Drinking green

Yesterday being Saint Patrick’s Day, and myself being Irish, the natural supposition might be that I was out celebrating until the wee hours.

However, that supposition would be wrong.

New Year’s Eve and Saint Patrick’s Day are when all the amateurs come out to drink, and I don’t particularly relish being puked on in any event. So I usually go private for any imbibing I choose to do to mark the occasions.

My office mate, being of an age and gender where it’s viewed as a character defect if you don’t overindulge, did go out to various faux-Irish establishments at the weekend to drink copious amounts of various substances.

One potation in particular caught my attention, an “Irish car bomb”. It starts with Guinness, which puts it beyond the beyond for starters as far as I’m concerned. (I’m not into drinking industrial sludge.) Into a pint of Guinness you’re meant to drop a shot glass with Bailey’s Irish Cream and a float of Irish whisky.

Then you’re supposed to actually swallow it.

According to my colleague, the trick is to get it down fast, “before the Bailey’s starts to curdle”. (He wasn’t completely kosher about the bibulous methodology: he poured the Bailey’s/whiskey into the Guinness, as, “I figured a lot of people had handled the shot glass.”)

The drink does have one benefit, he adds: “it kind of feels like you already threw up”, what with the Bailey’s curdling like cottage cheese in your mouth, “so you don’t puke.”

According to Wikipedia, the name “Irish Car Bomb” “is sometimes considered offensive due to its reference to IRA terrorism. It is not uncommon for genuine Irish pubs to refuse to serve them.”

Well, hmm.

I think the difficulty with that statement would be in trying to find an actual, you know, “genuine Irish pub”. There being squillions of faux Irish pubs around. And I don’t think you can count those pub-in-a-box franchises that give you sure-fire instructions for building an Irish pub in downtown Riga or suburban Peshawar.

Still—I should think drinking abomination (regardless of what you call it) would be its own punishment.

Then there would come the bar bill.