6/21/2009

White wine at an Irish pub




During the past week I have been alone in Toe-B's studio, working on the last details of a new song that we will make an Internet release of pretty soon. The studio is underground and it's the kind of place that has walls that help you survive a nuclear attack, but it also inspires you to go insane Jack Nicholson-style unless you get out of there every now and then.
So last night I needed to eat, and I went to the Irish pub, which is on top of the studio. The moment I went into the pub I realized that I entered a room full of big city minglers, dressed for a night out, and I was the freak from the basement who had forgotten what day I had my last shower, if I wore a shirt that matched whatever I had on the rest of me, and if my hair looked like my teeth or if it was the other way around. I decided to not care about it, so I sat down and ordered my meal.


Because it was so crowded there were soon two ladies that joined me at the table. Their initial reaction to this pub was that it was so great because a glass of wine was actually eight kronors cheaper (about one US dollar), than any other place they had been to. So they ordered one glass each. But one of the ladies (let's call her the brunette) talk one zip from the glass and immediately showed that she did not like the wine. She made a we-should-have-paid-eight-kronors-more face before the other lady (let's call her the blonde) even got a chance to have her own opinion about the wine. I noticed that the blonde actually liked it, but it was not big city mingling appropriate to like a wine that cost eight kronors less, so she went along with her friend. After a long time of conversation around the wine, which involved lots of quotes from "Sex and the city" and "Desperate housewives", they decided to ask for new wine. But once they got the new wine the blonde recalled that the waiter did not ask if they wanted a new wine, but he asked if they wanted a new bottle. Hmmm, there's a little difference in there (new wine or new bottle?), which meant that they could have gotten the same wine, but from a different bottle, but also meant that if the last wine was actually good, but from a bad bottle, they might have been drinking good wine, while it was actually... well, by the the time they had stopped talking about this I had finished my meal and they still had not tasted the new wine that came in. I waited around to see their reaction when they tasted the new wine. The blonde immediatley said "mmm, this was better", but the brunette said "no, it's the same crap", and so the blonde changed her mind and agreed that it was crap. By now I had also finished my cup of coffee and paid my bill, but I wanted to see how real life "Sex and the city"-ladies handle a situation like this. Their conversation still never left the wine, but they had obvious problems with combining their will to be upper class wine connoisseurs, with just wanting a nice glass of wine. But of course they came up with a brilliant solution. Just when everything looked as hopeless as it could be they left the wine conversation and ordered tapas. I waited around to see if the tapas were satisfying, which they were. Thank goodness!


After this intriguing experience I left the blonde and the brunette with their tapas and moved on to my own missions in the studio -should the bridge before the third chorus of "No better than you" be six or four measures and should I add more strings to the background? Hmmm, am I focusing on the right thing or should I spend more time defining the quality of wine at irish pubs in Stockholm?

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