Bars

She barely knows me, apart from a couple of meetings back in London, but Saskia agrees to meet me after work and take me to the Opera Bar which edges the harbour below the mighty shells of the Opera House itself. It’s Friday night and it’s rammed: the view and the sunset are beautiful, but perhaps so many people are here for some kind of wake for tax cheat Packer? We find seats, and a cushion even, right on the edge of the water, and drink white wine at a rate that’s usual for London and for me, but apparently not here, as I spend the night rapidly becoming convinced that by prevailing local standards I’m an unredeemable alcoholic.

Adriana and her boyfriend Scott come and pick us up and we bomb through the Rocks where the “Lebbos used to dragrace their ‘fully sick’ cars”, towards Darling Harbour, and the bars along King Street Wharf, where a comedy of dresscode errors ensues: while Scott parks the car we go to the Cargo Bar but can’t get in because I’m wearing shorts; while the door are off duty we sneak into the Pontoon but when Scott turns up he can’t get in because he’s wearing thongs (of the toe-cleavage rather than arse-cleavage variety); but it’s OK because Scott knows the guys on the door at Cargo and we can get in despite being underdressed; meanwhile I’ve texted Vanessa to ask her to bring some chinos of mine from her place, and I become aware that you’re never fully prepared in Sydney unless you are carrying/wearing three different types of legwear: shorts and trunks and jeans. In any case, it’s all the young and the beautiful, wearing t-shirts over their bikinis and listening to too-loud, not-too-good music. Vanessa’s friend Jennifer pays a visit to the ladies to scare some straight girls.

Over in King’s Cross it’s a different scene entirely. Kebab shops, sex shops, sleazy clubs and not-so-sleazy clubs, backpackers with guitars and bright lights. Scott’s on the door at Lady Luck’s and we escape the $20 entrance to get red velvet and low seats, a proper dancefloor and something musically a bit more tasteful in the soul/funk area. There might have been some C-listers in, but I wouldn’t have recognised them. The evening ends very well when Adriana generously takes me all the way back to Petersham via a drive-thru McDonald’s caramel sundae, yum.

Back in Newtown, things are a little more relaxed, and a bit more gay: a mixture of upmarket bookshops and tradestores, coffeeshops and hotels (ie large bars), Thai restaurants and pie shops. It’s in the slightly-irrepressibly-shabby, Stoke Newington mode, with perhaps even a little more emphasis on faddy health-food shops. On my very first day I get royally bollocked for having a cocoa in Gloria Jean’s (How was I to know? It looked friendly! It looked cool! There was a rainbow flag outside!), which is not only a chain, but a chain owned by an evangelical church — they’re very supportive of their small businesses on King Street. Zanzi-bar is a bit more lively, and the Thai food in ThaiLand is gorgeous. You can still smoke inside, in designated areas, but not for much longer. Disappointingly, the legendary Bank Hotel is closed and boarded up for redevelopment.

Shochu

Shochu occupies a dangerous liminal zone, somewhere between wine and vodka. It’s more like vodka side than sake, and you drink it on the rocks in a little china tumbler the size of a whisky glass. It’s a Kyushu speciality and it can be made from many things, from rice to barley to sweet potato. There are lots of varieties from all over the island, with names like ‘devil king’ scrawled in hiragana on the bottles of clear but dangerous liquid. Joe and Naoko start me off gently on a sweet potato variety in Kimama no Ioro where we have dinner before going to see experimental guitarist Giuseppe Ielasi duet with knob-twiddler Thomas Ankersmit at Art Space Tetra in the Suzaki area of Fukuoka. Then we hit a gaijin bar on Oyafuko Dori (the street of badly-behaved children) where the sound of Mancunian voices is not as welcome a reminder of home as it might be.

So we head off by taxi instead to a bar called Super Space Line (Zone 1) whose logo is a London underground logo and owner/manager and ardent londonophile whose dream is to open a bar in the Big Smoke. He’s dressed up like a maitre d’, and alternates bartending with DJing 90s-style happy house from the decks above the bar. It’s a good job his small bar on the second floor isn’t very full at all. In fact there are only two people in the bar apart from us. One of them is a Japanese man of about fifty, extremely drunk, whose shambling gait and close-cropped white hair make him look from the back like Takeshi Kitano, even in his black-and-red striped Dennis the Menace top. From the front he looks considerably more gaunt, and he keeps getting up on the Julianna’s-style podium in the centre of the room to dance and then lurches off again. The other bloke is his slightly more sober mate.

If you found a bar that empty in central London at 11.30 you wouldn’t leave quickly, even if they were charging a fiver cover including a cocktail. Nevertheless, we resist the allure of happy house and head for the most dangerous place of all, Akatan, a stand-up shochu bar where they serve a bewildering array of different types of shochu and grill octopus balls, fish, and other delicacies right behind the bar. We line up and commence consumption. I break ranks and have a plum wine, much sweeter, but nothing is going to save me now. I blame the last one, the one Joe pours back in Kashii, the one I drink without thinking about it, for the fact that when I wake up at six the next morning I discover that someone has embedded a large bowie knife very firmly through both frontal lobes of my brain.

Beware the devil king!