What’s your favourite tipple? This is quite a topical question, especially since Christmas is just round the corner. We can’t be locked down from a drink with one other person surely?

In recent years there has been a resurgence of gin drinking, especially in London where the juniper-flavoured potion started being distilled in the seventeenth century after being introduced by the Dutch. A G & T seems to be a traditional introduction to an evening’s entertainment in many circles and certainly there are some interesting brands around: Bombay Sapphire, for example, an echo of the Raj if there ever was one. For me, however, gin is unbearably connected with ‘1984’ and Winston’s last drink at the Chestnut Tree café after he has been tortured and brain-washed to love Big Brother.

“Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured with cloves, the speciality of the cafe.”

Gin also has horrendous connotations with Hogarth’s engraving of Gin Lane where one sees the effects of the drink among which can be espied  infanticide, madness, disease, starvation and suicide.  For example, there’s that syphilitic woman throwing her child down the steps at the bottom of which is a figure reduced skeletally by the effects of the beverage.

If it was

“Drunk for a penny

Dead drunk for two pence”

I would add “dead for threepence”

Dickens, of course saw that gin was not the primal cause why people were reduced to such wretched states. He writes:

“Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt are a greater; and until you improve the homes of the poor, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery, with the pittance that, divided among his family, would furnish a morsel of bread for each, gin-shops will increase in number and splendour”.

Plus ca change!

Compare all this with the healthy humans in Hogarth’s parallel engraving of Beer Street where commerce and good company thrive. It’s almost as if the unhealthy tinctures of the continent are contrasted with honest healthy English beers.

Of course, I agree there’s nothing to beat a pint of ‘Nelson’s Blood’ brewed in Chatham, the dockyard where HMS Victory was built. It’s one of the few things that would make me return to a post-brexit UK.

Whisky and soda is OK although I prefer to drink whisky by itself, preferably from a hip flask that anyone venturing across the Highland heathers is advised to take as an essential part of their survival equipment.

I’ve tried Vodka a few times but the way it has turned me into a psychopath is frightening. No wonder Russia has the one of the highest records of domestic violence.

No, none of these would really satisfy me except for my two favourites. Not Rum and coke (I just don’t like coke that much and its taste reminds me of some tooth eroding disinfectant) but rum with a fruit juice like pineapple and coconut.

Now that’s a really sunshine drink prompting memories of wonderful holidays passed in Antigua, Saint Lucia and Saint Maarten. And particularly, in Cuba where, naturally, it is closely associated with that other fabulous snifter the Mojito, Hemingway’s favourite tipple, made with the best rum, brown sugar, lime, soda and mint. A mojito is a cocktail no-one could possibly be without, especially during these somewhat trying times.

In Italy my favourite pick-me-up is Campari and Soda which a friend calls their ‘happy drink’. Quite right too! Obtained from the infusion of bitter herbs, aromatic plants and fruit in a mixture of alcohol and water, it has an intense aroma and a ruby red colour.

This awesome drink was developed in a small bar in Novara by Gaspare Campari in 1860 who then moved to Milan a couple of years later.  The (secret) Campari recipe has remained unchanged ever since.

Campari Soda was launched in 1932: with that famous conical bottle designed by the futurist artist Fortunato Depero.

His advert designs for the drink are equally original.

I hope that you’ll have a respectable amount of your favourite tincture this Christmas. It’ll keep us company if nothing else and is a better cure for the blues than any psychotherapeutic session and (in most cases) a lot cheaper.

Now as for Italian wines …but I’d better keep this post short before I become too thirsty!