Where have all the ‘rum heads’ gone?
I’M NOT a ‘rum head’. I have never been, and will never be. For, while my palate has a love affair with rum, my head does not. Rum makes it spin, and puts it into another space and time, and I refuse to be in another space and time.
I must be aware of where I am, whom I am with, where I am going, and what I am saying. And in these days of smartphone cameras and social media, and cold, uncaring people who revel in your distress and death, opting to share your ordeal for the world to see, rather than to keep it down and help you out, I cannot afford to make the ‘whites’ send my head to the other side.
Yet, I love the taste of rum, especially when it is infused with coconut. The pleasure it gives is indescribable. My palate can’t get enough of it, and it certainly will not. It is my brain over my palate.
My brain led me to the first-ever Jamaica Rum Festival, recently held at Hope Gardens, in St Andrew. And thousands of rum hopefuls turned up in the gardens to imbibe all they could. It was going to be a dizzying weekend. My main intention was to find stories, to cover the event.
Well, I was particularly looking out for engaging eventualities, outlandish bar talks, people telling lies and revealing their deep-rooted secrets under the influence of the spirits. Yet, there was not much or any of these. I wondered about what was going on with the patrons. Everybody was just nice and decent, well-behaved, and ‘stoosh’; not one was ‘stocious’.
Where were the real rum heads, the ones you can smell from afar, the ones with the unkempt appearance, and the ones with the slurred and incomprehensible speech? I guess they think the festival was too posh for them to patronise it. So, they stayed out of context. Or was it that people were drinking responsibly? Not everybody at all.
For, on the first day, after I have given up on finding any possible motivation for a story, with my feet and new sandals covered with brown dust, I came across a white man stumbling from one of the main sponsor’s booth. He had absolutely no idea where he was going. I stood and gaped. There goes a stocious one. He was really gone!
He turned the corner towards some patrons who were chatting in a small group. He groped on to an empty rum barrel that was near the patrons. The barrel shifted. As he was about to keel over with the barrel, two men grabbed him and propped him up.
Then I saw a white woman
rushing towards him. She took his hand, and the ‘little baby’ was led away from what could have possibly been a very unpleasant, but memorable scene. Picture a drunken man on his back under a rum barrel.
I said to myself, “You see why yuh nuh drink in public.” And I smiled.
However, for the sake of my palate, to appease it somewhat, I partook of the complimentary shots and the samples in the seminars that were held by J. Wray and Nephew, global rum ambassador Ian Burrell, senior blender David Morrison, and master blender Joy Spence. I particularly enjoyed those sessions, especially Morrison’s, for ‘food’ and ‘dessert’ were also served.
And with all the rum around, I walked out of Hope Gardens on day one with a big bottle of Leopold Maye’s cane juice. It was the first thing I bought. He kept it in his deep freezer all day. When I reached home, there was no cane juice. I returned to find it frozen. By then the day was winding down, and I was proud. I did not hit the ground. Brain over palate.