All the men at the bar bent over their phones and me among them, with Jimi Hendrix and sports recaps playing and the dull chatter that burbles and rolls like the tide spitting up their remains, making it all disappear… Read More ›
drinking
As several disturbances head our way
I looked up and my family was gone, lost in the folds of Powell’s bookstore, Portland, the litmosphere they call it, and I wandered the displays sniffing cakes of handmade soaps, glassware designed for gluten-free beer, branded. All the Portlanders… Read More ›
‘You got a decent enough do in the Brazen Head for a bob’
Running from our flat to the oldest bar in Ireland in the rain because you have to do that at least once in life, and it’s so close I make it there without losing my breath and find the same… Read More ›
View northwest from the Cairn of Greatest Sorrow
Some bars I’ll walk into and just walk right out, pretending I’m looking for someone. The bar, “Lochavulgin” or some other name that gets stuck in your throat: I throw the door open right on cue to a Foreigner song: I… Read More ›
The ‘angel’s share’: lost whisky, lost memories
After sharing the same room, the same car, the same bathroom, I can see where Stephen King was coming from in his story about the writer Jack Torrance who collapses into alcoholism, writes nonsense, starts seeing dead people. Charlotte’s going… Read More ›
‘Tell only happy hours’
Drink anything with enough alcohol in it and you’ll start tasting almonds, oranges, coconuts, pine needles, Christmas cake. But there’s no pretence in the tour at the Scotch distillery: our guide, who wears a badge saying Team Leader, points to… Read More ›
Viking graffiti inside the burial chamber, Orcadia
Just as you’d think they would, the Vikings came upon a structure of religious and historical significance that had already been there a few thousand years, punched a hole through the roof because they couldn’t find the door, pulled out… Read More ›
