HARRY PEARSON
THE BIG TEES
Harry Pearson’s new Tees Life column
T
Vir-gin on the
ridiculous
his time last year I spent two months
living in the Belgian city of Ghent.
One of Ghent’s great traditional
institutions is the Dreupelkot, a tiny bar
overhanging a canal.
The Dreupelkot is presided over by an
elderly man who’s so grumpy that he makes
Victor Meldrew look like Matt Baker. He
calculates what you owe him by scribbling
in pencil on a brown paper bag and then
ringing it up on a till that is straight out of
Wallace and Gromit.
Aside from the curmudgeonly owner, the
thing that makes the Dreupelkot famous is
that it sells 150 different types of gin.
Belgium – or at least Flanders, the Dutch-
speaking northern half of the country – has
some claim to being the birthplace of gin,
which the Flemish call genever (the Dutch
word for juniper – the aromatic plant with
which gin is traditionally flavoured – is
jineverbes).
People from the Netherlands disagree
and assert that gin was in fact first distilled
in Leyden, by a professor of medicine who
thought it might work as a cure for liver
disease (These scientists, honestly, what are
they like?)
What is certain is that gin came to
England