On Campari, death, supermodel wellness influencers, being bitchslapped for liking Martin Amis
And the dubious highs of wellness zealotry and harvesting young people's blood as a health supplement.
I sit down to write this at one minute past six in the evening and I want a drink. In fact I cannot promise you that between me typing this word………and this one, I have not thrown the ingredients below over ice and finished by pinching the zesty oil from a thick curl of orange peel.
There, that’s better. I’ve fixed myself a drink. I’m not doing worrying alone drinking. Why, with you here and this little bowl of olives I am enjoying a wholesome European aperitivo.
I had a story in the Sunday Times last weekend on an emerging British enthusiasm for aperitivo, aka drinking like a healthy and well-adjusted person. You can read it here. (But, paywall).
Some brave people are attempting the drinking habits of warm and relaxed Southern European cultures. Sensible, well-paced, convivial and with food, The Italians aperitivo culture is about taking time over a little alcohol, a small beer or wine, or some iteration of those bitter red drinks infused with herbs known as Amaro (meaning bitter) that make up spritzes, fizzes and strong sunset coloured drinks like the negroni (here’s my favourite version of this easy to make classic) and the Campari shakerato - only 18 calories a pop, beat that Stella Artois.
The point of amaro and aperitivo is not just a pause or a break in the day, but also to stimulate your appetite before dinner. The word aperitivo comes from the Latin aperire—meaning to open up— because the bitter flavours and small bites of food stimulate the liver and the digestive tract and get you physically primed to digest. It is to food as foreplay is to sex. It’s the elusive healthy drinking. Amaro can also be taken after dinner as a digestif, less foreplay, more like lovely sleepy sensuous pillow talk. This luxuriant menu of the stages to a sexual event feel sadly remote to me from the barren sexual outpost that is a decade plus years in one relationship. Safe to say, amari will never roll over and snore.
Aperitivo comes with tasty bits to nibble. In Italy these are free, in the UK they rarely are. Says it all. There’s another sex allegory there but who do you think I am, Martin fucking Amis.
Sometimes when I write stories I get very swept up in the ideas - enthused - and the aperitivo thing really did it for me. I’ve been trying so hard to master moderate drinking and the boundaries of ritual really help. The problem with pavement pints is they are a drink without end. Aperitivo, though. I invited some friends over at the weekend and served those red drinks and some, for the actual want of a better single word than this awful one, nibbles.
I knocked out a tomato tart…
…bought a key (as they say in the drugs trade) of Perello olives and cornichon, a half key of Tomme de Brebis (ewe’s milk cheese) and a filthy haul of Torres in the world class flavours that give me middle aged, middle class life: fried egg, sherry vinegar, caviar and black truffle. My friend Jo also brought some egg and truffle Torres, warning me that the egg ones smell like fart, I know, I said, the truffle ones smell of crack pipe.
These Italian drinks are so civilised that I was buying and tasting them at 11am. I felt so Continental. This is nice I thought. Look at me, drinking, sensibly. I have had enough late nights. And I’m not quite ready to have a Saturday night gong bath with my friends. Let’s try this middle way.
DRINKING WITH FOOD IS CIVIL
Drinking on an empty stomach is an insult to your body. It is just showing your body good manners giving it a little something to buffer the assault of the alcohol. I detest drinking on an empty stomach. Like Suella Braverman, it’s pure evil.
The first person arrived around five thirty and the plan was that the last person would leave by 830pm. “We will say we are going to dinner,” I said to the boyfriend but of course we didn’t, lying seemed silly. I admitted to them that I had become a wellness zealot, was light bitter drinks (negronis are not light though, by any stretch), nibbles, and a restricted hospitality window in the name of gut health and sanity.
They all seemed to understand. Many are trying on the corrective boot of wellness behaviours in order to improve their life quality.
Sadly, I must admit, that I still have some way to go before I can say I have the sprezzatura to pull off gentle, modest drinking.
YOUR FIFTIES ARE SNIPER ALLEY
I had a strong motive for this attempt at a moderate soiree. I don’t want to die. Our heroes in the generation above are dropping like flies. The end of Martin Amis was more immediately upsetting and sadder to me, I think, than when Princess Diana died in that awful drink driving accident. Amis, the chainsmoker of rollies and greatest prose stylist of my lifetime (in my opinion, and others) was gone. Amis always seemed a stones throw away from me. He inhabited a high echelon of literary credibility, and was older, and properly starry. Dear Martin Amis, I was such a big fan. But, moving on, after some feelings of sadness and loss - and texts to friends, “Martin Amis is dead!” What else can you say? - inevitably, I thought about me, and death. ‘Me next’.
Our contemporaries are starting to go at speed, including Lisa Marie Presley at 54, dear Terry Hall at 63, Andy Rourke, the Smith’s bassist at 59. Your fifties is sniper alley. Any one of us could explode at any time.
My curiosity with wellnezzzzz, which mildly gives a theme to these substack rambles, is, without doubt, partly roused by not wanting to die. [Note that I only say partly here, much later we will hear the other reason]. Not wanting to die, nor be ill, incapacitated and generally poorly as I head towards the inevitable with terminal velocity. This latter is what Martin called the “sweat of death”. I’d like the labour of death to not be too ghastly, please. Martin wrote about everything much better than me, but I won’t burden you with endless quotes. Just type Martin Amis, and a subject into Tinternet and see what gems fall into your eyes.
In the scheme of things, life is short. My thinking is that pursuing this cunty sounding wellness is the little parachute that might slow the hastening to the end. I really do not like a lot of wellness’ utter bunkum, its pill rattling, child’s blood transfusioning, $1000 a day money grubbing, unsciencey, narcissistic tendency and extremely unsociable habits, it’s ghastly entitled borderline anorexic vapid influencers and rapey gaslighting gurus but boy oh boy oh boy do I get it!
I want to live more life. Yes please!
It’s a pretty wobbly sort of wellness I practice - as yet, I am not meditating for an hour a day, but drinking bitter red Italian alcohol is a move in the right direction away from GnTs and sledgehammer plonk. I don’t exercise vigorously, but I do move every day (two mental dogs help with that), I aim to view morning and mid afternoon daylight pretty religiously now to regulate my circadian riddims and improve sleep quality. I swapped drugs for dogs. Cold showers brighten my mood. Vegetables, kim chi and nuts have entered my life. Psychedelic therapy helped me cheer the fuck up and be kinder to my Mum. I understand the benefits of regular sleep and a little overnight fast. Nothing heavy. Just little lifestyle tweaks. These small free daily actions can make a massive difference.
I suspect quite a lot of my generation have clocked their addictions to booze, stress, drugs, the fags and felt the unremitting expansion of the waistline against tightening trousers and resolved, repeatedly, and often with a hangover, “I’ve got to sort myself out”. Even the skinny madly healthy ones are noticing, ‘the thickening’, as one model friend calls it. I have a friend with very bad gout, which sounds like something that happens to Tudor kings. More seriously there will have been cancer, and scares, and a realisation that that backache might last forever.
Medicine isn’t the only answer, and you’d be mad to think it is. (And equally really fucking batshit crazy to reject it too, as some moron dipsticks will with their herbal tinctures and terror of vaccines.) Lifestyle changes are essential, and they give us agency in our own health and self-improvement. The wellness industry has some real answers tucked away in among all the price-tagged bullshit. My generation behaved like pigs for decades. We didn’t just go out we went to parties, after parties, after afters, an all back to mine, a carry on and a soft landing. We’re starting to realise that people like us don’t live very long.
Amis was a fan of smoking and drinking, and unapologetically so. Jude Rogers shared a piece she wrote about the life advice of Amis in the last ever issue of Word magazine in August 2012. Funnily enough, this journalist, a Millennial, sounds really quite unamused and unimpressed by him. His star waned with younger generations because he just wasn’t trained to say what people wanted to hear, his work was to entertain, not to cosset and make people feel safe. Anyway, with its headline “Keep smoking and drinking,” in it he says, “The main thing I’ve learnt in my life is that smoking and drinking is great. The Romany have one word for smoking and drinking, which is ‘rompen’. I love that: rompen.”
I too like rompen, but Amis died of oesophageal cancer which is a proven consequence of it. Tina Turner made it to 83, despite a dodgy kidney, high blood pressure and the wounds and trauma of the abusive marriage to the foul wifebeater Ike. She wasn’t into rompen. I think if we start to rein it in and make lifestyle adaptations, we can claw back long term health. But rompen must be curtailed though I will not eliminate it entirely. I cannot.
When we hit this panic button, here, the multi-trillion dollar wellness industry lights up. LET US SAVE YOU FROM ROMPEN.
I DON’T WANT TO DIE
This aperitivo experiment was about restricting the rompen, lightening it up, enjoying a blast of it, but not so it turns into a mad crazy morning after headache of a binge. British people drink by volume about the same quantity per year as France and Spain, but they do it in weird lumpy episodes. Our drinking culture is course. Pavement pints and Mr Porkies. Pouring wine til the vibrating horizon of a highly alcoholic wine’s convex meniscus bulges over the brim showcasing the physics of surface tension…
…This, and cracking a 150g bag of Torres has sometimes been my survival mechanism as I’ve slogged out books for other people. Which is better than nipping out for a quick drink on a Friday after work and getting in at 9am on Sunday morning with dolly’s size dusty plastic baggy - empty - and having eaten nothing for 48 hours. Who? Me? Never!
I’ve been drinking a lot less than usual lately, and feeling pretty good because of it. I’m not alone. There’s a new and rising enthusiasm for being teetotal or for a high form of moderation - 99% sober, aka ‘damp’. Young adults, under 25, are by far the most likely not to drink, and those over 55, well (*Coughs awkwardly*) they’re the least inclined to pack in the booze.
Office of National Statistics data from 2021, had these top line findings:
19% of men and 24% of women did not drink alcohol in the last 12 months.
54% of men and 61% of women drank at levels that put them at low risk of alcohol-related harm.
A higher proportion of men (28%) than women (15%) drank at increasing or higher risk levels (over 14 units in the last week for both men and women.
5% of men drank over 50 units and 2% of women drank over 35 units a week
WELLNESS ZEALOTRY IS NO LIFE
I can see that there are certain demographics for whom totally giving up booze makes sense, some people just don’t like drinking, alcoholics can’t do ‘safe levels’, those at high risk of certain cancers would understandably want to avoid booze given it is a noted carcinogen, pregnant women. It’s not much good for any of us. If we go into a sensitive and conscious frame of mind about how we feel when and after a drink or three, it is easy to spot the less satisfactory sleep, the finger that is a little more swollen around a ring, the chaotic appetite, foggy head and a generally inflamed state. Even very modest quantities of alcohol impact on us physically and mentally.
But I don’t think this means we should give it up and wellness zealots that tell you to are no different from religious zealots that do the same.
I don’t know about you but I enjoy watching wellness zealotry, from the glowing nutrition professional that urge us to to eat less sugar and more turmeric and leafy green vegetables to the ebullient health hacking queen who only eats once a day and endlessly gets her abs out while putting bovine collagen powder in their morning coffee. Then there are the real nutters, like this revolting giant turd who proposes the eating of raw testicles and liver?
In terms of ethanol’s impact on the lump of flesh, water, fat and bone we call me and you, yes, it’s ‘bad’ but can we agree that alcohol has its place in the great organism of community.
A couple of years ago I had a cocktail party with zero alcohol. I wrote about it. Quite a few people didn’t turn up because they were either too hungover or found the idea of socialising without alcohol unappealing. I modestly enjoyed it, but felt we needed something to take the edge off. A little Electric Kool Aid with a barely perceptible microdose of LSD, a Cynar Spritz (a light aperitivo made with the fantastically bittersweet Cynar, prosecco and soda water and a wedge of something citrus, this recipe is pretty straight up and simple), or something other than nothing. When I visit Wasing Wellbeing for the occasional morning Wim Hof session with their instructor there, we do breathwork, ice baths, a big old sauna and really strong cacao and that is a big buzz, a very lovely bonding experience, but not quite as easy to whip up as a vermouth and tonic.
I am an anti-prohibitionist. I don’t believe in endlessly banning things. Let’s ban banning. And let’s ban fucking opinions, they really do my head in.
After the aperitivo story came out in the Sunday Times I posted a light Instagram Story with no kerfuffle or hype. Still a woman got in touch to tell me at great angry lengths that the drinks lobby is evil (so many lobby interests are exceedingly dubious), that no level of drinking is safe, that Britain wasn’t ever going to get aperitivo because of the aforementioned evil drinks lobby. It was very forcefully put and I just felt, reading it, an overwhelming tiredness. She wasn’t wrong. But why this haranguing tone? What life is it, to be so fucking cross.
Wellness zealotry is irritating in its extremes. Don’t show me that bread I’ll have to call a gluten ambulance. I can’t drink tap water, ‘they’ control your mind with it. I healed myself by only eating ox liver for a year.
Then again, the mayhem of messy is also NO LIFE.
The last person left my aperitivo experiment at four am and chose to thank me for my hospitality by giving me a bloody good hiding for being a complete simpleton. Silly me, thinking the Ukraine war was about democracy, and what a thick useless c*** I am for enjoying the astounding prose style and crafted sentences of the aforementioned Martin.
WHY MUST PEOPLE BE SO AROUSED BY OPINIONS
I’d had enough of it. On the aperitivo night one of the people that stayed and drank more than was sensible got really jabby fingered and cross about, well, everything. Why must people have opinions all the time, even at four in the morning. He was hammering his righteously informed opinions into me like nails. I don’t want to diminish the suffering of Jesus, but Christ it was painful.
One of the arguments that was not really an argument because the force of his views just stunned me to short defensive sentences and apologetic mumbles was about Martin Amis. Though I don’t think that kind of rigour and talent ever goes out of fashion, Martin wasn’t fashionable when he died - he’d been too honest and true to himself and written what he wanted rather than what he should. He was a white man, and older. And so the culture did what it will and got cross with him. He hadn’t been cancelled but he had been disapproved of and scolded. I really did love almost everything he wrote, even the stuff I didn‘t like couldn’t understand like Time’s Arrow and Night Train I read out of curiosity because his style was always impressive. He came up in conversation because I was saying I found it pointless trying to write much more than basic stuff sometimes because there were great writers out there who seemed fired by a blaze of entitlement to success and creativity. It was a quite a complicated conversation, I wonder how Martin’s poor writer son, Louis, felt (below, right).
.That’s what annoyed me about this excessive hostility over someone so recently dead. As my angry friend was pontificating into the air holding another cigarette that would leave a miserable stench inside my tiny flat, he savaged Amis as privileged, racist, misogynist, pretentious, nasty…he even compared him to Will Self. “You can’t compare Martin Amis to Will Self,” I squeaked bravely. “You don’t know what you are talking about. You clearly haven’t read him.”
I don’t mind arguments when I’m sober but drunk and messy, they’re fucking grim. I’ve had enough of it.
Two years ago I powered through Inside Story a sort of 600+ page novel/non fiction hybrid that deals with the big questions, parents, how to live, how to die, how to say goodbye to people who are dying, and how to write; he gave no fucks and had novels within the non-fiction, it was all over the place and brilliant. When I read it in a feverish few days during a lockdown I barely slept and had terrible nightmares when I did. It felt like the work of a dying man, like he has to get it all down on paper before life runs out. Like he says in the Pregnant Widow, “And you sometimes say to yourself: That went a bit quick. That went a bit quick.”
It was not very kindly reviewed by some and reading those unkind reviews and listening to the late night polemicist drinking my good rosé I thought, “STFU. There’s no way you could do a fraction as good, let alone better mate.”
Inside Story wasn’t the last Amis book I read. I reread The Information recently when I got knocked back by a lot of publishers on an idea that I’d spent a long time hustling together. The Information is a brutal blackly comic portrait of the enmity between a chronically blocked once good writer who knows he is better than his self-assured dumb yet successful writer friend. It was like squeezing the pus from a boil reading it, I really wallowed in my self-pity, pausing only to peep at the sales on my favourite bete noire’s latest bestseller.
Our Wellness Zealot might not encourage that behaviour. They’d recommend instead an ice bath and a juice cleanse perhaps, going for a walk, or upping the dose of their latest magnesium supplement.
I think I chose the right path.
“Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are.”
I’d been blundering about reading all the bits there were to read about Martin Amis, and come across this from Other People. “Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back...” My boyfriend and I had discussed how ‘eating fear soup all the meals there are’ described very well someone we both knew. I think if your wellness adventures are all driven by eating fear soup, that doesn’t sound fun.
I woke up the next morning and ate a big bowl of fear soup and longed to scuttle into the arms of wellness zealotry, with its special system of rules and bans and no nos that might save me from myself and the pissed up pedant of the night before. Wellness zealotry can look very promising at times like this. It can look like a saviour. Which brings me to the bit that has to go behind the paywall.
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