Tag: Alcohol

Categories
City Life

A bottle in front of me

Empty vodka bottle on a garbage can on Yonge Street, Toronto

Dorothy Parker once famously said: I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. A logician would say that, strictly speaking, this is what is known as a false opposition. But our logician would also be missing the point.

Traditionally, the holiday season is the time of year when we tend to put more bottles in front of us. That impulse may be compounded this year by the fact that, thanks to the omicron variant, more of us are alone and/or bored. Alcohol seems like a reasonable antidote, especially after we’ve already had a few.

However, thanks to the fact that, in Ontario, most of our alcohol comes through a single pipeline (the LCBO), we are at its mercy to keep us well stocked. And this year, that’s a problem. There are rumours swirling around, like olives in a martini glass, that the LCBO is having supply chain issues. Their advice is to buy early and try new things. People have been using the Hunger Games to describe the scramble for booster shots. I think it’s a more fitting description of the scramble for jello shots.

Categories
Street Photography

Beer Kegs on the Sidewalk

Man walks past beer kegs at Sauchiehall & Scott Street, Glasgow

Beer kegs on the sidewalk is pretty much the norm for Glasgow. Perhaps the most famous of the local breweries is Tennent’s located at the foot of the Glasgow Necropolis. I’ve often wondered where they source their water. Do they take it locally, filtered through the hills of the Necropolis? Does that give their beverages a special flavour?

Peering through the gates of the Wellpark Brewery
Categories
Street Portrait

Morning Drink on Sauchiehall Street

Man sitting on a bench, drinking on Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, Scotland

At the risk of overgeneralizing, it seems to be a thing in Scotland to start the day with a good stiff drink. I remember taking the train from Lenzie into Edinburgh for breakfast at a gloriously refurbished bank-turned-restaurant and watching a man seated alone at the next table. Dressed in a business suit, he ate a traditional bangers and mash breakfast but, instead of coffee and orange juice, he washed it down with a couple pints. With the last gulp, he stood and ambled off to work. In Toronto, thanks to our straight-laced prohibitionist heritage, such a breakfast would be impossible. Liquor licensing laws prohibit serving alcoholic beverages until 11:00 am.

I made the photo here as I was walking one morning down Sauchiehall Street. Judging by this man’s speech and by his difficulty sitting upright, this was not his first drink of the day. Interestingly, his was not the stereotypically slurred speech of a town drunk; it was the trained speech of a Shakespearean actor reciting a soliloquy. He carried three books in his pocket. The outermost was that most Scottish of Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth.