Whisky: a friend in need

I was performing in Soho last night, and I asked the crowd whether there were any whisky lovers in the audience. It hit me immediately that it’s hard to be a true ‘lover’ of whisky, because I’ve come to regard it as a long-standing, shit friend - the kind who legs you up in the street, steers you into embarrassing conversations and nicks twenty quid off you on a Saturday night. The sort of friend you stay mates with all the same, because no matter how much they abuse you, they’re always there when you want a good weep.

Over the course of our acquaintance, my fair-weather friend has encouraged me to spend an hour trying to get into my neighbour’s house instead of my own (“but I DO live here officer!”), pushed me headfirst over a garden wall and convinced me that The OffSpring’s ‘Pretty Fly For A White Guy’ is an excellent choice of karaoke song. But whisky was also there the night I sat by a pitch black canal with no company except a moon as bright as a lamp, and the time I stood on Birchover rocks in the snow, so I keep reminding myself that we’ve had a good innings.

And, in defence, whisky isn’t the kind of mate who rings you up the morning after the night before to give you an earful about what a twat you made of yourself (wine can’t resist popping round to shriek: “but you MUST remember dancing on the pool table…”). It preserves a blissful nonchalance, almost as if nothing happened at all.

It was my friend Alastair who introduced us, at a party. He’d known whisky for years, didn’t have a bad word to say. It was only later that I found out people had been slagging her off: I heard some bloke called Logan Pearsall Smith (erm, obviously, I know a lot of people with names like that) muttering that “whisky has killed more men than bullets.” Which is a bit harsh to be honest. And according to Ralph Emerson “as a cure for worrying, work is better than whisky.” Well, that depends very much where you work, doesn’t it Ralph? I used to sit at the reception desk of the Chesterfield nightclub Livingstones, and I was definitely calmer when I was up in the bar after closing time with a Famous Grouse than when I was downstairs in the cloakroom having to confiscate lollipop lady signs, large inflatable dolls and traffic cones.

And without whisky’s steady inspiration, I wouldn’t have written this poem from ‘a pint for the ghost’:

A dram for all the men I’ve never drunk with

Sigmund Freud refuses every neat Ardbeg
or soft Caol Ila swirled beneath his nose,

but Byron knocks them back in one, then winks
and taps his glass against the lacquered tabletop.

Beside me, Marx is dishing out full measures
of the sherry-finished, twelve-year old Ledaig

but Larkin’s nothing but a bitter man, he says,
he’ll have no truck with spirits.

I’ve brought them to my local, in the snug
armpit of Sheffield, where the landlord

doesn’t bat an eyelid if my wise companions
sometimes slip their guard;

pass fingers through their glasses, take a shortcut
through a wall to reach the loos. It’s Sat’dy neet

he says, there’s stranger folk in here than these.
And, after all, he’s seen the likes of me before as well,

he gently lifts them out of corner seats
past closing time; the women who arrive alone,

who murmur toasts into the air, who raise a glass
to men who’ve never answered them.

* * *

And, just for a laff, here’s my whisky top 5. Arguments, additions, free samples from distilleries all welcome…

5. Bushmills summat-or-other – I had it once and it was nice but I don’t know much more than that.
4. Bruichladdich – unpronounceable and brilliant.
3. Macallan – what a winter walk in the park would taste like.
2. Caol Ila 1996– stinks of cigarettes. As many of my best mates do.
1. 10 year old Ardbeg – the real deal.

Definitely not making the list is a bottle of whisky I once drank in Chesterfield, which was to Bells what Blue Shark is to Red Bull, and was possibly called something like Rings…