NAMING THE GUILTY

It’s clear that during this lockdown we’ve been baking, getting drunk and painting fences, although perhaps not in that order. There’s still a chronic shortage of flour and yeast in the shops, you can’t find fence paint for love nor money (not that I have one to paint) but booze sales shot up more than 30% in March. Perhaps the surge in alcohol sales is due to the belief that, like drinking Dettol, it helps kill the coronavirus?

Mind you it’s not all good. The beer buffs Camra reckon some 50 million pints are going to waste in kegs (or is it casks?) locked up in pub cellars. Whether or not one beer comes out of this lockdown to characterise the time remains to be seen, but manufacturers revel in titling the stuff with excruciatingly bad puns or smutty innuendo. I mean would anyone actually drink a Yellow Snow? Or welcome you with a Citra Ass Down or Monty Python’s Holy Grail ale, distinctively tempered over burning witches? And if someone offered you a Kilt Lifter you’d have them arrested.

It’s not just beer, wine and spirit companies have joined in. Dry Sack? It sounds like a gentleman’s dermatological complaint. What about Anty gin, guaranteed 62 ants a bottle? Here’s a new one on me, the ‘exclusive’ vodka Porn, which sounds like an oxymoron but hopefully doesn’t bring you out in a rash. However, if you’ve had enough of the double entendres you could go straight for a Balls vodka.

My own tipple is on order. It’s a case of Geriatric Hipster Club.

TOASTING THE DECADES

There were drinks which marked the decades. In the Eighties and Nineties everyone who didn’t know anything about wine – like me and the vast percentage of the population – drank Le Piat D’or, Blue Nun or Mateus Rose which had the strong aftertaste of throat lozenges.

The noughties were notable only for the introduction of screwtops, previously reserved for large bottles of beer, and the advent of quaffing pink wine, which was a previous no-no and should remain so-so.

It was in the 1970s, of course, that wine drinking in the UK, and particularly Scotland, took off. There was Hirondelle, sadly now gone to the great vineyard in the sky, or swallow in Anglais, which was surely honed for the Scottish swallie market. Their advertising campaigns certainly suggested it, with a kilted Jock in a Scotland top out-jumping a Brazilian defender above the legend, ‘It’s about as likely as a duff bottle of Hirondelle.’

TOUR DE FORCE

I have just finished a marvellous book about a heroic endeavour by an absolutely mad and supremely talented middle-age writer who set out to follow the route of the most appalling bike race of all time, the 1914 Giro d’Italia, on a 100-year old, wooden-wheeled bicycle with wine corks for brakes, clad in an alarming woollen period ensemble, topped off with a pair of blue-lensed welding goggles.

You don’t have to know anything about bike racing, or even how to ride one, to appreciate Tim Moore’s Gironimo, part travelogue, an achingly funny read, peppered with ghosts from the past and tales of Italy’s past and present.

The 1914 Giro comprised just eight stages, around 400km each, which took the riders from Milan to the toe of Italy and back up the east side on largely unmade-up roads and without proper backup. It was contrived as the ultimate torture and it was. Riders set out in the evening and pedalled for over 17 hours, those that survived that is, as only eight of 81 actually reached the finish.

Racers cried like children and begged for dry clothes and salvation. The fearsome ride up the 2000+ metre mountain Sestriere, which a later account described as a Calvary, prompted Moore, as he laboured up it, to observe that “if Jesus had been made to ride up Sestriere on frozen gravel with no gears Christians would now be wearing little bikes round their necks.”

When the original race took place Italy hadn’t been long welded together from separate states on the peninsula, and some didn’t want to recognise the consolidation which wasn’t truly complete until after the end of the First World War. The 1914 riders dosed themselves on strychnine, the EPO of its day, and red wine. Crossing from one former state into another one rider was pulled up by a customs official because he was carrying a bottle of wine in his rucksack. What did he do? Beat the bejesus out of the official and got back on his bike of course.

Then there was the night the denuded peloton were stuck at a level crossing with the gates down, none of them clocking the one man who ducked under the barriers in the pitch black, and was only spotted at the finish.

Moore, who is clearly a couple of cogs short of a full chain set, has form for these authentic, if harebrained, quests. A previous book followed a Tour de France route, called French Revolutions.No heads rolled.