’s nightclub and forced to be sick in a plastic potted palm. I have a phobia about being sick, so it put me off alcohol for a while. By the time I’d got over it I was so auto-reliant that I couldn’t go back.
Dunstable’s only nightclub then, Ritzy’s was previously Cinderella Rockerfellas, during which time my step-mother was its accountant and I was allowed to run around the empty dancefloor during school holiday afternoons. She was later the accountant at the Queensway Hall civic centre, and in the following summer holiday I was allowed to prowl around that. Usefully, it was closed to the public for renovation at the time, so I could stare moodily out through its glass walls at the people shopping in the open market beyond. Sometimes I pretended I was the daughter of an oil baron being held captive in my steel and glass castle, and sometimes - because there was a piano in the lobby - I pretended to be a child prodigy rehearsing for the reopening night. The elderly shoppers would gawp at me and on some days I’d get quite an audience. (Good job they couldn’t hear me - I was just banging out The Entertainer over and over again.) Occasionally I played detective because I’d heard the Queensway Hall had an atomic bunker underneath it (more of that here) but sadly I never found any hard evidence - just some sharply dipping tunnels, which could just as easily have led to a beer cellar.
Prior to being Cinderella Rockerfellas, Ritzy’s was Tiffany’s, and I can remember much excitement in the school playground on the day a small aircraft flew overhead trailing a banner saying “See Sam Fox at Tiffany’s Tonight!” All the boys stopped burning each other’s hands on the pipes leading into the boiler room and started planning how they’d pass their nine year old selves off as 21 year old men about town to the hulking great bouncers.
Ritzy’s was subsequently Ikon and is now Jumping Jacks (”Jumpin Jax?”) and vies with two other nightclubs for the custom of Dunstable’s Ben Sherman shirted youths. Since I’ve not been for ten years, they’ve stopped sending me the free entry tickets for my birthday and interim ‘un-birthday’. Birthday girls and boys would also get a cheap bottle of perry - screw top, naturally - which if memory serves is where all the trouble started on the potted palm night.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The potted palm night ushered in my fourth age - being near teetotal.
The first age was enjoying Advocaat-based Snowball cocktails at Christmas. The second age was my first taste of vodka, age 13 and standing with my best mate on the edge of the pavement of a Dunstable suburban street. We’d coerced some poor stranger into buying us a half bottle of economy vodka and 20 B&H from Victoria Wine, and were attempting to enjoy them. Sarah stuck to the tabs, and I stuck to the neat vodka, despite it tasting like hairspray. Later that night, we met up with a couple of boys from school and were innocently idling outside The Golden Griddle kebab house when we were wrongly charged with being part of “The Bunhill Posse” (Bunhill being a local council estate) by a gang of 30 hard kids. Naturally we denied it and wandered off eating chips. But our aggressors were spoiling for a fight and it quickly became clear that four middle-class nice kids against 30 mental cases from the wrong side of town = unfair odds. So we legged it. They followed, cornered us in the walled-in car park of a block of flats and proceeded to beat the living daylights out of us. Sarah and I were luckier as there were less girls in the gang, but still enough to hold us down while a couple took turns in punching us. The boys were invisible under a flailing mass of parkas and baggy jeans. I like to think that the girl I am now would have fought back - in fact I like to think I’d have delivered them a stern lecture outside The Golden Griddle which would have inspired them to go off and do good work for the community, or at least give the VW signs round their necks back to their rightful owners. But me then did the only think she could do - opened her mouth and screamed blue murder. Someone in the flats called the police, who arrived within minutes and the hard kids magically vanished into thin air.
I didn’t try vodka again until the third age; my golden age of drinking (1989-1991) when we became regulars of The Wheatsheaf, then The California and finally The Bird in Hand, which were all owned by a landlord with itchy feet and a taste for alternative rock. Many relationships were made, broken up, remade, broken up again etc in the gardens of these pubs to the dim sound of L7 being played in the bar. Usually the evening would end with a screening of a bad film at someone’s house, or on the nights when one of our gang had been slighted by a foolish man, sitting in the car park of Dunstable Downs eating chicken chow mein and blubbing ferociously. On special nights, it would end at Ritzy’s, and so began the fourth age.
I suppose I’m in the fifth age now; still mainly teetotal but open to the occasional cocktail or two now I can afford an evening on the Watermelon Martinis at the Eagle Bar and Diner. I intend to drink tomorrow night at the Eurovision Party; possibly some kind of Eurococktail? Suggestions for themed drinks would be most welcome.
My sixth and seventh ages of drinking are a fuzzy mystery as yet. I don’t like wine or lager (though I occasionally have a craving for fizzy beer on hot days) and it won’t be classy for me to be drinking blue alcopops when I’m drawing my pension. But by then perhaps some new-fangled modern alco-pill will be all the rage. Or maybe I’ll just stick to tea.