Cocktail Talk, The Compleat Imbiber 5, Boring at the Bar
Those chosen few, who have dawdled here on Spiked Punch since days of yore, or since days of long ago, may have been blessed enough to chance across a Cocktail Talk post featuring some wit or wisdom from one of the Compleat Imbibers that I am lucky to own. If you, rascal that you are, missed one of those earlier posts (my guess is you were out chasing whiskey bottles up trees), then by all means, go read them. Now you know that The Compleat Imbiber was a series of anthologies covering everything about drinking, with lots of wine talk, some boozy poems, some pictures of glassware, some etching of famous tipplers, and more. Overall, awesome. And during my recent trip to the U.K., I managed in a London bookstore to find a copy I didn’t yet own, number 5. So, expect some quotes over the next little while from it, starting with this one from a short essay by C. Gordon Glover about those who might bore you at the bar with their chatter.
‘Good gracious Fossbridge! Never seen you drinking gin before.’ ‘Hollands, dear boy. And chilled. I always telephone Mrs. Mason in the afternoon if I propose to drink a glass of Hollands in the early evening. She puts a bottle in the refrigerator for me. But not gin, as you understand it – definitely not the brutish juniper. . .’
Of course, there is no need to suffer it at all. There is always the snug fireside. But yet, and yet – they would be missed. And we, too, possibly, may bore the dying nightlights out of them!
– C. Gordon Glover, Boring at the Bar, The Compleat Imbiber 5
