On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, [iso-8859-1] Stephen Date wrote:
It is arguable that the popularity of Buckie is due not only to its alcoholic strength and its large amounts of sugar and caffeine, but also the fact that the bottle is an ideal shape for a weapon.
A friend's father sings in the choir at Buckfast Abbey on occasion. From what I hear the good monks of Buckfast are not averse to a drop of the stuff themselves. However I am not aware of any anti-social incidents involving Benedictines and Buckfast Tonic Wine, suggesting that the problem may be more properly attributed to social conditions in Glasgow rather than a small monastic cottage industry. (I've yet to hear of any municipal authority having a pop at Messrs Tennants and Carlsberg).
Perhaps the monks aren't drinking it properly? The accepted ettiquette is to down the entire bottle in the space of a minute or so. This leads to the fascinating phenomenon of 'Buckie Mouth", whereby someone transforms from articulate sobriety to drooling incoherence half-way through a sentence. Something like this: 'As Popper says in "The Open Society and its Enemies", social engineering is necessarily a aaa ffff thhgyu keee-anto, me boay! Gaaaahhhhhh...'
Iain