Mick's Selective Memory

“All you need is sugar and yeast and something to flavour it with”, asserted the Master-Story-Teller. To illustrate his point he went on to explain: “I once made a drop from grapefruit-juice. It was a bit dry at first but you soon got the taste for it.”

We were drinking home-brew made with tins of brewer’s-malt that a Baker had ordered for making brown-rolls. The catch was that it was made with baker’s-yeast which gave it a bit of a rough bouquet. We were North-Sea-Tigers so we persevered and our palates adjusted fairly rapidly.

Mick was an alcoholic who had begun his drinking in London’s eastern suburbs. His London-stories were set in the sixties, an era that is famous for playing tricks on the memory.

One night of light-social-drinking brought our Hero and his friends to a certain night-club. A young Scottish-Singer was the centre-of-attention. Mick felt it to be his duty to ask her up for a dance. On the dancefloor the ungrateful-young-hussy asked him: “How did you-lot get in here? This is a private-party.” To which our Hero graciously replied: “We know The Guvnor”. This tale does have the advantage that it cross-references to ‘known’ (published) facts about a certain movie.

Another of Mick’s ‘London in the sixties’ series that also (probably) cross-references with published-reality involved an armed-robbery that went wrong. Some day when I’m not so lazy I’m going to do the research on that one. For the present I’m going to sketch in the missing details from my own guesstimates of the Hero’s character.

Mick claimed to have spent two years on a training-course with the Queen-of-England. He emerged at the end of his five-years (reduced to two) sentence with a Master-Brewer’s qualification. I was grateful to be drinking the fruits of this qualification on an otherwise dry oilfield-installation. I was not going to quibble about some of the inconsistencies of Mick’s story. What little attention I could spare from his tale was concentrated on how to improve the flavour of future brews.

Some of Mick’s friends who hung out at The Guvnor’s place had entrusted him with disposing of the two getaway-cars from the armed-robbery. They were Jaguars, as you might expect. Mick may have sub-contracted this important little job to someone else. Someone else had one of the cars crushed and then decided that it would do no harm to drive around in a Jag for a little while. This (fictitious?) sub-contractor was apprehended by The Filth and everybody went to jail. When Mick was released with a generous-sounding amount of remission he did not go back to ‘The Smoke’.

Mick took up residence close to (or possibly beyond) the edge of his universe; in Kingston-upon-Hull. The oil business in Yarmouth soon attracted this man of many talents. Some ten years later I was able to benefit from both his story-telling and his brewing skills.

Brewer’s-yeast from the shoppie in Rosemount, Aberdeen greatly improved the flavour of our product. When the tins of brewer’s-malt ran out we moved on to apple-juice. Some faceless kill-joy noticed that the tins of apple-juice were disappearing from the galley-store and stopped ordering them. By that time we had the quality, consistency and volume up to a standard that could be used for barter.

One of the Bakers was a man who liked a drop. We were able to bribe him to order more brewer’s-malt, that would not go into brown-rolls. It was very gratifying to know that members of the galley-crew were impressed by the work of dirty, ignorant deck-crew people like us.

By the time it all came back to earth with a dull-thud, I was quite relieved. I was never cut-out-for-being an alcoholic. Twelve hours of work followed by six hours of socialising tests your stamina by the end of two weeks. Doing these things leaves you with memories. Your own experience merges into the myths and legends of the infinite-world of stories.

Long may your lum reek!