Simpler days ... having a quiet one with the gang on the way to school
We're all batty now but we gotta get through this together without denial ... gentle, gentle, gentle
by PHILIP WHITE
At an impossibly short
age, Michael Dransfield, whom I reckon to be Australia's greatest poet,
published a volume called The Inspector
Of Tides.
From the moment I first heard
its title, I knew my young (1948-1973) guru referred to a commitment to that
vigilant watching, watching, watching routine that only scarce poets know. Driven
mystics with Karl Zeiss window glass, an obsession with tasty mouthsful of language
and a very risky tendency to honesty. Folks who live exacerbated in a constant
swing between exhaustion and ecstacy, as Hart Crane described. Humans with
forensic memories.
We thought the planet was
messy then. At risk of somebody blowing it up at any minute. Like all of it at
once.
Michael died real early so
I can't expect him to explain it in his beautiful naked simplicity but I reckon
it's got much worse. There's too much terrible out there now.
Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya, Musea Nacional Del Prado
Try pondering the meaning
of a world in which everybody must
now suffer from (a) Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or (b) denial of same,
which is even more dangerous behaviour than attempting to winter it out
knowingly.
All these kids will grow up. Into what?
Daily reminders of the rhythms of destruction lead to nasty volumes
of stuff like ethanol being pumped through the community kidney filters with
really obscene deliberation. Or, as above, (b) denial of same.
Even as a little boy in
the Strezlecki Ranges in the 'fifties, I knew the whiff of it. Every household
had a skinny bloke in it somewhere, sitting with a smoke glowing and a smelly drink
in the blinds-down dark, trying to forget The War. Kids had to be real quiet in
houses in case Uncle So-and-so chucked a funny turn.
One had especially to
tip-toe round those who could sleep only on the veranda. You could hear them yellin'
out suddenly in the night.
As if the recollection of
that cherophobic epoch wasn't enough, some sort of slime mould from Hell moved
into the vittles of my upper body yesterday, adding some colourful biochemical
blues to the normal electrical problems, so I've been wallowing round the royal
cot listening to BBC with the curtains drawn, remembering all these things
while I drink lots of water and lemon juice and honey and whatnot.
Remembering Michael and
those dark 'fifties rooms we came from led me to think about my first breakaway
drinks. Couldn't resist going straight back into there. Like discovering the Devil's
Brew from a household run by a savage Bible-bashing teetotalling father? A
tricky game to play with any measure.
Like Sarsaparilla. What a
powerful trigger of melancholic history is that aroma! Even as a kid I felt
this was a cordial essence drink with something vinous about it. I learnt early
that I could sleep in a bit and miss the bus so I could hitch-hike from
Kanmantoo to High School at Mount Barker. It was so much quicker hitching that I
had the time to call in at the Great Eastern in Littlehampton for a quiet one
or two before opening and then on to school on the other bus with the Littlehampton
kids.
I liked a pint glass filled with Smirnoff
vodka, Johnston's Oakbank Sarsaparilla Cordial and soda on ice. Even after
my younger brother, the beloved Stephen (above) sat me down in the Stirling hotel with a mixed grill
and a bottle of red and advised me "here, you can't go wrong with a
Seaview claret," resulting in an instant addiction to the fruit of the vine.
Even after that, all these damn years, I still like playing with sars, vodka
and soda.
You can make it short or
long. You can add a dash of pomegranate and/or blood orange juice. I probly
didn't but I always felt like I invented it. Stewart probably invented it. When only the best will do. Whitey's first kiddylikker.
As far as mixing alcohol
and caffeine goes, that was the go long before anybody thought of Red Bull. I
always make a pot of four cups of coffee for breakfast and drink two. I leave
the rest of the coffee to grow cold in the pot in case in the afternoon I feel
like black coffee with vodka and soda bone dry instead of gumming the olfactory
up with Shiraz jam. A splash of sars goes well in this too. And a splash is
suffice: it's very sweet, but it sure beats a teaspoon of straight sugar.
The Shiraz can wait.
The first sars cordial I
found on this lap is the F. C. Grubb Old Style Traditional Cordial Sarsaparilla
made by Trend Drinks at Gladstone. It calls itself 'gourmet flavoured syrup'
and admits to be made with 'sarsaparilla flavour' and there's a bucket of cane
sugar in it so what it has to do with the old Johnno's stuff from the high
school years beats me.
You can make it more like real old-fashioned sars by adding a sprinkle of Angostura.
It's always good fun
playing around with all these flavours, and astonishing how close you find
yourself to emulating wine at different points in the play. Or Coke. L-O-L-A
cola. Pity we can't readily get a drier syrup made from the real fruit of the Smilax ornata brambly vine, which is
what sars is sposed to be made from. Like a thorny grape vine if you squint
real hard.
I soon had casual bar work
in the Great Eastern, which provided a crash course in the tinctures of the
time. There were a lot of blokes who drank only Coopers Sparkling Ale. Pale Ale
was still called Light Dinner Ale. It was Coopers Sparkling Ale bottled with
some water in it, for the ladies to have with their oysters. We poured a lot of
porter gaff, all from bottles. We drank Corio, Milnes or Gilt Edge whiskey.
Goddard's Golden Braid Rum. June Smith drank schooners of cherry brandy with
Advocaat egg liqueur and dry, a bloody dangerous fizzy complosion if ever there
was one. I recall another lass who lived on port and lemonade on the rocks.
Jack Carroll, a Coopers Sparkling "little bottle" man, would bring his dog into the pub and leave the wife outside in the ute, staring at the wall with a pony of barmaid's blush.
In the summer it was pints
of hock, lime and lemon for the thinking drinker; more soda less lemonade for
the true genius. Only professors drank Pimms.
Gradually the World War II
vets were replaced at the other end of the bar by the Korea War vets and then the Vietnam
lads and I remember learning with visceral hurt their PTSD symptoms. Of course
in those more wholesome times things had names rather than meaningless acronyms
and those blokes had what everybody called 'shell shock'. Or the lasses would say
'had a bad war, poor dear, oooh it's such a shaaaame ... like, he used to be
sooo ...'
Apart from the pub, those
blokes went round the RSL Club to drink and deal with their horrors together.
Generations nowdays have their own clubs and bars of all sorts for like souls
to wind out and dissolve the terror of outside or next door or the skies above
or whatever the source of fresh evil may be.
And what does some nutbag
do? He'll blow their dance bar away too. And all who sailed in her.
This is related by someone
who's been looking, looking, looking since those grey post war times and knows with
enough clarity to guarantee you it's getting worse now.
Shellshock, see? More
people with it today than ever before. Be very careful when that vodka bottle
winks at you when you're suss. Drink drier; drink less ethanol; more water.
And expect strange actions
and utterances from your psychologically exhausted neighbours and friends and
from those who flee to our arms for safety immediately before we lock them up
indefinitely in gulags and Guantanamos. Or (b), expect even stranger behaviour from
those who deny occurrence of same.
It's not terrorism. It's the results of that. Being in it, watching it incessantly. Playing games with it for money or pleasure. We lose if we don't learn.
Nope. We're all batty now.
If we're gonna winter it out knowingly, we'd best do it together.
Gentle,
gentle, gentle.
