The Coaster

If you'd asked my father, a shipping man, what a coaster was, his immediate answer would have been a small merchant ship which plied its trade along a coast. However, asked if the word had another meaning he might have pointed to....

....this, the other, and rather strangely named sort of coaster, something placed under a glass or mug to prevent it marking the table top.

This was my father's coaster. It's wood, probably ebony, turned on a lathe. It's the one he used for years for the glass of whisky he enjoyed, in the evening when he was in East Africa but at sundowner time when he retired to England.

The coaster is only 7cm across so it's far too small to take a glass of beer, and most wine glasses are too big - but it suited my father very well because he drank his whisky in colonial style - that is, very weak with lots of water and, therefore, from a large glass. Any true-blooded whisky drinker might be appalled at this but there was good reason for it. If, in the tropics, you drank whisky neat or near-neat in the 'normal' way, the effects would have been quick and fairly catastrophic.

So here is my father's favourite whisky glass, reunited with its coaster. The glass is 12cm tall, made of very thin glass, and patterned, and....

....here is my father with it, in the last years of his life, still enjoying a very weak whisky.

One more thing.... The derivation of the term 'coaster', as related to a drink, is described as follows by Wikipedia: "The first coasters were designed for decanters or wine bottles so that they could be slid (or "coasted") around the dinner table after the servants had retired. They were in common use after about 1760."