Cigars and Whiskey

The British press have been warning of imminent disaster for some time. The occasion of their hysteria has been a little bit of cold, which has apparently blown in from the arctic or some broken conservative hearts in America or somewhere.

I have to say that nothing much seems to have happened. I made a sort of soya and turkey kibbeh bread with some melted mozza for myself and a friend tonight, put my friend on a train, and went for a wander in this freezing wilderness that Putney was meant to have become. Who'd have thought it; you can't believe everything you read in the press.

It was perhaps the Por Larranaga cigar whose creamy tastes made their way through my palate--and will, I guess for days--or the honeyed whiskey that some students bought me a few days ago running through my bloodstream, but I have to say, London is weathering this big freeze rather well.

I love Larranaga gold label. They're very good, smooth cigars, and the variety I smoke is Dominican, with others made in Honduras (not that I smoke them very often). The Cuban namesake is apparently more robust, as you'd expect, but Cuban cigars are often a little heavy for me--like Spanish or western hemisphere red wines, which have regularly now a high volume and an overdose of tannin in them.

I'm none too keen on supporting the Castros in their regime either, having had three friends come back from that imprisoned island with horror stories of corruption and the secret police. All you need to know about Fidel Castro was exemplified by his behaviour during the missile crisis of 1962. Whilst Khruschev blinked and Kennedy blanched, Castro wanted to destroy the world.

If you are ever in Chicago, down the back of North Clark by Lincoln Park--I think on Wells, near O'Briens, which is a great Irish pub, there is a grand cigar shop which will do for you very well. I wonder what winds are blowing over there tonight. The cigars I'm smoking aren't via there ; they came via North Carolina, from a friend, but are all the better for it.

The smoking ban, taxes, and the recession are of course killing pubs all over the place. They have been for a while, since it takes social institutions a long time to die. The Pub Association says that things are worse than at any time since the great depression, and since our depression has only just begun, that bodes ill.

I grew up above pubs, and I have my favourites too, and am sad at this. It's a shame. I remember my little self being nursed to sleep by the pounding music and the fights below. We used to be given the tough pubs to clean up in the midlands before moving on. My father, you see, refused to go on the dole or to wait for the steelworks to collapse. Not out of any Tory sympathy--he was always a Labour man--he went and looked for work.

It was an odd upbringing, but I suppose my distaste for drug users and violent band members comes from the fact that the various convicts, alcoholics and mad people downstairs were never as much of a physical threat to my dad as they were. We generally had a dog anyway, and on one occasion were offered a corby pub with an axe beneath the counter.

The midlands version of Hippies and other such wasters, and the self righteously liberated were a menace, though. Sometimes the drugs and their numbers corked their cowardice, and they could, not valuing property, become violent. Total hypocrisy on my part, given this alcohol and nicotine, except that these things can be moderated and won't have the psychotic effects that almost all drugs do. Not that they would on me; frankly, anything which could have dissolved my own native cowardice would probably have ate my body and the path down to several underground lines away beforehand anyway.

It is so odd that I should be wandering around a cold and virtually empty street (though beggars are back for the first time in years), rather than in some chair in a pub corner. It isn't the case, however, that I'm any the worse for it. I'm sure the wandering jew was a very healthy person, from one point of view.

I thought of dad tonight, not least because it was the 45th anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination. People got so worked up, even years after the event, as I was growing up about Oswald and Kennedy, joined in working-class aspiration and in the reality of desperation forever. My father was fascinated by the case. He presumably would have taken a while to come around to the obvious fact of Oswald's sole guilt, but I suppose that he is in a place where he knows the answer, and the fleetingness of life now anyway.

My dad told me that, on November 22 1963 he had run to my Northern Ireland granny, displaced to Corby, from the Raven hotel, which was a big imposing building at the top of our street. My mother, whom he had not then met, I think, lived slightly further up the stephenson way. Transplanted memories are such a curious thing; swirling like cigar smoke through cold nights linked by my head and nothing else.

The winter of 1962-3 was one of the coldest on record. Could we cope? What would that add to our economic slide? Would it bring us together?

I hope so. I wanted to write a post on how Boris Johnson and others were beginning to come around to an idea I played with a year or so ago on this blog--legislative independence for London. It makes sense, or did for a while, because London is now a separate country from England really, and England won't be able to rediscover and govern itself whilst London sits on top of it.

Now, however, London is facing the slump after its boom and may come to realise its dependence upon the areas outside of it; whether London's elites adjust by further centralisation and pretension or by relaxing their grip is anyone's guess.

That is a post for another cold, smoky night of whiskey and cigars, however. Tonight, in the cold, as all these things ran through my veins and left me feeling falsely warm, and as I gazed without looking at the disconsolate estate agent windows and empty restaurants whilst drawing my smoke, I remembered my long lost father, and my grandfather, somewhere on the arctic wind.