Archives, eh
-
# Victoria Bitter is not for humanities students
I remember being a student. This is a statement that should put to rest any accusations of wantonness. If you can remember it, it wasn’t wanton. Which is not to say that I didn’t consume my share of alcohol, just that I didn’t also consume the shares of any of the cool kids from high school who are currently working behind the teller at one of the fine Bundaberg ANZ branches or engaged in picking at one of the many lychee farms in the Burnett. Note: may or may not represent actual graduates of the Class of 1992; either way, said students are, with few exceptions, invited to choke on my well-earned disregard.
So casting my mind back to my student days for a moment – the university ones, not the kid prison ones – I have one clear and distinct memory of both campuses, UQ and QUT. Nobody, not a single soul, consumed Victoria Bitter for its taste. In fact, so absurd is the very idea, that I actually had to stop for a couple of minutes after writing it to try and get my giggling under control.
Taste? No. Victoria Bitter is not a taste-orientated thing. It is a barely safe-to-consume-liquid+ aimed at a market determined to get off its face in an economical fashion. This market, engineering students being a splendid example of which, wants drunkenness to arrive in a timely and cost-effective manner. Just like Pippin and Merry in the movie, over sized containers are preferred, a round of jugs at this table please.
I occasionally wake up in the early morning hours after a PTSD-induced dream of it being the morning of the last exams before I graduate and I’ve not attended a single class all semester. Really, I should be waking up and screaming about the ludicrous amount of money I spent of Fourex at the QUT student bar because it tasted better than VB which, for furriners, translates as “A drink even worse – but not as chav – as Fosters tastes better than VB”
So you might understand how puzzled I am at the idea of a mid-strength VB. It’s like a hog with the engine tuned to be silent. Like Elric – ah ha, continuity, I’m a real blog now! – without the demon-summoning, drug-use, and emo.++ It’s like taking the stupid, spoiled whoring out of Paris Hilton. Without the strength, what is the point of VB?
+ I hesitate to call it a drink because of course, one does not drink VB; one swills it, or quaffs it, or even – the sight of one incident of which I will never ever expunge from my memory after carelessly turning a page in a girlie mag – one consumes it second hand from a “friend”
++ Ah, that’s why there’s an Elric movie, cause the emo kids will go see it and with any luck buy official Stormbringer replicas and stab each other, thus getting them out of the gene pool before its too late.
