London, UK

Just don't try driving through this mess unless you invest in the new craze over here -- satellite navigation for the car. And you can send this one back to his lordship on a newsletter flyer, this isn't a luxury, it's a survival kit to finding the wife and kids and then finding your way back to where you left the house. Take on a roundabout and pack the car with shoulder pads, for over here the roundabout is king of the nasties for a quick luck fling at playing Mad Max. And they say there is no adventure or thrills in life anymore. So as you can guess, I like to go on walkabout.

Mid morning is always your safest bet; by lunchtime it can be a bit of a pedestrian horse race that might just cost you that favorite arm or leg, and try it at a quarter-past five and it's like somebody's rung the dinner bell and you can forget about sighting the sidewalk until at least eight-thirty when mad-rush disease has eased. Be prepared to go with the flow or you'll be tossed out from the traffic, which is how I got dumped in the middle of Leicester Square as London cranked into Friday night life.

There were artists, maybe as many as forty, who were indulged in portraits, and smudging charcoal for those prepared to take the stage. The diversity of caricatures was fantastic. Their agility and speed made it like watching a Rolf Harris fan club at work. Add to this special collection of bohemia a flavour of live pan pipes and steel drums and the square hummed and rattled like a beach party. The coffee shops and ticket booths were suddenly swarming with queues, and the air reeked of a subtle mania for libation preoccupation (time-to-get-pissed) at the end of a freezing cold work week.

Which brings me to beer. The closest thing we have to English pint size is what we call the Schooner, available back down in Mexico-land (New South Wales). This could be reasonably said to equal your bucket. The schooner got its name from the way a handful of these can send you sailing, or so a mate of mine once told me just before he shared yesterday's lunch with me. So I'm standing at a bar which bristles with as many as ten levers and with people working like they're at an outback pumping station and I'm asking myself, is this a place to get a beer or the inside of a new wave aerobics machine? And will you look at the colour of the stuff. Ebony? Teak? Mahogany? Talk about interior decorating. And why is that barmaid dumping bloody-red cordial into that guy's beer? Is she mad? And why is he smiling at her?

And this is where drinking in London can step off the ledge of normality and enter a dangerous and surreal land that I will call perverse-diversity. If the beer is so good here why are they adding so many chemicals to it? So try a Snakebite which is a pint of half lager, half cider and plonked with blackcurrant cordial and which I am told is the next best thing to removing your heartbeat. Or a Diesel, which is a pint of Guinness slashed with blackcurrant cordial -- not exactly the use Mr. Ribena had in mind when he invented the kibble juice.

Then there is the Ramsbottom which is half lager, half Guinness and -- wait for it -- bloody tomato juice slung in. And if that doesn't tempt the average stout palate, then you can always finish yourself off with a Freddy Fud Pucker (which is exactly how your mouth is going to work) by dumping half mild and half Guinness into a pint and then swirling the thing with lime juice. Fairdinkum mate, these people have too much time on their hands.

Now one thing for sure, these Frankenstein concoctions are guaranteed to slap you down harder than the missus on one of her off days, and probably explains why, when sober, the stout Englishman is notorious as being a bit severe, when in fact he's probably just hung-over. Wake up with one of these cocktails squatting on your head mate and I reckon you'd be a bit grumpy for the rest of your life. Mind you in saying all that, the Aussie version of mind bending, alcohol experimentation is just as blatantly displayed with the release of that merry juice -- Dog Bolter, which is the beer you give to settle your dog down after he's raped the neighbours moggy. It is only in the way the Aussie gets his beer that is more advanced.

Downunder, beer collection has definitely become civilized. You simply drive the car in to the local bottleshop or drive-though and without turning the engine off, people race around and fill your boot, but over here in the great UK these one-stop-liquor-drops are non-existent. Here you don't have to travel to a pub to get a beer you can grab what you like from the corner supermarket. Fancy that, walking around collecting your Weetabix and Vegemite and chucking a slab of Swan in on top - now that's what I call consumer selection. Only thing is, that because our English friends don't believe in refrigerators, finding anything colder than you are from the brisk country walk is fruitless.

Back to Postcards