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At the mention of
the bottle, every tongue confesses that the liquid content deserves to
be welcomed with delight, or as delight. Whether it is an alcoholic or
non-alcoholic beverage that is involved, the truth is that the liquid
makes one feel good.

A drink appears
always to have the magic of doing good and many who drink believe that
there is something dark and terrible in the lives of those who don’t.
That perhaps ushers one into the very pleasurable wine talk that goes
with drinking at bottle stores, bars, clubs, parties, and (I must not
forget) age-grade meetings in my own part of Nigeria.

Wining and talking
seem to go together very well, especially when one is in the good
company of those who love njakiri (or yabis) – that peck-me-I-peck you
banter in which one, with a spice of humour, can tell the other the
bitter truth of their lives without the fear of being sued to court, and
should likewise, be ready to endure the sharp edge of the other’s
tongue. With yabis, the drink flows down well, and one never even
realizes that many bottles have been laid to rest.

In spite of the
interpretations that pastors give to what happened at the wedding at
Cana in Galilee, drinkers like me believe that Jesus was a jolly good
fellow who knew the value of a good brew, even if the brew was delivered
late. A bottle of booze is not a bottle of sin. And wine talkers, who
sometimes are visionary and prophetic, do not hold hard feelings. They
say it and leave it there with the empty bottles. Those who pick up what
should be left with the bottles are the real sinners that need to
repent.

Someone somewhere,
filled with guilt feelings about their past could read this and conclude
that I am on my way to either losing my kidneys or selling my wife
someday like Michael Henchard in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of
Casterbridge. Some would open the Holy Book and read to me the section
that says that wine is a mocker. Others yet would support abstinence by
quoting the portion that one should give wine to those that are
perishing. But those that are likely to perish faster than expected are
those who, claiming to have retired from alcoholic beverage so as to go
to heaven, would down six or seven bottles of orobo soft drink in a day
and still be asking for more. One thing though: those who do not touch
alcoholic beverage on account of religiosity do not mind drinking agbo
soaked for days in ogogoro. Their excuse: it cures malaria and typhoid
very fast! Wait a minute. I once eavesdropped on a conversation between a
bottle of coke and a bottle of beer at a party and here is what the
beer said to the coke: “Listen, my friend, stop all this shakara wey you
dey do; make you no think say because pastor dey drink you, you too go
go heaven. Na for the same urinal we two dey go!” By the way, why should
I be afraid of a bottle of beer; will it drink itself?

Those of us who wine
and talk could be philosophers, you know. We can also bend the rules,
so that a bartender who is a non-initiate gets confused. If I place an
order for a bottle of pepper soup and a plate of beer, every drinker
immediately knows that I am a philosophical drinker. Don’t mind that
pot-bellied former president of PDP, sorry president of Nigeria, who
opened the mouth with which he was using to eat amala and ewedu and said
that “clubable” ASUU members were only good in eating (or did he say
“drinking”) pepper soup and beer at staff clubs and harassing their
female students. I wonder why ASUU did not sue him to court! What that
pot-bellied fellow did not know was that drinking at a club could
inspire a groundbreaking research paper publishable in an international
journal. Also, a drinking place in a university is good for the mind of
the highly overworked but poorly remunerated Nigerian lecturer. A drink
in time saves nine mental breakdowns, especially with a bad president
who believes that paying workers good salaries is a kind of favour
doing.

Philosophical
drinkers like me know very well that too much “overnight” could make
even an Oba talk nonsense publicly. That is why we advocate moderation.

We philosophical drinkers also warn that fly wey no dey hear word de folo beer enter bele.

Honestly, one should
sympathize with Giringori, a character in New Masquerade, when he tells
Chief Zebrudaya, his boss: “My mate dem don begin to drink stout.” The
creative power of “Shine shine bobo” requires that one gets one’s
“beering” right, even as a houseboy.

If you imprison cheerfulness in a bottle, do you expect it not to boil over when you uncork the bottle?