Squiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?'

'Oh, rather!'

'What do you do about it?'

'I generally take a couple of cocktails.

My sorrows appear to have sprouted gills and a functional liver; I can't seem to drown them in alcohol.

A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.

It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.

Bicky rocked, like a jelly in a high wind.