Right Ho, Jeeves
by PG Wodehouse
For the pure unadulterated joy of drinking, you can’t really beat Wodehouse. Indeed it’s hard to beat him for pure unadulterated joy full stop. He had wonderful phrases for it – “tanked to the uvula” or “oiled, boiled, fried, plastered, whiffled, sozzled and blotto”. He also has the wonderful story of Gussie Finknottle’s first encounter with alcohol. Gussie is a shy man who is shyly in love with Madeline Bassett. But he doesn’t have the nerve to propose to her. Bertie tries to persuade him that a stiff drink will give him the requisite Dutch courage. Gussie refuses and Bertie decides to spike Gussie’s orange juice. Unfortunately Jeeves also decides to spike Gussie’s orange juice, and Gussie himself then decides that he’ll do as Bertie suggested and downs half a decanter of whisky, which he washes down with the doubly-spiked orange juice. The result is a new Gussie Finknottle, who acts as though he could bite a tiger. “Make it two tigers. I could chew holes in a steel door.”
He proposes to Bassett, who joyously accepts. But he then has to give a speech at the school prize-giving in Market Snodsbury, and his drunkenness, now begun, must run its course through the classic stages of jocose, bellicose and morose, before finally arriving at comatose, by which time Bassett has called off the engagement.
Mark Forsyth
’Tis a strange serpent /10 of the most entertaining drinking bouts in literature 
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