Beer

This story starts in July 1981. The Hunger Strikes in Northern Ireland were entering their grim final denouement, Reagan was invading Central America and warming the coals under the Cold War cauldron and Thatcher was just starting on her project to destroy the social cohesion that Britain had enjoyed since the war.

But I was oblivious to this. I was 16 and setting off on my first independent adventure.   The Father of one of my friends was the local station manager and had sourced cheap tickets for three of us to travel the country at our will. We borrowed a tent and packed the backpacks that had nestled in our cupboards since our days in the Scouts.

We ended up camping in sand dunes just outside Tralee in County Kerry. We had barely two pennies to rub together, so free accommodation was a priority. On our last night before heading home, we pooled our remaining cash and decided to execute a plan that had been bubbling through every conversation for the previous two weeks.  We planned to buy beer.

We approached the off-license warily. None of us could muster the hint of bum fluff on our upper lips and we looked as guilty as a guy in a mask and stripy jumper in an Art gallery.

Conor was chosen as the oldest looking and most confident. He approached the shop nervously and we waited outside for what seemed an eternity. Then he emerged, grinning from ear to ear and clutching a six-pack of Harp Lager to his chest.

We raced back to the tent and prized open three bottles. It would be years until we realised that beer should be served cold, but at that moment we didn’t care that the bottles we held were as warm as tea. We gulped them down greedily. I seem to remember a fight then breaking out. Same as it ever was, I guess.

We awoke the next morning and packed up for the trip home. We still had three bottles left and didn’t want to carry them. So, we drank them before we left. This grew into an urban myth that we had poured beer onto our cornflakes. The truth was more prosaic. We rose late as we did every day on that trip and were packed and ready to go at 2pm. I’ve started drinking earlier than that on many occasions.

It is now almost forty years since my first taste of the amber nectar and I’ve been a regular visitor to the well ever since. It took almost 18 months from that first venture into the world of beer before I had my second. By then, I was in full-time employment and able to stand my own round. I got drunk for the first time at a work Christmas party in December 1982 and at almost every Christmas party since.

I’d be reluctant to estimate how much beer I’ve drunk in the interim, but suffice to say that my sister once described me as a not too complicated mechanism for turning alcohol into urine.

But I sat in a pub last week, fresh from turning 56 and finally took some time to contemplate my relationship with beer. I’d been invited on a pub crawl around four of Auckland’s most famous craft beer pubs. We were there for the Fresh Hops Festival, an annual event when craft beer companies are able to extort even greater revenue from their punters than they normally do. I had just tucked into my third pint of the day, a cloudy Extra Pale Ale, when I realised that I don’t actually like this craft stuff. My companions were all searching for the hoppiest, darkest beers they could find. They wanted something that was as far away from the generic beers of Heineken and Carlsberg as possible.

In that moment, I realised that despite forty years of drinking the stuff, my tastes are still the same as they were in 1981. I like Lager. I’ll tolerate a Pilsner but anything with Ale in the title can disappear up its own arse, as far as I’m concerned.

I drink beer to be social, to loosen up conversation, and to get merry. I don’t drink it for the flavour. As long as it’s cold and refreshing I couldn’t care what it tastes like. I realise now that my favourite memories of drinking do not involve what was in the glass that I was holding. My memories are of the company or the venue. A thatched roof cottage in Doolin with a fiddle band playing and the Atlantic Ocean crashing outside. The bar in Raffles Hotel on a sultry afternoon in Singapore. The Great Northern in Melbourne on ten-dollar steak night. I probably drank Guinness in Doolin, Tiger Beer in Singapore and Carlton Draught in Melbourne but none of that matters to me.

Craft beer is now the assumed beer of choice for men of a certain age. You are expected to mock the generic, mass-produced beers in the way a fine diner mocks McDonalds. I’ve seen these phases before however. You see it with coffee, where instant coffee is frowned upon and unless the beans have been passed through the intestinal system of a Malaysian monkey, they are not acceptable.

I’ve seen it with Wine. Blue Nun used to the perfect gift at a dinner party, now it would be akin to bringing a bottle of petrol.

I’ve decided I’m too old for this. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks and I’m set in my ways. From now on, I’m only going to drink what I want and not be bullied into going with the crowd. I just hope that all the favourite places I’ve drunk in will be accessible in the future. That I can visit old friends and continue the odyssey of travel and adventure that I started in 1981. That one day we can celebrate an end to this pandemic. I’ll raise a glass to that.

 

A Funeral in Lockdown

My Mother-in-Law passed away recently. She was a lovely woman but had been sick for a long time. So long in fact, that I have no memory of her being healthy. I met her first thirteen years ago and she was frail then. Parkinsons and several other diseases wrecked her body and she spent the last two weeks of her life unconscious in hospital after a stroke and my wife spent almost every night with her.

Needless to say, when the passing finally came, my wife’s family were exhausted and full of the emotional conflict that arises in these situations. Part relief, part grief and mostly tiredness.

It happened on a Friday night and my wife’s family gathered the next day to arrange the funeral. They had shared the strain of looking after their Mother in those last few weeks and it showed on their faces and in their thoughts. Somebody suggested a slide show at the funeral, another suggested that the congregation should be invited one by one to come up and give voice to the memories. It was then that my wife pointed out her Mother was a devout Catholic and at the very least she would want a Catholic funeral. Nobody saw a problem with this. Surely the local church would be amenable to them changing the entire service to suit their needs.

It became clear to me at this point that I was in a room of Atheists and Protestants (my own Mother would have said they were one and the same). I stepped forward at this point and offered myself as the representative of the Holy Church of Rome. I spent the first 22 years of my life going to Mass, so I could still remember the basic rules.

I didn’t let on that I had stopped believing in God in my twenties, around the time that I realised that there was very little evidence that God believed in me. My attendance rate at Mass had diminished ever since. But I’ve still gone along at Christmas, Easter, Weddings and Funerals and knew that the words hadn’t changed much in the interim.  

And while I no longer believe in God, I still have respect for the Church. I saw how they helped when my parents died, how the Church provided structure and support. I was married in a Catholic Church and it provided a foundation to the day and some mighty fine hymns.

So, I set about choosing the readings and prayers of the Faithful. I arranged to meet the Priest and to become the family’s point of contact for all things Churchy.

We adjourned at that point to the living room and tucked into a bottle of whiskey to toast the dearly departed. The plan was that we would all drive down to the Coromandel coast the following day, to the seaside community where my Parents in Law had retired. We came home and my wife went to bed to try and get her first decent night’s sleep in a week. I tucked into a six-pack while researching appropriate readings from the Letters of St Paul.

The first thing that struck me was his diligence. He kept writing to the Romans, Corinthians, etc with no evidence that any of them ever wrote back. He never starts his letters with “I refer to your letter of the 4^th inst”. The other thing that struck me was the number of readings that dealt with violence and misogyny. I realised from our Saturday discussion that I was dealing with a congregation that used secular funerals as their point of reference. They were used to Joni Mitchell's lyrics and not the rantings of a wandering disciple from the first century.

I was on my fifth beer when my wife’s phone rang. I ignored it. She was deep into a well-deserved sleep and I didn’t want to disturb her. Then my phone rang and I realised it must be important. It was my brother-in-law telling me that Auckland was just about to go into one week of Lockdown. The road South was due to close at 6am the following morning, which meant that if we didn’t leave soon, we’d be stuck in Auckland and unable to make the funeral.

I immediately woke my wife who was bounding for the car before I could stop her. I reminded her that we had a sleeping child upstairs and that both of us had drunk more than we should if we were to take command of a heavy vehicle. We compromised on going to bed and rising at 4am to get through before the check-points were installed.

New Zealand has largely escaped the trials and tribulations of Covid. We had one serious lockdown last March and April, but otherwise, it has been life as normal here. But when something happens the country takes it seriously. While we had escaped Auckland before the shutters came down, others who had intended to come to the funeral weren’t so lucky. That included the Priest who initially was supposed to take the service. My first job on the day we arrived on the coast was to source a new celebrant and venue. While we were away from the hotspot of Auckland, the rest of the country was in level two which meant a maximum of 100 at the funeral. It also required two-meter distancing between groups in the congregation. A quick Maths calculation suggested that this will limit the funeral to about 25 if we used the small church in the township my in-laws lived in.

Luckily another Church in the neighbouring town was found and the Funeral Mass went off without a hitch. We even rigged about a laptop and set up a Zoom call for all those overseas who couldn’t make it.

My Mother in Law would have liked it, I think. And my Mother would have been proud of me too. All that Mass going as a child had finally paid off.