Drink

James Bond’s most impressive talent is not his prowess as a spy or his skills of seduction. It’s his ability to always get exactly what he wants at the bar. In the 1954 novel Live and Let Die he orders a round of Old Fashioneds while on a train to meet Felix Leiter, his CIA opposite number. Not only does the buffet car make them for Bond, they even have his preferred brand of bourbon, Old Grand-Dad. You try pulling that sort of thing on the Acela from Penn Station to DC. ‘Sorry Solitaire, they wouldn’t do us a cocktail, but I’ve got a cup of Lipton’s and a bag of pretzels.’ We’d all like to drink like Bond but, lacking his miraculous powers, we need to be in the right sort of bar to do it.

I used to be terrified of homemade alcoholic drinks. Someone would bring out the elderflower champagne at a picnic, and I’d wave it away: ‘I’d love to. But I’m driving...’ Bottles of homemade cabernet would be pressed on me with irrepressible warmth at Christmas time; I’d accept them with a lying smile on my lips and an inward resolution to boil the contents for seven hours with sugar, oranges and cinnamon sticks and fob it off on guests as mulled wine. And for my narrow-minded ways I now repent. As I must, because with maturity comes the realization that, as Solzhenitsyn said, there is no us and them. The line dividing good from evil, the poised socialite from the homemade-liquor inflictor, cuts through the heart of every man.