Chapter 39

The Demon Drink:

My maternal grandfather George Wilkins was apprenticed to his father as a baker until at the age of fourteen he ran away to sea. He spent the next ten years or so as a merchant seaman before the mast on sailing ships. To my knowledge he visited Capetown, New York (where he fell in the harbour and was nearly drowned whilst painting the side of the ship) and I think Sydney. He mostly learned how to drink. His career was cut short when it was discovered that he was colour-blind, a trait which I subsequently inherited. He rejoined his father’s business and became, in my admittedly somewhat biased view, the best baker in the known universe. As a small child I remember this old man shuffling around in a flour whitened apron and smelling of newly baked bread. Despite his delirium tremens, a gift from his sailing days, he was a master of wedding cake decoration. He would sit at the table with the plain iced wedding cake in front of him on it‘s rotating stand. Also in front of him would be a collection of icing nozzles with bags of icing and a bottle of whisky. He would observe the tremor in his hand, pour a glass of whisky, drink it and check the tremor. When it stopped he would start that delicate icing filigree tracing which all wedding cakes had in those days. An occasional shot of whisky would maintain his steadiness of hand. I remember gazing with awe on the results of his artistry. It is no surprise that two of his sons became artists, one of them probably being the only colour-blind art master in a British school.

Here in Bangtao I am surfacing after another eventful evening at The Coffee Shop. As usual we all had perhaps a little too much to drink but with us was a Norwegian gentleman who was due to go home today. In celebration of this he started drinking at about eleven in the morning. He was drinking a mixture of beers, Jaeger bombs, Zambuccas, red wines and probably other alcoholic devices which I cannot remember. At about one in the morning he attempted to get to his motorbike to ride home. He fell over twice. Eventually a sympathetic Thai lady organised a taxi for him. An hour later just as the bar was closing he re-arrived on the back of his hotel security guard’s motorbike. We sent him to another bar and went home.

You may have noticed that I used the expression alcoholic ‘device’ not ‘drink’ in the previous paragraph. This was deliberate as it more accurately describes the use to which the drink was being put. It was not a means of relaxing with friends in a social environment - It was, very precisely, a mechanism for getting totally and blindly paralytically drunk. This was an example which one can see most any night here in Bangtao. It is the cause of nearly all farang motorbike accidents. It is clearly something to which farangs aspire.

Why? Why? Why? I ask myself.

When I get inebriated it is merely the result of too much convivial drinking. One drink leads to another and another and so on. Sometimes I walk home. But the difference is this.
I do not drink to get drunk. I get drunk because I drink. Drunkenness is not a state I aspire to - it just sometimes creeps up on me.

This hell bent determination to become completely pissed just does not turn me on.

I can remember as a twenty year old once deliberately getting drunk. The reason was simple. The girl I fancied was more interested in some other guy. It was a “look at me, look at me, look what you’ve made me do” attempt. Of course it didn’t work. Oh yes she looked at me ok - and headed off in the opposite direction. I haven’t tried it since.

So is this deliberate drunkenness a plea for help, for sympathy? An attempt to escape the horrors of reality ? If so then I am sorry that people feel so bad about themselves but it just seems to me to be totally counter productive.

I have also observed that the loss of self control, the violence which often goes with drunkenness seems to be a very British, or at least northern European, phenomenon. It is even used as mitigating circumstances in court when violence has erupted. “My client apologises but says he was very drunk at the time”.

That is a defence which would not work anywhere else in the world.
In Spain for example a drunk can expect to receive a far greater sentence for violent behaviour than if he was sober.

We Brits seem to think that we can get drunk and that excuses our subsequent bad behaviour.

Well we can’t and it doesn’t.

So here I am lecturing on the perils of the demon drink and sounding like a real goody goody.

I suppose really I’m making a plea for the happy drunk. I enjoy drinking and sometimes drinking too much. If that then leaves me in a cheerful state I reckon that can’t be too bad for me or for the world at large.
However if the drinking left me in a morose, pugnacious, bellicose mood then I reckon that something would be very wrong.

I expect I have totally missed the point here somewhere. But if I have then it is a point that I am, perhaps unfairly, happy to misunderstand.