Beer

Fascinating to hear Mike Nelson’s story of Manfred Pagel rejecting a London-proposed beer ban in Bonn. Another little-known fact about Manfred that underlines the human side of a colleague and top editor who was often, unfairly, seen as stern and rigid. I recall he feigned shock once in Moscow at seeing two crates of Soviet Stolichnaya vodka in the corner of my office. Just slightly nervously I explained that vodka was the common currency with which to reward the Tass teleprinter repairman, a frequent visitor, and various Russian “dvorniki”, or yard-sweepers, attached to our foreigners’ ghetto who performed odd jobs like mending broken pipes, sweeping the snow off our cars, or even retrieving our straying cats. One of these indispensable and resourceful chaps - when not recovering from a binge in the basement - became a regular beneficiary of my family’s largesse for - as he would tell us on ringing our bell with our moggy, named Tassik, clasped in his arms - rescuing it from a dire fate on the Ring Road outside the Sad-Sam block. Until, that is, my wife returning from school one day saw him opening our front door with a purloined key, grabbing the feline who would usually wait behind in the hope of escape, stuffing it under his padded jacket, and hurrying off down the stairs. Manfred liked that story and the same evening we enjoyed, with the rest of the Moscow team, a frozen bottle of the lemon-flavoured vodka that we preferred but our dvorniks scorned as kids’ stuff. ■