DRINKING vodka in Yeltsin volumes does lead to hallucinations, but sometimes I wonder how prolonged they can be. That I drink the stuff will come as no surprise to familiars of mine who regularly call for stretcher bearers in the later evening to take me home. But I did have an unusual experience after an exotic evening at The Ritz Carlton a little while ago.
At the RC, they pour the vodka into large glass jars crammed with fruit, clamp down the lids, let it gestate for a month or two and siphon off the measures through a tap at the bottom like a baby's winkie. It is dead simple to do, if you have the patience, and dead is how you will end up if you are over-eager about the result.
The fruity vodkas were lining the hotel's lounge bar with a lurid keenness the Victorians used to have for displaying intestines in jars of formaldehyde. We tasted six, eight - after the fourth, who knew? Our intestines began to qualify for jars of formaldehyde.
The most popular in this line of drinking is supposed to be the lemon vodka - although, for me, it really did taste like some form of body preservative. An attempt to orientalise the drink by putting in ginseng added a sense of musky decay. Subtlest was the cantaloupe, most exotic the strawberry and most fun was the pear, which tasted like coffee.
An interesting impact on the vodka came from pineapples. It occurred to me that if a chap had the will and resources to put a lady in a devil-may-care mood she had never planned to be in, a few of those would slip down a vulnerable gullet easier than fruit punch at a church fete. That was about the last thought I remember having.
So it was that a day or so later, when I was still trying to keep my balance and walk in a straight line through my lift lobby, that the hallucinations seemed to kick in with force. I wobbled out of my building, turned into the street and grabbed hard for a lamp post. A few metres ahead, by the kerb, sat a Government House Daimler, one of those black sitting rooms with white chair covers. Were it capable of speeding, the policeman would have to draw a crown in his notebook instead of writing down the licence number.