Years and years ago I worked in telly, which was wonderful fun — it helped enormously that I fancied my boss — apart from the 3am starts and the daily meltdowns that seem particular to underperforming producers. In spite of these howling rages, or perhaps because of them, Fridays invariably ended up with everyone in the pub, where drink would blur the tensions out of focus. I remember the presenters all seemed to need the loo at the same time.
You learn things at the pub; gossip is God. But among the more mundane lessons was that when everyone else is on the pints, a Gn’T at twice the price pretty quickly comes off as greedy. And so for the first time since spitting out Foster’s at a teenage house party, I made an effort to find a beer I could stomach; pretty swiftly, I found I could stomach Guinness very easily — although only when I could find it.
