d r i n k s t e r: CHINAMAN BUSTS AIRPORT WINE RECORD

“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”

DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)

29 December 2008

CHINAMAN BUSTS AIRPORT WINE RECORD

CARTOON BY GEORGE GRAINGER ALDRIDGE

Staff at Paris’ Roissy airport liquor store are still bemused at the record-breaking customer who whizzed through on Christmas eve. A mystery Chinaman broke his dash to a Beijing flight to spend $A89,013.00 on wine for Christmas, doubling the previous record spend on the good oil at an airport. Our thirsty traveller’s cache included 1991 La Tâche, a 2002 Romanée-Conti and a 1947 Lafite-Rothschild. No doubt the world’s most famous winemaker, Jesus Christ, would have been delighted to see his birthday celebrated so heartily by a wine man from the east. One wonders about the Christmas dinner menu. In Australia, the airport anti-terrorism droogs would confiscate the wine before he caught the plane, and it’d be back to that sweet Damascus rosé for the next birthday clambake with the lads on Galilee shore.
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CONFESSIONS

"After enough years newspapermen begin to pall on other newspapermen; they begin to take their good qualities for granted and wince at their shortcomings, of which the most common are a vanity that sometimes borders on the thespian and a sort of perpetual mental adolescence that I think stems from starting a fresh story every day or every week or month and never having time to get to the bottom of anything. They forget that newspapermen as a class have a yearning for truth as involuntary as a hophead’s addiction to junk. The question of whether the junkie really loves hop is academic; he can’t get along without it. A newspaperman may write a lie to hold his job, but he won’t believe it, and the necessity outrages him so that he craves truth all the more thereafter. A few newspapermen lie to get on in the world, but it outrages them, too, and I have never known a dishonest journalist who wasn’t patently an unhappy bastard."

A.J. Liebling,

war correspondent,

New Yorker,

Algiers,

January 1942.

“Ale, especially that made from barley, clogs the sinews, causes headache and congestion of the head, yet it overstimulates the action of the kidneys, and, when drunk to excess, lowers the temperature. That, however, which is brewed from wheat, and is flavoured with mint and parsley, is judged better for everybody. Still, in the case of persons exposed to the sun’s heat, in feverish conditions and sultry weather, its use is inadvisable.”

From The Science Of Dining – A Medieval Treatise on the Hygiene of the Table and the Laws of Health, translated from the Latin by Arthur S. Way D. Lit, MacMillan, 1936. Previous translation The Schoolmaster, 1583. Original text from Mohammed ibn Zakariya al Razi, Arabic medical writer (865-925AD).

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29 December 2008

CHINAMAN BUSTS AIRPORT WINE RECORD

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