More gin


I had an early lunch today with a couple of colleagues, and on the way back to the office stopped to look through the window of a restaurant I’d never been into. The owner saw us and rushed out to encourage us to come in and check the place out. This was despite it being packed full of people already eating, but he ushered us through to the rear area of the establishment, where he persuaded us to drink coffees and then brought out a vast selection of different booze for us to sniff.

That was perhaps a little cruel. I have an enlightened and accomodating employer, but not so enlightened that they’d accomodate me returning to the office outside of six shots of whisky. The restauranteur knew this and I knew this, so the most that could happen is that he’d open a bottle of hard liquor and let us sniff the delicious, alcohol-laden fumes, and then have it taken away from us again.

It turns out that expensive Venezuelan rum does not smell like the soul-destroying, throat-burning Captain Morgan of your teenage years. How surprising. I sniffed a rum, two whiskies, two gins and a drink made by infusing vodka with Fisherman’s Friends. (There are some odd people in Denmark with access to booze and throat pastilles, apparently.) Then it was high time to go back to the office and muck about with databases. (I spent the last two months doing some activities that I thought would make my database work better, only to discover yesterday they were exactly the opposite of what I should have been doing, so I’ve had some fun things to reverse recently.)

Still, as the saying goes, show the dog the rabbit. If you put expensive booze in front of me, sooner or later I’ll hunt it down. When I rolled out of the office at 6:30 tonight with two pregnant ladies in tow, my first thought was to go straight back to the bar and try out some of that gin for real. But as a responsible adult and soon-to-be-father, of course I didn’t.

I went to the bar opposite my office first, and had a gin (St George Botanivore) and tonic there, and then I went to the new restaurant and had another gin (North Shore) and tonic. Both of these were very flowery, sweet gins – as one of my accomplices at lunchtime put it, "they smell like perfume". I’ve never drunk any perfume, honest. Things have yet to get that desperate.

After two strong drinks, it was time to stop, but I still had to get the ladies fed, so we went over to Lau Pa Sat for hawker food. Somehow they ordered between them enough satays to feed a regiment, while I was browbeaten into a raft of curry and rice too large for a slightly drunken man to manage. Broken, defeated, and overheated, we shambled home again.

Pretty good going for a Tuesday night, really.


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