THE PRICE OF WHISKY AND LOVING THY NEIGHBOUR

To: Jack Adamović Davies ~ 20 March 2025

Jack hi. Thanks for your email. No I do not like whisky. I love it. Please do not, however, buy any for me. For historic reasons I have so much that we have been using it as hand sanitiser and to light the Barbecue for the past decade or so.

I started buying duty-free malts forty years ago when I bought the house in France. Now, every time we cross the Channel we get eight litres of duty-free premium spirits under £17 a litre. We average ten trips a year. Eighty litres per year in total. Nowadays this translates roughly into 40 litres of Famous Grouse and 40 Litres of spectacular 47.3% proof Tanqueray Gin. I have given up buying malts. They are so expensive I feel it is immoral and the Duty Free shops never have malts as nice as the ones I bought decades ago and that are lying unopened in the bottoms of wardrobes and cupboards all over the house. As we have got older our consumption rate has dropped off. We now drink about half a litre of spirts a month. Our guests drink little as they are by and large as abstemious as we are and for the same reasons. They do, however, like the selection of fine malts we offer when they visit. On subsequent visits they remember last time and bring a bottle (or two) of their favourite whisky which they present to me with much the same expression as our cat when he brings home the heads of slaughtered garden birds and lays them at my feet. We have about twenty guests a year. This has been going on for four decades. I give Robert a bottle of whatever, whenever he visits. And at Christmas and on my birthday he brings about twice as much as he has consumed during the previous year. There are wardrobes full of the stuff. Some of it is spectacular.

If this house caught fire the resulting explosion would take out 60% of the village. If only I could choose which 60% I would light the match myself.