My wife and her Vices
That was going to be the subject of this column (and a dozen more) before I pitched the idea to her. Unfortunately she shot it down in no uncertain terms. I have been censored. In my own newsletter.
Now I find, on reflection, with Phil standing over my shoulder with her arms crossed and the sound of her grinding her molars, that his would not be a fruitful line for me to follow as she is perfect and free from every vice.
Except for one: Beers of the World.
She only has one vice, and that is drink. Not an alcohol problem, but a problem with buying alcohol that we never get around to drinking. The idea of Beers of the World came during lockdown and was apparently inspired by a newspaper columnist. I know this is getting rather recursive, so if Christopher Nolan wants to option the rights to this newsletter's response to a newspaper column (in the dream of the subconscious of a corporate spy) for his next thinking persons blockbuster, by all means call my agent.
The thinking behind Beers of the World was to travel the globe while being stuck at home stinking drunk. Over the weeks and months boxes would arrive with bottles claiming to be the brewing product of far distant lands. We marvelled at their locations, distinctive labels, differently shaped bottles and then put them on top of the kitchen cabinet where they collected dust. We gradually, one bottle shared between the two of us once a week, made a small dent in the row of alcohol. Except for the weeks where we forgot. Which became most weeks.
And so it was until I had a dream that involved a loud crash. I woke up to a quiet house and assumed it was another variation of my usual anxiety dreams where the house falls down around my ears while my teeth turn to confetti. So far, so Freudian. I returned to my uneasy slumber, dreaming of trains entering long dark tunnels.
It was only when I went downstairs to make breakfast that I was confronted by a scene of carnage.
The floor and surfaces were covered with brown shards of broken glass. The severed neck of one bottle, cap still attached, rested at the foot of the french doors at one end of the room. Jagged fragments sat on top of the microwave in the opposite corner. Liquid had pooled on the floor and the heady smell of beer pervaded the room.
I cast my mind back to my dream and checked my teeth. The few remaining ones had not turned to confetti. I grabbed my trainers, crunched and splashed my way across the floor, opened the window and put the kettle on.
An hour later I thought I had cleared up the mess. The bowl of water I used to wipe up was a chestnut brown with a frothy head. Good enough to drink. The strong smell of beer remained. I later found broken glass behind the slow cooker and beer pooled under glasses in a cabinet beneath the site of the explosion.
Glancing up I could see a notch in the ceiling where the cap had blown off one bottle, taking out a second and a can of ginger beer that was an innocent bystander. The base of one bottle still sat out of sight on top of the cabinet. It was lucky that we had been upstairs asleep and dreaming of calamity.
I googled exploding beers and found several reports of beer that wasn't fully fermented when bottled and resulted in similar incidents. A bartender had lost sight in an eye when dropping a bottle of Corona into a bucket of ice.
I took down the surviving beers, put them in a box with bubble wrap and stored them in a low cupboard.
I had learned two important lessons. Firstly, if you buy beer, drink it. Secondly, that regardless of where in the world beer is brewed, it all tastes suspiciously similar.
I suspect there's an Anheuser Busch factory in an industrial estate nearby siphoning identical brown liquid into a variety of bottles and labels and passing them off as Beers of the World.
The further you roam, the closer you are to home.
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