What to drink in an emergency situation

If we categorise by type of crisis, we see that characters from our greatest tomes liked to reach for a variety of drinks:

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In times of war and by this we mean people actually in combat, which we sincerely hope and are pretty certain won’t be the case for our customers, there was drinking before action to calm the nerves. In Hemingway’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, he tells us that before launching an assault ‘They drank the last of the wine together, solemnly…’.In 'War and Peace' by Tolstoy, before the Battle of Borodino, ‘The officers drank vodka’. Whisky was the drink of choice for the American airmen about to embark on combat missions, in Joseph Heller’s WWII classic, 'Catch 22'; ‘They drank whisky in the briefing room to stop their hands from trembling’. The American Civil War saw Rum being served; “The lieutenant was making his men drink from a flask…”, in Stephen Crane’s 'The Red Badge of Courage'.

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Another emergency situation we think that will be quite rare for our Slightly Anxious members is to do with the supernatural. Such times of horror had people reaching for the spirits (geddit?). In Bram Stoker’s 'Dracula', the story’s narrator, Jonathan Harker, recounts how when being driven to Dracula’s castle and frightened by the howling of wolves and supernatural eeriness, ‘The driver offered me a flask of slivovitz…’, which is a rather fabulous and potent plum brandy. Also taking a stiff drink because of general weirdness, this time from the potential attack of an enormous hound from hell, was one of the characters in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' where the story’s narrator, Dr Watson, tells us, ‘He drank the brandy in one gulp, for the terror had unmanned him’. Forsaking the brandy in Stephen King’s classic, 'The Shining', the lead character, Jack Torrance, so eloquently played by Jack Nicholson in the film, ‘reached for the bourbon as the hotel seemed to close in around him’.

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Stereotypically, almost every issue involving the sea’s dangers involves Rum. In Jules Verne’s 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea', when the giant squid attacked; ‘Ned Land took a draught of rum before seizing his harpoon’. In 'Moby‑Dick' by Herman Melville, during the violent storms and frequent whale attacks, ‘The steward handed out the rum; for such a night, the men must have courage’. We see some of the negative effects of alcohol when in Joseph Conrad’s, 'Lord Jim', a reason for the sinking of the ship Patna was ‘They had been drinking rum in the chart‑room when the ship struck’.

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We also think our members will have zero chance of being involved in murders, their investigation and the subsequent arrests, hopefully! With a serial murderer on the loose, murdering guests who had been invited to an isolated island by the murderer who had accused them of being murderers themselves, Agatha Christie’s 'And Then There Were None' uses alcohol to emphasise their fear the guests felt as they waited to see who would be next; ‘He poured himself a stiff whisky, his hands trembling’. In Dostoevsky’s 'The Brothers Karamazov', three brothers are suspected of the murder of their father, the main suspect (no spoilers) ‘seized the vodka and drank it down in terror’ at being accused. Equally fearing a knock on the door from the authorities, was Winston Smith, dreading the Thought Police in George Orwell’s '1984', ‘He poured himself a teacupful of Victory Gin and gulped it down’.

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Civil unrest, revolution and social collapse are at the very extreme end of the spectrum of the kinds of crises we think our members could suffer, we think it has the same probability as snowfall in July and yes, when it happens, people reach for the hard stuff. In the French revolution, as so eloquently portrayed by Charles Dickens in 'A Tale of Two Cities', fear of losing one’s head was enough for the protagonist to take; ‘a draught of the brandy to steady himself’. Scarlett O'Hara, the female anti-hero in Margaret Mitchell’s 'Gone With the Wind', upon seeing her beloved city of Atlanta in flames, ‘snatched the brandy bottle and drank deeply’. Tom Joad, the lead character in John Steinbeck’s 'The Grapes of Wrath', ‘took a drink of whisky to brace himself before the trouble started’, dustbowl America was a violent place. We can take this further to the extreme with 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, where an unnamed hero set in a post-apocalyptic world, fights off starvation zombies and the bitter cold, ‘He unscrewed the cap from the bottle of whisky and drank’.

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In our very short survey of emergency alcohol in the canon of literary classics we can only find one example of wine physically being served (rather than swigged) and that is not on Earth but rather Middle Earth, as its in the 'Lord of the Rings: Return of the King' by J.R.R Tolkein, during the siege of Minas Tirith also known as the siege of Gondor, Peregrine Took, a hobbit known as Pippin, ‘poured him a cup of wine’. Him being Gandalf and it happens as Sauron’s forces are about to attack, the tension is extremely high and this exemplifies how alcohol is used in literature.

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When it comes to crisis situations authors use alcohol as a liquid analogy for courage. It externalises fear without long internal monologues, it shows characters trying to override their instinctive terror and it highlights the thin line between bravery and desperation. Characters often drink to numb their fear and as such it becomes ritualised before moments of peril. They to remember is that alcohol in literature is a tool for enhancing the story, not as a mirror reflecting the reality of people’s lives.