Yes, I know the last two instalments of the Advent Flog are late. Badly late, although still the right calendar year, so that’s something. What can I say? Trying to do Christmas on one bad wheel was tiring and time-consuming. It’s taken me a day or so to gather my energies.
I’m writing this with my foot up and a fortifying glass of Baileys to hand. Baileys-esque, anyway. Fake Baileys. Faileys. Aldi’s Specially Selected Irish Cream Liqueur. Perfectly palatable. Healthy? No, obviously, but it could be worse. We were talking about making egg nogg for Christmas and that’s basically a handwritten invitation to a heart attack and diabetes.
I used to know a chap who made his own Baileys. Gerry Pegram was his name. He’d make you Pegram’s Cream Liqueur at cost. I forget the ingredients, but cheap whisky and condensed milk featured. The only caveats with Pegram’s Cream Liqueur was he could only make you two litres per serving (“That’s just the recipe”) and it had to be drunk within a month of production or else it would go off.
I never took him up on the offer. Drinking two litres of cream liqueur in a month seemed like a bit of a challenge. I did taste it though, and Pegram’s Cream Liqueur was indistinguishable from the genuine article.
Gerry’s homemade Baileys is the first thing I think about when I think about him. I worked with Gerry at the end of his working life and the beginning of mine at Zurich Financial Services (Allied Dunbar when I joined). Gerry was ex-forces and then moved in being a financial adviser. When we crossed paths we were working for a team investigating the mis-selling of pensions, so he was very much a poacher-turned-gamekeeper.
He was very dapper, was Gerry. And slightly wolfish. There was danger in his grin. Out of the group of older colleagues I used to drink with and he was the one I most wanted to like me. I think there was always a step of distance between us as I tried too hard for his approval. But when I wasn’t winding my neck out too far he tolerated me and told me wonderful stories.
He told me he went on his nephew’s stag weekend in Scotland and they ended up in an establishment that was a curry house and a strip club. What he couldn’t get his head around was you had to walk through the strip club to get to the curry house and that seemed to him to be entirely the wrong way round. You have the curry first, don’t you, he reasoned? He found the idea of having a pre-curry lap dance very back-to-front.
I think about that a lot. What is the right way round? Do you want a lap dance on an empty stomach? Equally, is it a great idea to have an young Estonian lady gyrating on your lap when you’ve got a rising tide of the curry sweats.
The more I think about it Gerry was one of the great thinkers of his generation.
Gerry retired, but he’d still come along on Thursdays for a drink with ex-colleagues. Right up until he had a stroke – a nasty one – and he was robbed of his mobility and his words. His son would still bring him along occasionally. The smile was lopsided, but still dangerous, and his eyes still had their shine, even if he was only capable of gibberish.
Christ, he’s been dead nearly a decade now.
Christmas is a time for ghosts. I’d like to conjure up old Gerry Pegram’s spirit. I think he’d find the older, less gauche and more cynical, me far more to his tastes. It’d be nice to share a glass, enjoy his company and not be so obsessed with grasping for his approval.
Or maybe he’d be saddened by how weathered I’d become and encourage me to reach back and try to rediscover some of my lost ghost of my wide-eyed innocence?
Who knows, eh?
You can read more about Gerry here.
The Flog 