Bitter and twisted farts
- BRAD
- Jul 28, 2024
- 4 min read
Who doesn't love a good bitter and twisted old fart?
We knew one. She lived at the bottom of our road. I used to drink Gin with her late on Friday afternoons. We'd sit in the back room, overlooking the garden.
I recall her telling me of her upcoming trip to Singapore. She told me, "Brad," she said, "I don't care what my teetotal companions say, I am having a Singapore Sling at Raffles, considering I'm going all that bastard way."
Look, if you’re going all the way to Singapore with teetotallers and you like a drink, you tell them as it is. You shouldn’t even need to declare and argue, if you want to order a nice cold beer on the upper deck of your ship, nobody has the right to challenge that order, even if it is them who are paying.
They can sit with their ice-cold jugs of water and you can sit there with your nice cold pint of beer. If they do challenge, you say something like this, “I am giving myself the right to enjoy a nice cold beer, you have the choice to order the beer or the water. I have the choice to order the nectar or the water. I am going to enjoy the pint. You are going to enjoy the water. We shall sit and converse. The drink has nothing to do with it.
“What you need to focus on is the words, the conversation. It is that why we are sat at this table. The drink is the by-product of the conversation. The chat takes priority. I shouldn’t think there is any problem with that. If I were to do it to you, like now, you will know. You are genuinely making a mistake by ordering the water.
“You are missing the relaxation and the fluidity the pint will bring. Instead, you opt for something so neutral, you might as well be sat in your kitchen with a fag in the ashtray, oppose to being on a cruise off the coast of the delightful Singapore. I urge you to order a pint and I will enjoy sitting alongside you more so than I would if you had ordered the water.”
By this point, they will be tranced, dumbfounded and will either laugh or hang on your next word. It is at this point that the drinker of the pint will graciously walk up from the table to the bar to order a second pint and enjoy it there, giving the obnoxious and rude part time for the lecture to sink in.
The one ordering the alcohol is the good party. It is the interfering water drinkers who have caused the problem. But, because the pintee has become outnumbered, she feels it only right to fit in with the group and thus goes along with drinking the water. She gets annoyed. She internalises it and begins to feel resentment towards her friends.
This behaviour now leeks out in how she talks to the waiters and staff on the ship and gets labelled a bitter and twisted old fart. It is her friends in all their white refinery, hair perfectly quaffed, and breeze blowing the white silk which adorns their upper outfit.
She has more party in her than the others, but they aren’t the ones being labelled as an old grump. We begin to feel for the drinker and instead wish that all jugs of iced water become banned on the ship to protect this unfair labelling.
Upon return to the UK, she was asked, “how was the Singapore Sling?” She began to explain she didn’t order it, because her party were teetotal and just went along with it.
A friend, goes all the way to Raffles and doesn’t even order the cocktail, coming in much cheaper than the trip herself, because of choosing to conform to the social norms of her group. If she only laid it on thick, she may have found herself cock of the group, turning drinkers of iced water into boozers and they could have had a whale of a time.
I would seriously tell any party to fuck right off if they began to order for me. It just would not happen. Anyone who sits opposite or next to me would no there would be no chance they could even get away with it. Anyone at my table wouldn’t even want to put food or drink into my mouth. That’s my duty.
Very rarely do I turn bitter and twisted, but I’ve had my moments. It usually comes from boredom or frustration. If a situation I’m not happy with escalates for too long, I get angry. I’m happiest in a lane four life. I get up, I feel bored. I decide to take a decent car to the garage and prep her for a trip to Zurich, Switzerland. Why? Because why not?
It wouldn’t do to compare or contrast lives, but why would I want to sit in the local every Friday just because that’s what we do? There’s nobody at the local anymore, I don’t enjoy going in there, so let’s spend these weekends abroad. Let’s get on a plane after close of play, hit the golf course and then pack a case, stopping off for a sly one at The Cock, before getting that case and heading off for the night flight to Paris and have a weekend there.
We are grateful air fares are as good now as bus fare was to my teenage self. To me, tickets are affordable, they are easily accessed and travel is a piece of piss. It is something I enjoy, rotten.
There’s a village next to one of the major airports I fly from. This is the favourite part of my trip. To be stood in a field, next to the end of the runway, with my four to eight pints of Jamaican lager in the sunshine, listening to Harry Belafonte, before heading to terminals is such a treat.
Sometimes, I think it’s better than the trip itself. But it wouldn’t be the same, standing in the field if there wasn’t a trip on the way, so the trip is part and parcel of this oh so delightful arrangement.
You don’t mess with ME!
