Henry Jeffreys

Last summer I attended a reunion at my prep school. The occasion was the leaving of a much-loved master. I thought that the appropriate thing to wear would be a tweed jacket in honour of prep-school masters everywhere. I found myself woefully overdressed. Pretty much all of my contemporaries were wearing gilets. It was a similar story this year at the Fortnum & Mason awards, the Oscars of the British food and drink scene. I wore a suit, but it seemed as if every other guest was casually sporting a gilet. When I was growing up the only people who wore gilets were fishermen, farmers and Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. Furthermore, they weren’t called gilets, they were called body warmers or sleeveless coats.

The Platinum Jubilee celebrations look like boom time for the drinks industry, with various whisky, gin and port brands all releasing special commemorative bottles. But there’s one curious omission: Dubonnet, a liqueur that is said to be the Queen’s favourite. According to a spokesman from parent company Pernod Ricard, there’s nothing planned to celebrate 70 years on the throne of its most famous fan. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a flurry of activity. I picture the Dubonnet promotional department as two old Frenchmen asleep by a telex machine in the back of a dusty café in Béziers. But then again, who needs le marketing when you’ve got the Queen?

Stroll around Florence and you’ll notice little ornate openings embedded in the walls of Renaissance palazzos. They look like doorways for tiny people, though they would have to be quite athletic tiny people, as the openings are three feet off the ground. But they’re not entrances for Tuscan pixies — they’re for selling wine. There are more than 150 buchette del vino dotted around the city and they date back to the 17th century. You’d knock on the door, hand over some money and a bottle, and the mysterious person behind the wall would fill it full of wine.

Picture the world before the invention of the bottle: if you wanted a nice glass of claret at home, you’d have to send a boy round to the tavern to fill up a jug — unless you were rich enough to have a whole barrel in your cellar. Around 1630, a new tougher glass was invented in England which, when combined with the cork, meant that wine could be transported and stored safely and inertly. We owe the amazing variety of wine available to us at the touch of a button to this invention. What’s peculiar is how little has changed in 400 years. For most of us, buying wine still means buying a bottle. This is bananas, because most wine is drunk within hours of being purchased, and the glass bottle then discarded. It’s not as if there aren’t alternatives.

When I mention to people that I have written a book about home bars, the most common response is, ‘my parents/grandparents/swinging uncle used to have one of those globe cocktail cabinets’. The other thing they mention is Only Fools and Horses. For years, having a bar in your home was seen as the height of bad taste. It’s a far cry from the home bar’s 1950s heyday. After the second world war, people were spending more time at home, but still wanted to lead the cocktail lifestyle. It was the suburban American dream: after a hard day’s work, drive home in your shiny new Chevrolet, put Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers on your state-of-the-art hi-fi while your wife knocks you up a martini at your home bar.

I was collecting my daughter from school when my path was blocked by an enormous black Range Rover sitting in the middle of the road. As I squeezed past, one tyre on the pavement, I opened my window and asked, as gently as I could: ‘Why don’t you drive on your side of the road?’ The woman looked down from on high and said: ‘Why are you driving a banger?’ I’ve been trying to come up with a clever response ever since. I’d never thought of my car as a banger before. It’s a nearly 20-year-old Ford Focus, in excellent condition for its age with just a touch of rust on the boot lid. But by modern standards I suppose it is.