Cheers to Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis wrote three short books on drink, which are collected for the first time here. The first, On Drink, is a witty, belligerent and often profound defence of the kind of drinking habits that Kingsley acquired in the Old England of mixed drinks and beer. Its recipes are based on spirits, the repeated recourse to which enabled Kingsley to suffer fools if not gladly, then at least with a recognition that their defects are largely human.



These recipes belong to a vanished world, in which you had to think hard as to how to get as much alcohol into the system for as little outlay as possible, and in which those noxious medicines Dubonnet, Martini, Advocaat and Noilly Prat stood on the sideboard, waiting to be enlivened with vodka or gin. Wine occasionally gets a look in, but it is clear that Kingsley despised the stuff, as representing an alcohol-to-price ratio far below the horizon of a real drinker's need.

At the start, Amis announces certain 'general principles' to be followed in creating drinks, all of which can be derived, by natural drinkers' logic, from the first of them, which holds that 'up to a point [i.e. short of offering your guests one of those Balkan plonks marketed as wine, Cyprus sherry, poteen and the like], go for quantity rather than quality'. Spirits prevail over the stuff that might soften their impact, as illustrated by the Lucky Jim, which consists of 12 to 15 parts vodka to one part vermouth and two parts cucumber juice, and there is a drink for just about every ordeal that Kingsley's ordeal-filled life could be expected to present.

Thus Paul Fussell's Milk Punch (one part brandy, one part bourbon, four parts milk, plus nutmeg and frozen milk cubes) is 'to be drunk immediately on rising, in lieu of eating breakfast. It is an excellent heartener and sustainer at the outset of a hard day: not only before an air trip or an interview, but when you have in prospect one of those gruelling nominal festivities like Christmas, the wedding of an old friend of your wife's or taking the family over to Gran's for Sunday dinner'.

The books were written between 1971 and 1984; as a guide to prices, availability and so on, they are therefore entirely out of date. But who cares? Each chapter is packed with observations that, in their utter disregard for political correctness, social inclusiveness and phoney compassion, are as punchy and uplifting as the vile cocktails they describe.

The famous hangover scene in Lucky Jim is complemented here by a philosophical chapter on the hangover that is one of the great English essays of our time. Kingsley dismisses the run-of-the-mill cures that you can find in any newspaper, since they omit 'all that vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure that makes a hangover a [fortunately] unique route to self-knowledge and self-realisation'.

Other writers, he believes, have illuminated the metaphysical hangover while ostensibly writing of something else: parts of Dostoevsky and Poe can be read in this way, although the greatest attempt at capturing the experience, according to Amis, is Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis', in which the hero wakes up to discover that he has been transformed into a man-sized cockroach.

Elsewhere, Amis laments the destruction wrought on the English pub. His apprenticeship as a drinks-man began with quiet conversations among smoke-blackened trophies, with drink as but one component in a profoundly English routine of social consolation. This consolation was arbitrarily destroyed during the Seventies by one-armed bandits, kitsch signs and the conversation-stopping noise of pop music. Kingsley blames the brewery chains for this violence against the very heart of English society. To the violence of the brewers, however, has been added that of the politicians, who have banned the activity - smoking - that brought people from their homes of an evening, and which both conserved and overcame their shyness.

Judging from the effect of the smoking ban on our village pub, this great English institution has now been consigned to history. And if you are seeking a requiem for the pub culture and all that it meant, then this is the book for you. It will not console you for the loss, but it will teach you how to be rude about it, with that inimitable rudeness that Kingsley perfected and which was the breast-plate across a warm, vulnerable and thoroughly decent heart.