I've never read anything about heroin where, yeah, it's a good experience, and you can do it for 20 years and enjoy it, like having a cold beer. It doesn't work that way with heroin.
My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.
After tea, we discussed a variety of topics before the fire; and Mrs. Micawber was good enough to sing us (in a small, thin, flat voice, which I remembered to have considered, when I first knew her, the very table-beer of acoustics) the favourite ballads of "The Dashing White Sergeant", and "Little Tafflin".
No sane person, I hope, would accuse me of saying that every Distributist must drink beer; especially if he could brew his own cider or found claret better for his health. But I do most emphatically scorn and scout the vulgar refinement that regards beer as something unseemly and humiliating. And I would shout the name of beer a hundred times a day, to shock all the snobs who have so shameful a sense of shame.
It was darkly rumoured that the butler, regarding him with favour such as that stern man had never shown before to mortal boy, had sometimes mingled porter with his table beer to make him strong.
Beer was the driving force that led nomadic mankind into village life. It was this appetite for beer-making material that led to crop cultivation, permanent settlement and agriculture.
Neither can embellishments of language be found without arrangement and expression of thoughts, nor can thoughts be made to shine without the light of language.
You may talk o' gin and beer When you're quartered safe out 'ere, An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it; But when it comes to slaughter You will do your work on water, An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it.
Give an Irishman lager for a month and he's a dead man. An Irishman's stomach is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.
This is all thousands of years old. It's the same the world over. Anyone who has ever walked upright has loved beer, celebrated over it, told talks over it, hatched plots over it, courted over it. It's what we do as a species. It's what makes us human. We brew.
I'm getting rather hoarse, I fear,
After so much reciting:
So, if you don't object, my dear,
We'll try a glass of bitter beer -
I think it looks inviting.