All beer and skittles

A British metaphor from the mid-19th century that denotes an easy, frivolous way of doing something, as if one was drinking beer and playing skittles in a tavern. First attributed to Charles Dickens Pickwick Papers (1837), “They don’t mind it; it’s a regular holiday to them - all porter and skittles” (porter is an old word for beer). Later, in 1894, George Du Maurier used the expression in his book, Trilby, “Life ain’t all beer and skittles, and more’s the pity.” It is a more modern form of the expression cakes and ale which is found in Shakespeare Twelfth Night Act II, Scene III, “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”