Shaken Not Stirred

I'm reading Alan Bennett's Writing Home just now. It's a collection of his musings and diaries and other bits. It's fairly interesting throughout, and in some places it's utterly captivating – especially when he's writing about the insights and preoccupations that caused him to write some of the screenplays he has written. It's all told with his trademark lugubrious wit, of course – and there are so many of his famous bon mots that it's easy to see how he has retained his position as one of our most popular dramatists over the years. I was reading this morning about some chap or other whom Bennett had encountered in the British Embassy in Washington – he describes this fella as "entirely charming, affable, and able to hold his liquor". What an anachronistic description is that, of someone? It's a phrase one used to hear in the 1960s and seeing it in print for the first time in years, it brought me to a halt.

It immediately conjured up an image of a man in a dark suit and a thin tie – a solid man; someone who is both worldly and dependable. It's not a quality in a man that one looks for any longer. Correction: it's not an attribute that would any longer inspire admiration in other men. There's something quintessentially masculine and old-fashioned – in the James Bond sense – about a man being able to "hold his liquor". Nowadays, it seems that a man is more often to be admired for getting as drunk as he possibly can and for behaving disgracefully. If the inhabitants of central Nottingham are anything to go by, a man is these days a "man" provided that he can deposit the contents of his bladder and his kebab-filled stomach in the same shop doorway, and still go back for more.

I'm finding it quite difficult these days to "hold my liquor". It seems that after only a couple of drinks, my reason seems to start wavering and I find it hard to hold a discussion on anything sensible. For example, I'd love to chew the fat with someone on subjects such as participatory economics - as an alternative to capitalism - but just two pints of lager renders me incapable of distinguishing between libertarian socialism (on the one hand) and the desperate need to roll naked in the sack with someone (on the other).

Maybe it's all an illusion anyway, and maybe these men who appear to be able to hold their drink, don't actually drink very much at all. The clever man it is who can give the appearance of necking Martini after Martini – and encouraging his associates to do the same – yet who is surreptitiously sipping only half as much as his partners. This reminds me somewhat of the smartass as school who would advocate idleness and delinquency – on the pretext that a displayed diligence was "uncool" - and yet who was secretly swotting like a maniac so that his subsequent high grades would appear to be nothing more than effortless aptitude. Sneaky.

So, perhaps the man who can "hold his liquor" is not James Bond after all, but Lord Snooty.