Three Sheets to the Wind: One Man's Quest for the Meaning of Beer by Pete Brown

Author:Pete Brown [Brown, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780330528238
Google: LKJbsGZ1LM8C
Amazon: 0330442473
Published: 2011-08-19T06:30:28.374000+00:00

I’ve been looking forward to Sydney. Apart from its stunning beauty, fantastic weather and great food, Australia is a crucial stop on my quest to figure out the whys of beer drinking. Some pundits claim that part of Britain’s drinking problem is simply genetic or cultural: Anglo-Saxons are just predisposed to getting bollocksed in a way our Latin cousins are not. Others argue that climate is a fundamental factor, that we drink because it’s cold, dark and rainy all the time. So Australia forms a fascinating control for our international experiment; the population is largely from the same genetic pool as back home, but the climate is much more pleasant. So what happens?

Liz’s cousin Tom moved out here a few years ago with his wife Kirsten. He meets us at the airport, and leads us out into a gorgeous Sydney spring day, the sun climbing into the north-west of a clear blue sky.

The old ‘joke’ about Australia is that it is upside down. It’s not, of course. But it is back to front. Tell anyone you’re going south of the equator, and they will inevitably urge you to watch for the water going the wrong way down the plughole. This is true, and mildly interesting in its own way, but it does suggest an unhealthy obsession with the trivial. My point is this: call me melodramatic if you like, but hasn’t anyone noticed that the sun is going the wrong way around the sky? Jesus Christ, it’s in the north! That’s just not right!

Tom and Kirsten live on the north shore of Sydney Harbour, a stone’s throw from a slim crescent between two cliffs called Freshwater Beach. In the time it takes me to walk from my house to the White Hart, my local, Tom and Kirsten can be jumping the waves on the beach where surfing was invented. There’s a pub between their house and this beach, with that other great Aussie institution, the drive-through bottle shop, right next door. While I won’t hear a word against Tom’s hometown of Newcastle, I can understand why he’s living here instead.

Having said our hellos, showered and changed, Liz and I go for a bracing walk to try to stave off the jet lag. Over the headland from the bay, we’re soon overlooking Manly Beach, a shallow golden strip that curves around gently for a mile or so.

Manly is an affluent suburb built on an area named by Captain Arthur Phillip, the first governor of New South Wales, who looked at the shore from his ship, saw the Aboriginal people of the Kay-ye-my clan and declared how confident and manly they looked. With his odd and somehow depressing literalness, Phillip ensured that this lovely suburb will remain the butt of juvenile jokes for ever more. We walk past the Manly Boathouse, the Manly Italian Restaurant and Manly Seaside Kebabs, each of which conjures up its own somehow camp image. The Beach Pit, Manly, and Ivanhoe of Manly are the only places that avoid the obvious invitation to snigger by constructing the name in a different way.

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