Drink - Victoria Moore hopes the Prime Minister is in good spirits for his trip to Japan
During the G8 summit, the Prime Minister is on the Japanese island of Okinawa. I can't make any political predictions, but I do know that, if the locals who have lobbied to make Awamori the official toast drink have been successful, there will be a lot of lip-pursing and hasty swallowing going on. For Awamori is a rice-based spirit so revolting that it has no market outside Okinawa, let alone outside Japan. Not that this has deterred the Okinawans from creating a special limited-edition bottle that they are calling "Bankokushinryou" ("International Friendship") for the grand occasion. There is, I suppose, a sliver of possibility that the international power-bearers will bond on what may transpire to be their only common ground - distaste for a drink that the natives optimistically believe "makes you happy".
I haven't been to Okinawa myself, but I have tasted three versions of its fire-water, malevolently imported for me by my friend Matthew who lives in Tokyo. Matthew was very excited about it. Even in Tokyo, he'd had to go to a specialist Okinawan delicacy foodstore in order to procure the three bottles he proudly placed before me and two other friends on his last state visit to England. We were suspicious. He tried to sell them to us by claiming that Awamori is the Okinawan version of whisky - it's drunk with water, straight or on the rocks. It's produced using the refined distilling techniques that the Okinawans learnt from the Thais about 500 years ago - Okinawa is, after all, somewhat detached from its mother country and floats in the East China Sea closer to Taiwan than to Tokyo.
"So it's not Japanese," said Sarah. "They pinched it from the Thais." Matthew activated his most withering look in defence of Okinawans. "Yes, they pinched it. Rather like we pinched our alphabet, our judicial system and everything else from someone else."
Then he opened the bottles. A smell of stale Chinese takeaway curled out of their necks like a bad genie and wrapped itself around the room. "I think it will be necessary for me to go to the loo," announced Robbie. If he thought that was going to get him out of the tasting session, he should have gone the whole way and invented a severe case of constipation as well.
Sarah and I, left alone with Matthew and the Awamori, developed a sudden and intense interest in the photographs of Matthew and his sister in Okinawa; Matthew and his mother and sister in front of some very tall skyscrapers in Tokyo. By the time Robbie returned, we had poured small glassfuls of the most innocuous of the three Awamoris - a standard version that smelt like grappa, but tasted indescribably bad. Matthew could see we weren't impressed and moved us rapidly on to the second, which was more alcoholic and claimed "special quality eight years old". If he has the option, Tony Blair should make sure he goes for this version. It has a golden hue and a much smoother flavour, although the taste doesn't drop away so mercifully quickly. "It's not as minging as the first," Robbie said.
But a further treat lay in store. "I know you'll like this one," Matthew said with some satisfaction, reaching for the last of his loot. The third - "habu sake" (and it's important to know what it's called so that you can be sure to avoid it at all costs) - is distilled with the venom of a deadly snake, the habu. "For tourists, they stage fights with mongooses and habu," Matthew explained with proud disdain. Robbie, not to be upstaged, claimed that, in a pub on the Isle of Man, he had once found a Chinese spirit that had a large, intact lizard corpse in the bottle. All this procrastinating was not, however, going to get us off the hook. We faced our glasses with the resignation with which some face the firing squad, and I made the mistake of delaying by the fraction of a second that allowed me to worry about the screwed-up faces of the other three before the foul taste of habu sake assailed my own taste buds. Good luck, Tony Blair, and may God be with you.
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