Drink - Victoria Moore on her love affair with gin and tonic

I thought I was over my ex. I'd been to parties without checking first to see if he'd be there, standing all square-shouldered and solid by the sofa. I'd stopped shivering when I heard other people say his name. I'd stopped needing to tell friends how, this time, I'd really got over him. I'd even begun to go to bed and fall asleep without giving him a second thought. But it's no use. In my heart, I know my six-month affair with campari is not fulfilling me. Gin, I have come to accept, is The One.

In much the same way that a middle-aged man, having left his wife, her ample underwear and rambling family home for a flitty young girl with a slither of a thong and a flat on the cheap side of town, eventually begins to feel that he has traded in a whole life for a weekend away, so this brief fling with campari has prompted me to meditate on the rogue I cannot drive from my heart. Wherever I turn he is there, teasing me to come back to him.

To me, gin and tonic are the three most blissfully tender words in the English language. Ah, the rattle of ice against glass; the vital sting of citrus; the sharp, exuberant fizz of freshly liberated tonic; and the gin, oh the gin.

Ours always was a mercurial relationship. On family occasions, Gordon's London Dry gin provided the familiarity and reassurance that Mr Knightley gave to Emma. Wandering into the garden at the end of a difficult day, Portsmouth gin inspired the earthy-palmed urgency that Mellors did in Lady Chatterley. In city bars, Bombay Sapphire was the giddy, fashionable hit that heroin was to Rent-boy in Trainspotting. Sometimes, though, gin lets me down - especially when we are in pubs together and he arrives weak, deflated and in the wrong-shaped glass without any ice or lemon. But even this inconsistency keeps my heart raw.

Like all great lovers, we have shared times that I will never forget. And, after much agonising, I have selected my two greatest gin-and-tonic moments. One of them is a bit of a cheat because it's actually lots of identical moments. Still, aeroplane G&Ts (outward leg of journey only) are among the best. The last vestiges of grimy anxiety have been left in the airport terminal. You are airborne, in limbo, your time belongs to no one. It doesn't even seem to matter that you're drinking from a perspex cup, because you still get lemon, plenty of ice, those baby cans of tonic that never fail to fizz properly, and far too much gin. The moment you rip the ring-pull off the tonic, lean back in your seat and prepare for the gin to overcome you is sheer heaven.

The very best gin and tonic of my whole life, however, was in Ravello, a small village pitched high above the Amalfi coast. It was a hot day in late summer. In the gardens of the Villa Cimbrone, we found a tiny bar hidden under the belvedere that overlooked the long, olive-tree-strewn plunge to the sea. In this bar, we watched as gin was slugged to half fill the beautiful thick glasses, wedges were hewn from a locally grown lemon and just a little bit of tonic was added to finish it off. The bar had a balcony of its own, carved into the cliff-face. No one else came near.

I have heard about gin and tonics on beaches, drunk under the early afternoon sun, with the ocean tickling at toes and a paperback of Tender is the Night lying spreadeagled on the sand; of gin and tonics that found their way up snowy mountains to reward the bravery of fearless climbers; gin and tonics that were a prelude to wild outbreaks of salsa and flamenco; and those that were drunk in no extraordinary place at all but were as pitch-perfect as a newly minted tuning fork.

For all its slinky charms, campari, I know now, doesn't come close to gin.

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