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Not that you should care, but for the first time in years, Y&H has given himself permission not to read a food-related book. Instead, I’m burying my nose in an earlier work by Bill Buford, who has written a great food book in the past.
Some friends gave me a copy of Buford’s Among the Thugs as a birthday present a year or two ago. In it, Buford chronicles English soccer hooligans during the early ’90s, and the book is so grotesquely fascinating, a study of human violence from the inside, that I can’t put it down.
I was particularly taken with Buford’s description of a hard-drinking hooligan named Mick, who sucks downs more alcohol than any man I’ve ever met in my life. Writes Buford:
I had had two cans of lager and eights pints of bitter. That was a lot, I thought. I had done rather well. But now Mick was telling me that I wasn’t much of a drinker. Mick certainly was. He was not keeping track of what he consumed, but I was so impressed that I was. In addition to a newspaper full of fish ‘n’ chips, his two cheeseburgers, his two meat pies, his four bags of bacon-flavored crisps, and the Indian take-out order he was about to purchase on his way to the station, Mick had had the following: four cans of Harp lager, a large part of a bottle of Tesco’s vodka, and eighteen pints of bitter. As the pub closed, Mick bought a further four cans of lager for the train ride home.
Top that, you bros.