So what’s your beef with The Kraken?

So what’s your beef with The Kraken?

A bartender and rum-scallywag explains…the real sea monster is those who hustle wee drams of inauthentic paradise.

Ok fade to flashback, for those of you who are unfamiliar with a new rum phenomenon, here’s a little back-story.

I first happened upon The Kraken Rum in a slightly grungy blues bar in Harrogate.  For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure of visiting Harrogate, it’s about the only posh place in Yorkshire, and the idea of there being a grungy blues bar there at all is mythologically bizarre.  I digress.

I was told it was a Scottish dark spiced rum, which nearly gave me rum kittens.  If you know owt about sun-drenched rum and its very distant peaty, rainy friend Scotch, you will know the climate in which they’re made is integral.  As it turns out, I was told wrong.  But that word-of-mouth thing had already happened, so I returned to The Midlands with a myth in my gob, about a Scottish dark spiced rum.

But that would make The Kraken very happy.  The Kraken is named after a gigantic sea monster, the kind of which could swallow whole ships.  We were already steeped, and triple-distilled in mythology, the dark salty sea washing away petty things like truth.

But sadly knowledge has sobered me.  Damn you knowledge.

The Kraken is made in the US, using Caribbean rum, with the spices added later.  It is simply distributed in the UK from Glasgow.  Those bartenders need to learn how to read a bottle.  Eejits.

In fact a little reccy of the website makes me smell a drunken rat, and that rat has drawn himself in the image of Sailor Jerry’s.  Sailor Jerry’s is similar to The Kraken, in that it is a marketing entity, which relies on Chinese whispers to keep on-the-down that it’s a US brand.  They don’t hide it, it says right there on their own website.  But because Sailor Jerry’s is distilled in the Caribbean, and uses a Caribbean style recipe, those who don’t care too much (the drunks), may be led to believe it is a Caribbean rum.  And the same can be said of The Kraken.

Why does this matter?  Well, rum has an exciting and horrible history, a history entwined with everything from global slavery, to piracy and naval warships.  And more recently, as those who have seen ‘The Rum Diary’ will know, it’s entwined with corporations wanting to buy and sell paradise, while the locals in that paradise still flounder in poverty.  Children begging money off tourists, who’ve come to drink the fine rum their great grandparents crafted the recipe for.

There are plenty of stunning little rum tots which are genuine to the Caribbean, which are growing the local economy of course.  But Sailor Jerry’s and The Kraken are American brands.  That’s why their ad campaigns are so good.

In many respects I’m just glad people are drinking something other than Bacardi, a brand so ubiquitous that many ‘Bacardi-drinkers’ don’t even know that it’s a rum.  And while The Kraken is sadly neither Scottish nor Caribbean, I have to admit the other reason I raved about it was the taste.  It tastes awesome with ginger beer, having the robust character of a proper dark rum, with the smoothing, sweetening spices.  And for that fair reason it will still be one of my tipples.

Over & owt

Fox

 

The Rum Diary – Rum Come Save Me

The Rum Diary

There seems to have been alot of ‘meh’ type reviews of The Rum Diary (2011, Bruce Robinson).  I suspect this is all to do with towering expectations.  The combined adulation for ‘Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas’ and ‘Withnail & I’ (an earlier project from this director), leaving viewers begging for some kind of ultimate mutant hybrid.

But this was never to be a bona-fide Hunter S. Thompson cacophony, so much as a suitable examination of where his great Gonzo voice originally whispered from.  My main concern beforehand was that the film would pander too much to being like Fear and Loathing.  I have the smug advantage of having read The Rum Diary, and while it is unmistakably HST, it is a world away from his later work.

And so I greeted the whole shebang with jazz claps, and pretentious nods of affirmation.  The look of it felt right, showing the paradise people were drooling to buy, as well as the real vibrant streets and interiors of 50s Peurto Rico.  The tone of it felt right, marrying the sublime, with the ridiculous, with the downright batty.  The characterisations were affably wacky, depicting a gaggle of journalists who might one day shake the corrupt system, if only they could stay sober long enough to keep giving a shit.

And while this was never a film that would alter the foundations of perception, or some other grandiose thing, it was a lot of fun, and made me want to drink rum.  Which were the two basic requirements in my mind.

Besides this, it had a certain integrity to the tipsy haze of its thinly veiled politics, which are still timely and relevant.  There is nothing very radical here, nothing that hasn’t been commented on before in terms of beautiful unspoiled places, being stomped on by greedy corporations.  But it’s still a hearty reminder of how ridiculous the world is, and a tribute to the wayward hack who was so good at articulating this.

Enjoy in moderation.

Over & owt

Fox

this & that (a life without bubblewrap)

Whatcha been up to? “This & that”

How you feelin? “So-so”

In the past few weeks I’ve smashed up a lot of stuff.  Not least a loving relationship based on rum, fun, rambling (both types) & laffing…as opposed to mutual mundane torture, as is the norm…  What can I say except I’m terribly skilled at kicking myself in the teeth?

I’ve been packing all my stuff up in the cohabited flat, and so dismantling our life together, taking to pieces our ying & yang of DH mountain bikes, moomin pictures, 70s coffee tables & micro-brewery paraphernalia.  I was wrapping up picture frames today to protect them for their travels, bubble-wrap & masking tape & rolls of old lining paper.  I finally came to my favourite frame, one I bought from an antique/junk shop on Abbeydale Road, back in my Sheffield days, all decoratively carved wood, scratched by time & provenance.  I leaned my knee on it to secure some tape and CRRAAACCKK.  Being on the fragile side, I began bawling like a kid fallen off their trikey, but as quickly as the tears spurted, they stopped, like a kid being handed a lollypop, and so immediately forgetting why he was upset.  It was my pretensions to ‘art’ that stopped the tears & made me fetch my camera & alter the lighting in the room.  I’ve got a thing about photographing smashed glass.  Which is just as well.  I’ve worked in bars for nearly 10 years, surrounded by glassware & crockery, and one of the few errant genes I’m sure of is the clumsy gene.

They say clumsiness is linked to emotions, and I can vouch I can measure my own stability/happiness by how often I break shit.  At the most anxious/unhappy time in my life I was smashing a couple of things per shift.  Needless to say the head bartender (a dickweedious blob of an ego, also my then-boyfriend’s housemate) would rip it out of me every time, and while I’m certainly able to return such ‘banter’, it didn’t make the bags under my eyes any lighter.  That particular job/boyfriend scenario was one of my lifes lowest ebbs, and before I left both I even managed to break someone’s arm.  Another dickweed thankfully, through the ‘gross negligence’ of leaving a box of wine in the way.  A trip hazard it seems.

In the past week or so, there have been some breakages.  My favourite being an entire tray of salt & pepper pots at the end of a saturday night slog.  Sneezy, Dopey & Grumpy were all present by the end of the evening, sweeping up the debris of my self-esteem.

Have you ever bought a pint, set it down on the table, gone to take your seat (mid-conversation) & up-ended the entire unsupped pint into your own lap?  I’ve done that twice.  Once it was Guiness, once it was Black Sheep Bitter.  Although they both happened at good times in my life (Sheffield city of dreams), so on my sliding scale of being a clutz, skirt-full-of-beer = good, glass-i-barely-touched-exploding-near-my-face = bad.

Anyway, back to the packing…

Over & owt.

All my little words…

Writing a novel has so far been an incredible experience.  However I’m now reaching the two toughest parts – detailed, tedious editing (as opposed to creative editing) & the challenge of getting published.

Anyroads, I shall allow here a little nostalgia.  In between working in bars, cafes & pubs, in between completing an art degree, in between deciding between rum & ginger or a nice pint of local ale, inbetween drinking more brews than is good for the brain or the bladder, inbetween over-egging the ‘inbetween’ pudding, I’ve managed to nail 200,000 words, most of which I’m proud of.  Writing, particularly about the murky depths of characters minds, has worked to keep me sane.  I can admit at times it’s done the opposite, I’ve accidentally fallen into the pond of ‘method writing’, which has left me worse for wear.  But whenever the mundanity of work, studying or friend/family politics has got me down, I’ve had a surefire escape.

Although I owe a great deal to my hometown of Nottingham, and all the amazing people & places I know here, in many ways the novel is a lovesong to the North (albeit a cynical, doom-riddled one, a bit a ‘ Magnetic Fields’ song, one title of which I stole for a blog heading).  I love the drinking holes, the atmosphere, the latent potential, the shabbyness next to the clumps of uber-shiny regeneration, the wild moors & drizzly inner cities, I love the importance of gumption & the overwhelming lack of it.  Yorkshire my love, when will you take me back?!  I know I don’t quite talk proper yet, but I’m working on it…

I digress, as is usual with memory fog & rum riddled bleating…

A typical armchair know-it-all recently asked me flippantly, “So, what writers have you ripped off?”  Truth be told, I’ve ripped off everything I’ve ever known that got under my skin.  The difference is that I chewed up & regurgitated it, and now hopefully it’s even prettier than West Street gutter, 3am Sunday morning.

And so, and so…back to the drizzle of grammar & layout, & this & that… wish me luck on the road to meek success or noble failure.

Over & owt.