Country Living with Francis Farragher

There’s probably little point in being a grumpy old man unless you document your gripes for the world and humanity to empathise with you every so often. The other night, in a quieter moment, I started to think about the little things that tend to annoy me in this world. Not issues of world importance nor of great philosophical gravitas . . . but just annoying.

Probably number one on the list is non-alcoholic beers. Here and there I’ve been told that I should try out the myriad of beverages which look like the real thing such as Guinness, Heineken, Carlsberg, Moretti and Erdinger, all with the 0.0 attachment at the end.

It strikes a particular memory chord with me concerning a wedding I attended a few years back [oops, it’s longer, in the pre-Covid period] when I was on a particularly strong combination of antibiotics after a problematic wisdom tooth extraction. [By the way, that also irks me . . . giving those useless, pointless and sometimes wickedly troublesome teeth at the back butts of your jaws, the ‘wisdom’ title].

Anyway, I was given ample warning that a mixture of the post-op antibiotics prescribed for me, with even a very modest measure of alcohol would deliver a ‘sickening that I would never forget’, so on ill-fated advice from a work colleague, I gave a go at imbibing an alcohol-free German beer.

Halfway through the first pint – and there was no second one – I kind of thought to myself that this had to have been the vilest liquid that had ever invaded my taste buds. After that, and for the rest of the wedding, there was a real appreciation of how nice a mixture of sparkling and natural water, topped up with a shot of Mi-Wadi, really was.

There’s a very funny clip, somewhere out there in the ether of social media, which features the wife of the that gifted playwright, the late John B. Keane, from Listowel, outlining her travails when John B. decided to ‘give up the drink’ for a couple of weeks. During that time, she had no comfort in this world . . . he was up during the night; here, there and everywhere. In the end, she pleaded with him to ‘to go back and have a few drinks’.

Pictured: The world of 0.0!