From the archives: Drunk and disorderly

The green elixir of long life; Oliver Reed’s last day; Peter the Great’s All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters; and prime minister who got drunk and announced a snap election.

The secret recipe for Chartreuse was an elixir for long life.


The actor Oliver Reed died after a serious drinking and arm-wrestling binge in a Maltese bar.


Peter I
Paul Delaroche [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Peter the Great’s drinking club – the All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters – terrorised 18th-century Moscow.


Muldoon
Archives New Zealand from New Zealand [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

In 1984 the prime minister of New Zealand announced a snap election live on television while extremely drunk. He did not win.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s