Pub Etiquette: Playing Catch-Up. This practise – ordering multiple or very strong drinks in an attempt to catch up to your co-drinkers in inebriation terms – is bad form. It makes you look vulgar at best, a medical case at worst. That said I do find it neccessary on occasion to kick off my drinking with two pints rather than the more common one. For instance, the editor of this publog is a slower drinker than I. I drink at approximately 1.2 times his rate of consumption p on the first pint. His rate of consumption also reduces for each additional pint. So if I arrive in the pub at 8 on a Friday after a hard journey on the Oxford Tube, and he has been down the boozer since 5.30, he will not only be drunker than I and prone to rant about Tarkus, but my rate of consumption will be approaching 2p and thus to correct the imbalance a second pint may be required during the initial purchase. (Needless to say you should only even consider buying multiple drinks if it is your round.)
But even if you think it’s necessary it’s still bad form. And on some occasions your concept of “necessary” may stretch the boundaries of good behaviour to their limits. On a recent visit to London’s trendy Bierodrome the Coolest Man of the Third Millennium found himself at a disadvantage. We had been sitting in the Cittie Of Yorke all afternoon and were so incapacitated we were singing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” all down the Kingsway, vying with one another for the honour of doing “the Bono bit”. In the circs we would have surely been churlish to take issue with a double-drink purchase, given that CM3M had been working behind a counter during that same time.
However CM3M judged that two drinks were not enough, and ordered two (2) pints of John Smiths and two (2) Bailey’s. On the last round of the evening. This meant that he was a) drinking four drinks to our one, and b) paying through the nose being as Bierodrome is not cheap. Also the thought of a cocktail of John Smiths and Bailey’s is enough to make the sternest stomach turn. Afterwards he announced that he would not be coming back to Bierodrome as it was too expensive. The result was that he sacrificed the moral high ground over us – given how hammered we were this is some feat – and on future pub visits the conversation made reference not to our disgraceful crooning antics but to his ambulance-chasing drink-lust. Readers – don’t let this happen to you!