Bollock
It began in the Borough of Camden and, with a brief detour viaTexas, it ended there also. It was wonderful, wonderful and unexpected, fromstart to climax...
So I left my home in Kentish Town and I walked, strange for a Londoner and a cyclist, I grant you, but I walked. The sun was at large and she’d brought her nemesis along, the cold wind, but in wintery combination the two proved strangely pleasing. On my journey I stumbled across Camden’s The Coffee Jar, and I honestly thought that the skilfully heart-topped Flat White, with its unusual note of cherry tomato, and the wonderful accompanying salt-flecked white chocolate cookie that I picked up there, would be the pinnacle of my sensory journey for this particular Saturday. But I was wrong, oh so very wrong...
As I shuffled, hands plunged deep into pockets, around Regents Park, I unequivocally heard a gentleman call his associate a “bollock”, singular and visceral. The brash offensiveness combined with the very English eloquence of this insult would stick with me all day, and then repeat on me later with the potency of a cod liver oil tablet.
Over lunch with a one cad and one particular bounder, I learned that the name “avocado” derives from the fruit’s likeness to a testicle. This startling fact made me love, but also fear, guacamole a little more. It also reminded me of the Camdenite’s pendulous comparison. And it wasn’t the last time that that organ would swing back into my memory...
I returned home, without leaving the Borough of Camden all day, but with the spoils of a little retail therapy in the form of a bottle of Balcones Brimstone from Royal Mile Whiskies. I nestled into the sofa in my tiny flat to watch Liam Neeson bash foreigners with a ferocity only rivalled by Fox News. But while doing so, I idly took my first sip of that Texas Scrub Smoked Corn Whisky. The first mouthful roundhoused me, it was like being hit in the face with a rubber soled Converse filled with milk chocolate, chipotles and bacon fat. I can categorically say that Mr Neeson’s very particular set of skills, ceased to be very important. The leathery old Country Antrimite mercilessly pummelling bad guys with his big ol’ sausage hands couldn’t distract me from the leathery old American whisky that was mercilessly pummelling every taste bud in my mouth with its dark notes of charred sweetcorn, fresh paint, barbecue sauce lathered hot dog, candle wax, suede, smoked paprika, cracked black pepper and burnt children’s plastic toys. Balls, what is this brew?
Balcones (for some strange reason I find it difficult to say the name without rhyming it with “cojones”) Brimstone is complex and unique beyond anything that Scotland has yet thrown at me in recent years. It’s both brash and yet eloquent, fun, naughty and charmingly insulting, much like calling someone a “bollock” loudly in public I thought.
Please try it.*
*I mean the whisky of course, not abusing passersby with foul language.











