Malt or Milton

I make an absolutely dreadful drunk. The problem is I simply don’t drink enough.

Back at art school it may have been a different story on a couple of occasions. But even, in the throes of youthful exuberance, there were many times when I’d end the night virtually stone cold sober while everyone else was stumbling about and tipping arse over teakettle. No more so than a first year day-trip, life-drawing in France, that turned liquid even before we reached foreign soil.

Writing at the desk on Boxing Day, I finished off a bottle of ginger ale*, forgetting that I had bought it specifically to make Moscow Mules by using up the rest of the vodka that had been sitting in the fridge for... how long? Six or maybe seven years is probably a conservative estimate.

Also on the shelf, being kept chilled, is a bottle of champagne. It was a going away present when I left an animation studio back in 1990. I liked the people I was with and the work I was doing. The animation director, one of the best in the business, was someone I had the greatest respect for.

I left because he had finally got finance for a film he’d been trying to get off the ground for something like twenty years. Just from his way of working, and where his priorities lay, I knew it was going to be a train wreck. Ultimately, it was a train wreck. I left because I didn’t want to be there to see it fail.

I went travelling and came back to working on documentaries. The bottle stayed chilled. I decided to open it when I had a good enough reason. In the late 1990s a girlfriend expected me to crack it when she got hired by Dreamworks. She was seriously put out when I declined.

Work Buddy and I still have a way to go with the projects we’re trying to set up. You know what they say; Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light. But we’re putting our shoulders to that big rock, always moving forward.

It may well be premature, but I think next year the wire will come off the bottle and the cork will finally get popped.

[* If you're about to say "Hey, muppet, it's ginger beer that goes in a Moscow Mule," you're too late. I've already had my knuckles rapped in the comments. The thing is, it was ginger beer I was drinking. I just didn't pay attention to the label. Hopeless!]