Soho in the Eighties

I've worked hard and accumulated modest savings. Others like me blow wads of cash on golf, fishing, and other hobbies. So I occasssionally figure, "Why don't I splurge and buy every book that sounds like it might offer me a few hours of enjoyment? Books are cheap."

I think there's only one good negative response to that question: Storage. You could end up like that guy who had so many books, he had to store them in his refrigerator. That anecdote, for me, borders on the romantic, but for that (oh-so-unreasonable) harridan I live with? Not so much.

And so I've been buying. Not on Kindle, mind you. I like the Kindle, but I don't want to read Of Mice and People when I want a little Steinbeck, and it's now proven beyond an O.J. level of reasonable doubt that Amazon will do just that: reach into your Kindle and change the text without your request, consent, or even knowledge. It is, at the reading level, a type of rape, which is a thing I like to avoid. I don't wear tight shorts in homosexual neighborhoods late at night; I don't buy many books on Kindle.

One of the books I bought on a whim? Christopher Howse's Soho in the Eighties. I'm 5% of the way through it and I'm not sure what I'm reading, but I'm pretty sure it's an abject waste of time and delightful. Soho in the Eighties, at least to Mr. Howse, apparently means, "Hanging out with the famous literary drunk, Jeffrey Bernard, and his drunk friends at various imbiberies in London's Soho district during the 1980s."

And that's fine with me. It's entertaining, even if it's just cataloguing the barroom escapades of a bunch of men past their prime who are greasing their slide downhill with copious amounts of alcohol. I'm pretty sure I'll finish the remaining 95% because, every time I go to select from my current bevy of reading, I grab this guilty pleasure.

So, expect a few BYCUs from this book in the coming weeks. Like this one:

It was Sandy who had introduced me to the Kismet. The Kismet . . was an afternoon drinking club, bridging the hours from 3 to 5:30 p.m. when pubs were closed . . . The Kismet had two nicknames: Death in the Afternoon and the Iron Lung. Someone once asked: "What's the smell in here." The reply was: "Failure." . . . [I]t was like drinking in a badly run public lavatory.