Drunks of Slackbuie

Listening to: Hap-hap-happy Heart by Lucia Pamela; The Devil’s Dance Floor by Steve Lieberman, The Gangsta Rabbi and Let’s Go Party by K. Lewis

It’s been a while. Everything has been so weird for the last while, and most of the news has been bad, that I just never quite got round to writing the blog. But..all that has changed. The Anchor opened again, and the streets, ditches and fields are filled with the happy sounds of laughter and throwing up. A sense of normality returns.

It’s not that everyone here is an alcoholic, far from it, as drinking is purely about the socialising, obviously. At a Burns supper once, both father of Willox Dixon and I were playing. I drew the short straw and had to pipe in the Haggis and he was to do the address. The chef, standing with the the freshly squeezed haggis on a tray, suddenly asked, “What is in the glass for the toast? I don’t drink”.

I went through to check, and told my father, “He doesn’t drink.”

A look of total confusion crossed his face, “Doesn’t drink?”

“No, the chef doesn’t drink, what’s in the glass?”

“No problem, I can just put wine in instead of whisky.”

He was even more perplexed to discover that some people consider wine to be an alcoholic drink.

Now I can certainly assure you that wine is alcoholic. On a visit to Switzerland I was invited to join friends for a wine tasting at a vineyard in a neighbouring village. Being something of an expert on this – a tiny glass, “Ah, I am getting hints of pencil shavings” and then you buy some wine – I agreed.

We arrived and Georgie answered the door of the Caveau. Dear God, he was 106 if he was a day, with a face as purple as elderberry. He led us in, and opened the first bottle. We tasted it, then again, and a little more and the empty bottle was dumped. As we progressed, we learned a wide range of fascinating facts – you can’t get drunk at altitude and how long you can keep a bottle for is not a question he has an answer for.

“This wine is called Symphony Rouge, because, well I can’t remember, but you’ll like it!”

After four or five hours solid ‘tasting’, it was time to see the bottling plant and try the various types of schnapps he made. The bottling was interesting, label on straight, label on squint – goes to Georgie, label upside down – Georgie upside down in the plant. Georgie’s son was the black sheep of the family, he had run off to join the opera and his assistant, went to work in a quarry as he thought it would be safer. Georgie is from tough stock though. Poor guy does wine tasting for 12 hours a day, so he doesn’t get to drink for pleasure until after 9pm. Worse still, his mother – yes his mother – gets to drink for pleasure much earlier. Sadly we never got the pleasure of meeting her. Perhaps the life support machine power lead was too short.

The final thing I did learn that day, was there are two brass bands in the village, affiliated to two different political parties. Each year they have a play off at the vineyard, and each year they fish musicians and instruments out the river for days afterwards.

I have digressed again, but drinking too much is not a new phenomenon here. A copy of the Slackbuie Post and Herald (incorporating Ploughman’s Weekly), from 1904 carries the headline ‘Slackbuie Drunks’.

A correspondent to the Herald wrote, “Can nothing be done to stem the tide of drunkenness in the usually delightful district of Slackbuie? The amount of drunk navvies, etc, stumbling and lying about the roads has become not only a nuisance to residenters, but a danger to any person driving, cycling, or motoring. One is never sure when negotiating a turn in the road, but that a drunk man may be lying about, and if he should be rund down the question arises – Who is responsible? Recently this beautiful district of ours has been turned into a pandemonium.”

There was also an article complaining that the head teacher was being paid too much – One of the old lairds of Colqualzie was so noted for kindness to his horse, that one of his friends made the remark that if the transmigration of souls was true, he would like to be transmigrated into a Colqualzie horse. We suspect that the rate payers would rather be transmigrated into a head teacher under the Slackbuie School Board, and be paid the prodigious sum of £280 per year – so really nothing much changes.