Cocktail Talk: A Bottle of Wine at the Cavendish

When a new year begins, I always think of the below quote (which has been featured on here before, but I was just thinking about it, and it is such a good quote, that I believe having it on here once more is only doing a service to the world, and, as such, is okay), because it reminds me that my life, while swell, could always be swell-er, and that until I find myself in a situation like the below quote details, I can always aim higher, do better, and keep working to make an even better life, starting this very year. Now if I can just find a monkey.

I remember, for example, being taken to see a neurotic Frenchman who was staying there with his wife, and vividly recall Sunday morning in his suite, the wireless resounding to a clergyman’s voice reading the Lesson, while we drank Pernod, and a Pekinese tried in vain to seduce a monkey.

–Anthony Powell, “A Bottle of Wine at the Cavendish,” from The Compleat Imbiber 6

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Cocktail Talk: Love, Liquor, and Classical Learning

It’s nice to know that the classics were full of Cocktail Talk. And nice to know that I’m still tappng into those great books, the Compleat Imbibers, those British compendiums of drink, wine, glassware, poetry, and so much more that everyone should pick up if they ever get a chance. If you don’t get a chance, well, read this quote:

Drinkers, such as Horace, were regularly mentioned in the New Year’s Honours. Indeed, Horace’s great ode on the defeat of Cleopatra begins, symbolically, with the words ‘Nunc est bibendum’: ‘Now for a drink.’ It is as if some patriotic American poet, the late Robert Frost perhaps, were to have celebrated the annihilation of an infinitely seductive female Mao tse Tung by demanding a Manhattan.

–Peter Dickinson, Love, Liquor, and Classical Learning, from The Compleat Imbiber 6

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