Jamaica Arms, Kingston, Jamaica 1968

Had a hard day? The king-size drinks on offer at the Jamaica Arms in Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1960s would have gone a long way to solving the troubles of most patrons, at least temporarily.

And if strong booze didn’t work, hearing the bartender’s own sob story would have cheered anyone up.

It sounds like the Jamaica Arms was a fun and light-hearted place to be, where no-one took life too seriously.

We love the descriptions of the Pink Elephant Specials and other cocktails such as the Moscow Mule that could ‘straighten out world problems’.

Advertised as the biggest drinks in town, prices for drinks were in Jamaican shillings and pence and also in Jamaican cents.

The JMD or Jamaican dollar was introduced in 1969 so this menu would have been dated slightly before that. Today, cent denominations are no longer in circulation in this island country in the Caribbean.

Another boast of this bar was its air conditioning – illustrated by a happy pink elephant sitting on an ice cube.

The euphemism ‘seeing pink elephants’ was first used in the 19th century to describe the hallucinations experienced by drinkers of absinthe, the anise-flavored and highly alcoholic beverage associated with bohemian culture. Vincent Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway and Oscar Wilde were well-known absinthe drinkers.

The phrase became popular again as an elegant way of describing someone who had imbibed too much.

The Jamaica Arms is long gone – a pity, because we’d have liked to hear the bartender’s life story.