Apropos of nowt, here’s a chunk of wordlers from Bruce Robinson that lept out of a dusty email cleft yesterday:
“Occasionally I’d go down and hit my parents. Scrape up the dough to get me the train fare down there and sort of lay on the couch – with hunger – and try and get some money. My grandmother, who I adored, used to give me a few quid. In those Withnail days my friend Vivian had parents who lived on the Isle of Islay, and all the people who worked in the whisky distilleries were forbidden to drink the stuff on site. So apparently there was a massive upsurge in spin drier sales and what these buggers were doing was getting the whisky filters – with 160 proof in them – and taking them home, sticking them in the spin-drier and sucking the whisky out – they called it Yon White Stuff and – it was like fucking aviation fuel. Every time Viv came back from Islay, he would have a crate of Yon White Stuff which we’d murder ourselves with. It was like the scene in Withnail where he drinks the lighter fuel – that actually happened. The events in Withnail and I that take place over about two weeks actually happened over four or five years. Various things I used, other things I made up and I integrated, squeezed, concertina-ed all this into one story. But the lighter fuel scene actually did happen. We always used to have those terrible, awful fucking English Sundays that extended for eleven months, because it’s always winter and always cold when you’ve got no money, you’re always shivering, living off the vitamins in cigarettes. I remember one Sunday we didn’t have the money to go to the flicks and Vivian was under the sink with the Guinness bottles after the dregs – some of the bottles you’d pour out a fag end trying to get enough together to have a drink. Freaking out, in a terrible mood, he picks up a newspaper – he read The Sun and I read The Guardian – he hated my paper and I hated his. He started ranting about The Guardian, “The Guardian, what do they fucking guard? What do they guard?” all of that, stamping around this flat with his Guinness dregs and – it was very acrimonious, nasty afternoon – his eyes finally alight on the Ronson. And he grabs the Ronson and tears off the top, “RAUGHH, glug, glug, glug!” He had a three or four day hangover, went blind in one eye and I often wonder – because it’s an incredible carcinogen, kerosene – whether that was the thing that kicked off his cancer of the throat. He drank a can of lighter fuel and was in a most terrible state.”
(The Rum Diary is listed for 2009 on the IMDb - yeah, no breath held.)
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