Drinking Game

Reflecting on Dickens' classic, Great Expectations, it's embarrassingly obvious that Pip's life of expectation was as void as Widdecombe's bonce. All he seemed to do entailed drinking and worrying, balancing his debts, and fawning all over a suspiciously repellent young lady. Of course, this was the intention. We're talking Dickens, and he can do anything. At the moment I'm reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, a tale of the leisure-class in Paris following the First World War. Their lives are similarly vacuous, devoid of direction, resolved to keeping up appearances with their various acquaintances. Drink is a recurring motif, and it's supplied me with the idea for a new drinking game; read The Sun Also Rises and, when they drink, you drink. Trust me, you'll be in the emergency room having your stomach pumped before you get to page fifty. Then again, were you to do the same with a Bret Easton Ellis novel, you'd dissolve your septum in half an hour.