“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)


.

.

.

.

01 April 2015

BLEAK DAY IN THE EAST END

As I attempt to kick some order into a lifetime of notebooks, I hit much catharsis. Like this account of a bleak afternoon crawling the pubs of Adelaide's East End after lunching with Stephen Tracey and Greg Trott eleven years ago. Stephen, who became a customer's representative at the wine label printer, AQ, after being state manager of Remy-Blass, was on his fourth bout of cancer in a decade. Trott, founder of Wirra Wirra Wines, was dying of it too, but he was enjoying a bout of sweet remission. This recalls the last time the three of us lunched together. It was early January. Stephen went into hospital soon after and died on February 29th, it being Leap year. Trott died almost a year later, to the day. We were really good mates. 

It seems that after lunch at T-Chow, I drank through The Exeter, The Belgian Beer Café and The East End Irish Bar before fleeing to Dekka's (North Adelaide), where the black cockatoos finally came in to haunt my poire William.

 

No comments: