The Philippolis Hotel had a congenial pub with a well-stoked fireplace in winter where one could enjoy the banter and achieve a buzz and warmth to make winter more bearable. I was startled when I first went there when a wagtail came winging into the bar to settle on the side of the stainless steel dish where the tot measure resided when it was not being used to measure out the hard tack. Nowadays “optics” are used to accurately measure out a tot, but at that time, they were relatively uncommon. As a day wore on, the contents of that dish consisted of the dregs of any number of different brands of liquor and it was a pretty potent mix. By evening, drinking the contents of the dish would have been sheer folly but to my amazement, that chirpy little bird dipped his beak in the dish and had a good few tiny sips.
After a while, the little bird flew erratically over onto the bar counter and staggered around a bit. Then it made for a fellow who had a full glass of beer and it hopped onto the rim of the glass and dipped for couple more sips. If the owner of the beer tried to shift him, he would get really aggressive and go for his finger. He eventually fell off the glass (I’ve decided it must have been a HE!) and walked right off the bar and crashed to the floor without so much as flapping a wing and there he lay. I was sure he was dead but the barman came round, picked up the pathetic bundle of feathers and placed it on a little cloth on the mantel piece above the fireplace. He lay as if dead with his beak open.
I had been watching the whole process absolutely spellbound and with my mouth agape. I questioned the barman and it appeared that this quite often happened at night. Turned out he was not dead but simply sleeping off his shocking bout of boozing. After a while I saw him turn over and chirp a couple of times before flying off a bit erratically. Imagine that! An alcoholic bird!
I saw that the hotel cat, a huge fluffy Persian, had a sizeable bell round its neck and the barman confirmed that the cat had to wear it to give the waggie a chance! And no, I don’t know how the bird exited this life – if the cat didn’t get him or if he hadn’t broken his neck falling off the bar counter, then he must have died of cirrhosis.
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