Highly encouraging news from Iran
The incomparable Modern Drunkard website has a report on quite how easily getting hold of the sauce is in those parts.
Here's a telling extract:
"But in Iran you can’t drink without being put squarely in the confidence of your drinking mates. Nothing accelerates bonhomie better than the knowledge that your drinking partner could, at a whim, turn you in and have you subjected to the lash. I drank with families (gin, straight out of a can) and with store owners (Turkish beers). And on one lovely afternoon, university students in possession of a magnum of moonshine escorted me all the way up a long, steep trail so I could enjoy the view from a mountainside overlooking Tehran, all of us as tipsy as lords".
Well worth the read, and puts me in mind of the well intentioned 'Peace Through Alcohol' movement of some years back. In the early eighties they surmised that with the rampant alcholism of the Red Army (tanks out of commission because the anti-freeze had been drunk, Migs grounded as the brake fluid had been drunk etc etc), it would be a great deal cheaper to scrap planned siting of Pershing, cruise etc missiles, and instead switch the West's defence budget to stockpiling vodka and the like. Then if the Red Wheel were to roll west, NATO would parachute down crate after crate of vodka just ahead of the advancing wave. The advance would then stop, the Red Army would get thoroughly mashed, and we could then just round them up and despatch them home with maybe some liver salts and paracetomols to help soothe their aching heads.
Here's a telling extract:
"But in Iran you can’t drink without being put squarely in the confidence of your drinking mates. Nothing accelerates bonhomie better than the knowledge that your drinking partner could, at a whim, turn you in and have you subjected to the lash. I drank with families (gin, straight out of a can) and with store owners (Turkish beers). And on one lovely afternoon, university students in possession of a magnum of moonshine escorted me all the way up a long, steep trail so I could enjoy the view from a mountainside overlooking Tehran, all of us as tipsy as lords".
Well worth the read, and puts me in mind of the well intentioned 'Peace Through Alcohol' movement of some years back. In the early eighties they surmised that with the rampant alcholism of the Red Army (tanks out of commission because the anti-freeze had been drunk, Migs grounded as the brake fluid had been drunk etc etc), it would be a great deal cheaper to scrap planned siting of Pershing, cruise etc missiles, and instead switch the West's defence budget to stockpiling vodka and the like. Then if the Red Wheel were to roll west, NATO would parachute down crate after crate of vodka just ahead of the advancing wave. The advance would then stop, the Red Army would get thoroughly mashed, and we could then just round them up and despatch them home with maybe some liver salts and paracetomols to help soothe their aching heads.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, November 26, 2006 at 5:58 pm.
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Mr C
Let me tell you the British Army gets through a fair amount of booze and not just at weekends , every officers mess has wine on a side table at lunch (open but not to be drunk if on duty )and plenty flowing with dinner and every other mess batters it most nights.
Paracetomols will not help C when a combination of overwork a few beers and extreme fatigue ,pitch you into a living hell of gastric flue.
My hollow voice echoes directly from white faced hades
Misery
I guess so. Wellington reckoned that men only enlisted for drink nigh on two centuries back...
N - you do not sound well old bean.
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