Early Whisky photographs

However, my involvement with Scotch whisky started well before I was given a store card. Way back when I was fifteen we moved from a gorgeous place in which we'd been living, up in Fairlight, with views over Bantry Bay, the northern part of Sydney Harbor and both North and South Heads, with a tiny little beach opposite the bay window where young women often sunbaked, something of great importance to a pubescent lad, and a vast,rambling garden populated by spiders and bullants, to a two-bedroom flat down in Manly, opposite Manly Oval. This move was caused by several things, but most notably the reappearance of Jack, who was my alleged stepfather. I say alleged because there is some doubt that mum and he ever actually went through the ceremony.

Jack had secured a job as bar manager at a local sailing club, a prime position for an alcoholic, and the flat was closer to work. It also separated us from my sister, who loathed Jack. She and her husband had been living up at Fairlight with us, but there was no room in the house for Jack. She moved to a flat only a flight of stairs away.

As bar manager, Jack had to take delivery of crates of booze, and they often turned up before the club opened for the day, so they came to our flat and were stacked in the kitchen. Now mum and Jack spent a lot of time at that club, him drinking and running the bar, her playing poker machines and running the kitchen. What can a poor boy do, when faced with a stack of cases of alcohol in the kitchen, left alone most nights of the week? Investigate ways of opening the cases and the bottles they contained.

This was in the days before untrusting souls put clever little tamper-proof seals around the necks of bottles. Old Smuggler was the easiest, because it only had some gold tinfoil crushed down onto the neck, and was sealed with a cork. They were 750 ml bottles - 26 fluid ounce as it was - so the removal of 50 ml of Scotch and its replacement with water diluted the Scotch to 34½% from 37%. People took their Scotch with ice or soda or water, so they never noticed the difference. At least, they never complained. 

A case would give me 600 ml of Scotch, which I stored with the photographic chemicals in a little box. Anyone using the fixer would have been very surprised at the results. I used the bathroom as a darkroom, and spent many wonderful hours in there, developing photographs I'd taken with my Box Brownie, particularly after I'd been up to that beach opposite Fairlight.

It was not top-shelf stuff. Johnny Walker Red was okay, and still is. It was one of the tinfoil and cork sealed bottles in those days. Grants was a bit of a bugger, because it had a metal screw cap, but I worked out that a firm grip on the join as you unscrewed it forced the whole thing off, and it could be re-sealed with the back of a spoon. And then there was Usher's Green Stripe.

There are top-shelf whiskies, such as Johnny Walker Black (just to limit this to ordinary blended whiskies), and there are middle-shelf whiskies, such as Johnny Red or J&B, and bottom shelf whiskies, such as Black and White or, god help us, Corio Five-Star. And then there are those for which no shelf is quite low enough, and there you find Usher's. It redefined rotgut in a new and more sinister fashion. The nose was that of fermenting banana-leaves crossed with Roquefort cheese and sheep-shit,and the last may have been what was malted to create it. The taste was that of nail-polish remover cut with burnt coffee. Even to my novice palate, it was undrinkable. 

For what purpose did the renowned club purchase this stuff? It was cheap, about half the price of Black and White or Vat 69, and it was alcoholic, somewhat more than the 37% of most blended whiskies. Well, Jack explained this to mum one day when he picked up a couple of cases to take to the club. 

You see, at the end of the night, when only the dedicated drinkers were left to mutter into their glasses and miss the dartboard, they swapped the bottles in the dispensers. "Those bastards are too pissed to notice the difference," he said, with a vast, Tom Cruise, he had great dentures, smile. The Ushers would be poured into a more reputable bottle down in the cellar, brought up and placed in the inverted dispensers behind the bar, increasing the profits of both the club and liver surgeons. 

But was this the worst whisky I have ever tasted? Possibly not, and that may provide the topic for another post. 

Bye.

This is really a test to see if a blog works for me. I've tried before, but I tend to lose interest or, truth be told, feel as if I have little to say. But hell, don;t we all feel like that on the dreary days? 

Since I've titled this blog Whisky Diary, I will try to include something about whisky in every post, even if it's only something as simple as wondering why the word processor suggests it should be spelled whiskey. As far as I know, that only applies to whiskies aren't Scotch. 

Just checked; the label on the bottle of Dimple Haig, which is the spirit of the night, to almost pinch something from Phantom of the Opera, says it's whisky, so yah sucks boo to word processors which are supposed to be switched to English (UK) but which are secretly spreading United States cultural domination.

To go on a little about the Dimple Haig, I have a soft spot for it, particularly when it's on special at the local cheap grog shop, because it was one of my very earliest indulgences, way back when I was corrupted by my very first store card. I was a callow nineteen-year-old when some idiot gave me access to credit at a major department store. I say they were idiots, because, at that time, I wasn't, legally, an adult, and so could not sign a binding contract. My older sister had to sign it for me. Unfortunately, she left the country a couple of months later, and hasn't come back.

To give a teenager a credit card is often a mistake, and it was in my case. I tried to act responsibly, really I did, but when you have no income, access to a department store that sells food and booze is, quite literally, a life-saver. The unfortunate thing was that they only flogged high-end stuff, so it wasn't possible to buy a cheap bottle of Uncle MacBooger Scotch Whisky, aged three weeks in a sporran. No, they only had the good stuff, and Dimple Haig was one of their cheaper Scotches. 

Thus the fondness for DH. I'm off now; have to mash the potatoes for the braised rabbit with mushrooms we're having for dinner.

Bye