Drinking Brandy Excessively

Put more thinking into your drinking, Sir Terry Wogan

The most creative drinkers, unsurprisingly, are often writers. Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter) worked while sipping a “Sonny Boy”: hot tea and sherry. Evelyn Waugh favoured a blend of Guinness, ginger beer and gin known as a “Noonday Reviver”, which sounds strong enough to revive a corpse – then promptly kill it again. Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) advocated a cocktail called “Hangman’s Blood”: doubles of gin, whisky, rum, port and brandy, mixed with stout and champagne. (“It induces a somewhat metaphysical elation.”) Coleridge, when he wasn’t reeling in an opiate stupor, swore by “Smoking Bishop”, made from port and oranges. He didn’t invent it, but he did plug it in a poem, Drinking vs Thinking: “spicy Bishop, drink divine!”

In truth, though, I don’t know what the above drinks taste like. Therefore, I propose to spend the week investigating. I can hardly call myself a journalist if I don’t do my research. I can hardly call myself a journalist if I’m not drunk, either.

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Disappointed by BBC Two’s serial The Hour, a Mrs Peak, of Dorset, writes to ask why the BBC doesn’t adapt more of the 20th century’s finest female novelists, may of whom are largely forgotten. In February, BBC One screened Winifred Holtby’s 1936 novel South Riding, but other recent examples are few. Mrs Peak recommends Elizabeth Bowen and Mary Wesley (whose The Camomile Lawn was adapted for Channel 4 in 1992).

My tip would be Barbara Pym, with her unhappy comedies about prim spinsters and spineless bachelors. In 2013, it’s the centenary of her birth – that would do as a reason to adapt her, if her truthfulness and plangent humour aren’t enough. My favourite novel of hers is No Fond Return of Love (1961). “When Dulcie Mainwaring realised that her fiancé did not want to marry her after all – or that he was not worthy of her love, as he put it – she…” Half way through the novel’s second sentence, it’s already plain that here is a writer who understands the relationship between men and women all too horribly well. Most of Pym’s novels were written in the Fifties and Sixties, but that doesn’t mean they’re out of date: I doubt we men have become much less fatheaded in the half-century since.

Sidecar Cocktail - taking the imbiber for a ride… | Cognac Expert ...

As it was written in 1948 by David A. Embury in his acclaimed cocktail book, ‘The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks’.

The story continues to explain an eccentric British captain in Paris during WWI who frequented his favourite bar in his army issue vehicle.   A story well enjoyed by bartenders and customers alike, however this defining cognac cocktail has a heritage which predates this definition by almost a century.  But to begin with – the name…

The first recorded listing for the cocktail formally known as a Side-car,