Lunchtime O’Booze is the archetypical drink-sodden columnist propping up the bar in the pages of UK satirical magazine Private Eye. Famously crusty British novelist Kingsley Amis (self-declared “curmudgeonly old shit”) could have been the prototype. Everyday Drinking: the distilled Kingsley Amis (Bloomsbury, 2008) is a collection of newspaper columns published between 1971 and 1984 along with a slim volume entitled On Drink, could be exhibit A. When a letter to the editor complained “your writing is getting more and more biased and entrenched in reactionary fuddy-duddyism” Amis agreed: “an excellent summing-up, I thought, of my contribution to the eighties’ cultural scene.”

Kingers

An aversion to pomposity and a gift for the unexpected bon mot make him a most excellent barfly. In the same way that his review of Dylan Thomas included the immortal recommendation “someone ought to give Dylan a bouquet of old bogwort before long” so his reports from the frontline of Bacchus are often startling. Amis on lager and lime: “an exit application from the human race if ever there was one” or his speculation of the contents of the hip flask of financier Nubar Gulbenkian – “Scotch and fox’s blood. Not true, I imagine, but a splendidly offensive thing to bawl at a weed of an anti-hunt demonstrator.” You get his drift.

Amis appetites are prodigious ones. Take his recipe for the Lucky Jim, a cocktail of his own devising named after his own memorable comedic character: “12 to 15 parts Vodka, 1 part dry Vermouth, 2 parts cucumber juice.” And hangover cures for both the physical and metaphysical kind arrive thick and furious.

His opinion of wine is not great (poor kick-to-volume ratio) and of winespeak even lower: “deep colour and big shaggy nose. Rather a jumbly, untidy sort of wine, with fruitiness shooting off one way, firmness another and body pushing about underneath.” Although his take on snobs is sound: “the so-called expert and the jealous wine merchant will conspire to persuade you that the subject is too mysterious for the plane man to penetrate without continuous assistance. This is, to put it politely, disingenuous flummery.” He offers a useful litmus test for anorak membership – one who tastes “prunelle” where others taste sloe berries (a wild plum).

Amis is a below the waterline torpedo for the bowtie brigade, describing the game of winesmanship at length – “how to get away with giving your guests the vilest plonk imaginable and passing yourself off as an expert at the same time” – with the ultimate putdown agreement and the suggestion “that your mind’s on higher things than wine, like gin or sex.”

The last third of the book consists of a boozy quiz that may come in useful at slow office parties and the like before the congeners kick in. As Kingers declares “the object is to make knowing about wine seem like an accomplishment on the level of knowing about the flora and fauna of Costa Rica or the history of tattooing – well worth while, but hardly in the mainstream of serious thought.”

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