I was staring into the amber flames of the campfire on a vineyard, listening as a friend, Patrick, talked about how he travelled to an internationally acclaimed distiller and accidentally bought a bottle of whiskey that cost $360.

“What do you mean, ‘accidentally’?” I said as Patrick pulled the bottle out and poured a splash into two glasses.

“Well, the lady behind the bar was just so—nice,” he said as if she wasn’t being paid to be nice to entice customers, like Patrick, to buy exorbitantly priced liquor.

“I couldn’t afford anything too expensive. I did make that clear,” he assured me, holding out a dram of whiskey for my taking. “And she was like, ‘totally.’ But then she pulls out this bottle.” Patrick stopped talking, then, becoming distracted by the liquor. He swirled the whiskey around the glass for an ironically long time. I did, too, before taking a sip, because swirling declares a certain percipience. I looked at Patrick and he said: “Smooth, aye.”

I was delighted to discover that a) the whiskey was very smooth and b) I could, after years of trying, finally appreciate a whiskey’s smoothness. No one is born with a hankering for a drink that, at least initially, tastes indistinguishable to turpentine. And I’ve consequently worked very hard to deaden enough tastebuds to discern the ‘sweet’ and ‘smokey’ notes that hide behind the sensation of a small flame at the back of the throat.

The journey to appreciating whiskey is similar to that of coffee, I’ve found. I recently encouraged a weak latte drinker to taste a double espresso. She was tentative, of course, merely dipping a tongue into the crema. That the total consumption of espresso amounted to about 2 millilitres didn’t stop the woman from contorting her face, though, as if she’d just sucked on a lemon.

“Can you taste the white peach and burnt toast notes,” I said.

“Now that you say it, yes, I can sort of taste it,” she said, cordially—still with a scrunched face, though—before putting down the hardly-touched espresso. “Mmm, very nice. That weak almond latte is still coming, though—right?”

She obviously hated the espresso but was remarkably polite and resolute. I admired that. I’ve always found the two virtues somewhat irreconcilable, like adding cream to a skinny flat white. I, for one, usually find that politeness turns to submission and then, finally, to self-sabotage which I credit to an unexplained proclivity to forgo loyalty to oneself in the name of wanting to please another.

To uncover the cause of being a people-pleaser, I attempted a sort of self-psychoanalysis by asking my mum, who bears a similar predisposition, whether I’d endured any unpleasant experiences as a child. We brainstormed a few possible causes, though none were revealing. And then I asked: “What about you, mum?” She paused and then said she as a teenager travelled to Melbourne as part of an extracurricular program at school and stayed with a host family who was Asian and, on the first night, cooked a traditional meal that included baking an obscure variety of fish.

The mother was dishing out portions when, according to mum, one of the children cried: “Dibs eating the eye.” The mother, apparently, gave the child a stern look, as if to say, where are your manners? She then lectured the children that the best part of the fish is always reserved for guests and proceeded to scoop the eye out of the socket and place the half-melted spherical organ onto my mum’s plate of rice. “I couldn’t,” she (my mum) said to which the matriarch replied: “Nonsense. Stop being so polite.”

I like to think I’d draw the line at eating a fish’s eye, which my mum apparently does not, but I am, like Patrick, prone to buying items I can’t afford to not disappoint a shopkeeper, a total stranger.

Patrick spent 15 minutes at the bar, drinking whiskey and queering the nice lady about distilling. So, after another dram, he decided to buy the whiskey as an end-of-the-week treat, because he had, after all, been working very hard and the bottle, though forming a sizeable chunk of his weekly paycheck, was actually outstanding value.

“I said I'd take the bottle. And the lady was like, ‘Great choice. You wait there and I’ll get the bottle,” Patrick told me.

The choice was not great, though. Patrick was looking at a retail list that only showed prices for half bottles, which would have been fine had Patrick fetched the bottle and not the lady. In the room that held the whiskey were rows of shelves that were organised by half bottles and the regular size and, presumably for the heedless, was further delineated by two very different prices in large writing.

Patrick continued to sip as the lady returned and began wrapping the bottle fastidiously. “She took forever, too,” he said. “Like really taking a lot of pride into the wrapping.”

The lady, according to Patrick, then scanned the bottle through the system and as she typed the price into the Eftpos machine, a group of P-platers walked in the door and crowded around the bar, around Patrick. The lady, apparently, then held out the PayPass device, smiling charmingly, anticipating the purchase. The P-platers, meanwhile, sat at the bar impatiently waiting for free samples, also anticipating the purchase.

The fire cracked and the embers floated and then faded into the night sky. Patrick poured two more splashes of whiskey and continued: “Then, she said, ‘That’s just $360.00.’ Can you believe it? JUST? I almost choked because I gulped so much. Then I thought I need to back out now because if I buy the bottle, I’ll have to live off beans and rice for the next three weeks."

“So what did you do?” I said.

“I said, ‘What a bargain’, and bought the bottle, of course.”

“Of course.”

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