Given the fact that many scholars love whatever is distilled, brewed and fermented, and given the fact that long-term and serious alcohol consumption destroys the ability of the brain to function (via the battered dendrites), the collective loss of brain function among intellectuals is stupendous. The term ‘brain drain’ gains a whole new meaning.

But I am not interested in the conference binge, in which the hardy warriors show their true mettle by turning up and delivering a paper after three nights and days on the piss. Nor am I interested in that old adage, which applies especially to scholars: ‘beer: helping ugly people have sex since 3000 BCE’.

No, I am interested in the truly legendary lush. Here I suspect we all have stories. It may be the lecturer who turns up for the 9.00 am lecture, pours himself a coffee and then tops it up with a liberal dash of whisky. Suddenly realising that he has done so in front of scores of students, he calmly looks them straight in the eye and says, ‘I have a cold’. Or it may be the head of department who offers you a massive shot of sherry – at an 8.00 am meeting in his office. Or the bedraggled professor decked out with his permanent sunglasses, who, at the first flush of light on orientation day, leans into his bag, pulls out a bottle of sake and pours it neat into his coffee mug (what are coffee mugs for, after all?). Or the once brilliant scholar who stuns his students with a scintillating lecture, full of witty repartee and insight – only to repeat it word for word, gesture for gesture, intonation for intonation, the following week, and then the one after that.

One may be moved to ask, what happened to such-and-such? The answer (as was once given to me): the occasional bottle of wine for breakfast is probably fine, but every morning …

But it does raise the question as to why? It’s been a while since the first impetus to human civilisation took place, namely the growing of grain for the dual purpose of producing bread and beer – the staples of life. And unlike the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians, wine and beer are no longer regarded as gods. We might joke about the medicinal bottle of ‘aqua vitae’, but unlike the monks who invented the distilling of spirits, I have yet to find someone who actually believes it. It would be even more difficult to find someone who argues that hitting the bottle is a way of warding off the Black Death, as was common in Europe’s Middle Ages. And it has been a long time since a parliament passed a law such as ‘An Act for the Encouraging of the Distillation of Brandy and Spirits from Corn’ – as happened in England in 1690. At a pinch, you might get away with arguing that fermented or distilled beverages are the only way of ensuring that the water is purified.

More likely is a combination of too many social misfits in the one place, the grim realisation that you won’t be the next Confucius or Plato, and a desire to get back at the brain that turned you into an intellectual in the first place.

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