© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 95
I am five short of a magic number. This is Offbeat 95. In a couple of weeks time, I will hit the 100 column mark, will be suitably amazed and probably will have beer with my Friday morning paper. In fact, I am already amazed. This is the first hobby I have had that has lasted this long, with the possible exception of my ‘cross-eyed single malt whisky period’ which wasn’t so much a hobby as a means of inducing a rather upper-class hangover with still water at room temperature and no ice, thank you very much.
I’ll save the deeply meaningful, self-congratulatory philosophical stuff about the Offbeat column for five weeks hence though, and tell you what I know about expensive single malt whisky (or whiskey if it is the Irish variant). It’s really good stuff.
I can’t really claim to know a lot about whisky. There were a lot of bottles of it in the pub and although I diligently attempted to taste them all, I got lost somewhere amongst the G’s a couple of months into the project. I remember that there were a lot of bottles beginning with the word Glen. Somewhere along the way I skipped forward and ended up amongst the O’s where I discovered a bottle that made me take one sip and give it to the guy sitting next to me. I wonder if he survived the next morning.
I remember that each one of them tasted different and each of them left a different aftertaste, but that they all ended up with a butterscotch aftertaste as I went to bed and a taste like dirty carpets when I woke up the next morning.
There were also various classifications. There were some that you drank after work, some that you drank before dinner, some that went well with dinner, others for desert and others for sending you to bed. There was even a group called ‘restoratives’, otherwise know as ‘breakfast whisky’. I never got to experience those. The pub didn't open before twelve noon.
I can’t claim to be a connoisseur though. All of them tasted great, but there were only a few that I can clearly remember aside from that terrifying bottle of Old Pulteney. Perhaps what made them taste so good was the cost and the knowledge that, at the time, without the expense of a daughter or the need to begin thinking seriously about the future, I could afford them.
Why did Hillary climb Everest? Because it was there. Why did I drink all that whisky? Because there were sixty plus amber bottles with stodgy beige labels all neatly lined up on the shelf waiting to show signs of appreciation. Hey, they were there as well.
Other than that I enjoyed a bit of snobbery. But at heart, I still deeply appreciate a mug of beer in the local dive.
The problem with the single malt whisky was that although I enjoyed it, after a while it became a little less rare and exceptional: an every day occurrence, though not at breakfast.
So what is the moral of the story? I suppose it is something along the lines of less is more. A few bucks found in the pocket of a coat is worth more than a couple of hundred in hand when you have a few hundred more that you can get to elsewhere. And although it doesn’t quite fit here, it seems right to say that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
The pub has gone. The whiskies, if any of them remain in the bottom of some dusty bottle, have probably turned to sugar water. There is no more temptation. Quality is a fleeting thing. If anything, quality is nothing more than something new and unaccustomed. The extraordinary can become an everyday occurrence: expected but not appreciated.
We are defined not by what we have, but by what we desire. Once we have what we desire, we need to find something else to want.
This is not a column in praise of asceticism. Personally, beyond the normal desires of a parent, I have decided to want a luxury yacht, and an island. Desire defines the goals towards which we work. I can’t think of anything better than to have a goal in life, even if it isn’t whisky.
In the strangest way, not having money to spend immediately is self-improving.
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