Life in the Sloe Gin
Lane
By Dominic Horton
Being greeted by a hangover at
the start of the week is nothing new to me but I have had fewer pleasant ones
than the variety that I had on Monday morning and the pleasantness was due in
large part to the sloe gin that I was drinking with Fudgkins in the Flagon
& Gorses the preceding evening.
Fudgkins had been drinking sloe gin with Alexander Sutcliffe two weeks
prior so I had Sutcliffe to blame for my consumption of the drink even though
he was in absentia, which was criminal on his part given the barrelhouse
atmosphere that developed during the course of the evening. Washing the sloe gin down with pints of the
moreish Elland 1872 Porter (at a heavyweight 6.5%) was a winning combination
but it was acting as too strong a relaxant, so I stepped down the ante and
downgraded to taking the porter in black and tans instead. I used to drink black and tans with Sutcliffe
when we used to loiter in the Royal Oak as teenagers and it was a tactic we
developed to make the best that we could out of poor quality mild and Guinness
and it at least made things bearable.
I always associate drinking pints
of black and tans with snow as when I used to work at Patrick Motors petrol
station (which is a whole other story) heavy snowfall befell the earth on a
lonesome winter Saturday and under severe pressure from my colleague, the Wild
Man of Brummio, the gaffer shut the station mid-afternoon on account of us
having no customers. I called Sutcliffe
post haste and arranged to meet him in the Royal Oak to have a little taste of
beer and to shelter from the inclement weather.
Having a 4 X 4 (rare in those days) the Wild Man offered me a lift and
as he wanted to have a drink himself at his club he put his foot down and we
skidded off the forecourt, heading down the road.
We found ourselves at the island
by the Oak but our progress was halted by a little old dear who was driving at
two miles an hour in a Metro. Panicking
that his eight hours drinking time was dwindling away the Wild Man took the
drastic action of driving right over the island to the other side, leaving tyre
tracks in the grass, and after booting me out of his motor he took the same
root back directly over the island shouting expletives at the crawling Granny
as he went. Sutcliffe and I then
proceeded to drink black and tans until it came out of our earholes, as young
men are prone to do, and a blues duo struck up in the bar and it felt like
Christmas.
On arrival at the Flagon, early
Sunday evening, it was clear that some of the inmates had drank a few and that
they were in the mood for a few more.
Although Frank Henstein carries his drink well I could tell he was full
of mild as he was starting to communicate less by speaking and more by hand gestures;
his daughter-in-law Toe-Knee Tulips was making a rare appearance at the
drinking side of the bar and was in a very relaxed state and seeing that Agent
Fudgkins and I were enjoying the sloe gin so much she elected to join us. Frank Henstein accused the long suffering
barmaid Carla Von Trow-Hell of having a nice ar*e and Neddy La Chouffe was so
taken with the whole bonhomie of the evening that he decided to ditch the car
and he reappeared from stage left and got involved with the black and tans. Neddy’s is a professional motor car tinkerer
and in his expert opinion the “Helen” style number plate on my new car could be
worth a couple of hundred quid. With
pound signs in my eyes I ordered another round of sloe gins.
All hands clamoured round the L shaped
bar like whelks on a rock face. Fudgey
gave me a book, The Little Grey Men, by
BB and Carla immediately nicked it and Toe-Knee claimed second dibs on it, so
by the time I read the children’s book to my dear boy Kenteke he will be a
fully grown adult. Philly the Gent
compensated for my loss of the book by lending me a DVD, Captain Phillips, a film about pirates, and such a piratical
infusion was needed as the Pirate himself was AWOL, resting upstairs in his
quarters.
When supplying us with a steady
flow of drinks Chilli Willy took the unfamiliar tack of being nice to us and
the general consensus was that we didn’t like it and all internees agreed that
he should return to his usual sullen, curt demeanour. Being cunning though Willy stayed in the game
by changing tactics and he informed us of the fascinating life and times of one
of his distant forebears, the eminently colourful Chalkley Beeson who was a businessman, lawman, and cattleman and owner of the famous
Long Branch Saloon, Dodge City during the wild west era. Beeson was Sheriff of Dodge City. Get that Sheriff
of Dodge f*cking City; imagine that on your CV – I can see a smarmy, marble
smooth suit asking in an interview “what makes you think you are qualified for
the job Mr Horton?”. “I was the Sheriff
of Dodge City, now if you don’t give me the job I am going to blow your f*cking
head off.” Beeson drove noted gunman Clay Allison out
of town. Beeson knew Wyatt Earp. Beeson had a big moustache. Beeson was without a shadow of doubt a right
rough and tumble character. “This town
ain’t big enough for the both of us” tough.
Two lumps of grit in his coffee.
The Milky bars were not on me but I did order another round of sloe
gins.
The Chalkley Beeson story was
Chilli Willy’s finest moment since he cooked the deluxe and luscious food on
the Jewish food night and he can live off the story well into his dotage. Meanwhile, in strolled the inimitable Colly
Coren and surveying the Wild West Midlands sight around the bar he must have
thought he had walked into the Long Branch Saloon in Dodge City in the 19th
century. Coren fell short of greeting
us with “howdy” but despite his sobriety he did have enough sport in his bones
to join in with the general carousing and high
spirited horseplay. Willy and Carla did
not slide our sloe gins down the long bar top as they would have got stuck on
the beer towels and there is a ledge half way up the bar anyway: if they had so, it would have been to my
detriment as Fudgkins would have been quick on the draw and had my drink down
his throat quicker than you can say Wild Bill Hickok. The rest of the evening was hazier
than the early morning mist over Tombstone but it ended with Willy and Carla
giving me a lift back to Codger Mansions and Carla generously shoving an
unwanted bottle of wine in my hands that was clanging around the motor.
Back to Monday morning. Someone must have broken in during the night
and cooked a curry and left all the dishes strewn across the kitchen, it
couldn’t have been me as I can remember it.
A small piece of green chilli wedged between my teeth gave the game away
though – not an unpleasant reminder in morsel form of the night before. If I see a morsel of food on the kitchen
surface I always instinctively eat it even if I don’t know what it is, a bit of
bonus food; I have fallen foul of it a few times when it was not food at all
but a foreign body that tasted acrid.
Unwashed dishes, poor form, not like me at all, I always manage to tidy
up no matter what condition I am in post Flagon, hang my trousers up etc.
Sundry bits of paper were strewn
over the table, potential dates Carla had given me for a Flagon beer junket,
notes for this column, a reminder that I need to look into buying a
mattress. Despite everything I am a shining
beacon of organisation. I need a new
mattress because of a bad back; my existing one must pre-date the three day
week and is less supportive than a parent whose child has just said that they
are running off to the circus. Have you
seen the price of mattresses? I was aghast when I looked, it will have to
wait. Willy Mantitt, who admittedly has
a few quid (not all of which has been acquired in a condign fashion), said that
he spent three and a half grand on a top of the range mattress stating that you
spend a third of your life in bed and that it was the best money he ever
spent. I suppose you wouldn’t hesitate
to lay out three and a half large on a motor if you had the cash knocking
about, so for once Mantitt is onto something.
I dragged my hangover onto the
train to get to work and out of a dark corner of my eye I saw a headline on the
inner pages of the Metro that a passenger was reading, which read, “Why does
anything exist at all?” Such a poser was
too much to handle in the circumstances so I just thought to myself that if in
the final reckoning I fail to evade the clutches of the sinister
devil I hope at least that they stock black and tans and sloe gin in hell.
© Dominic Horton, 2014.
* Email:
lordhofr@gmail.com.
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