I have been following an exchange in the Notes and Queries section of the Guardian, in which Michael Rank asked: "In The Sea by Iris Murdoch, the narrator pours himself some sherry and bitters. Does anyone really drink this horrible-sounding combination, or is it some obscure joke?"
It is not a joke. Bitters are really a pharmaceutical concoction, originally drunk for health reasons and with no thought of pleasure. Angostura bitters, a mainstay of any decent bar and one of Iris Murdoch's ingredients, started off as a medicine for malaria. In the early 20th century, it was not unusual to drink sherry and bitters as an aperitif. An alternative was gin and bitters - otherwise known as pink gin - a classic drink for retired admirals because, in the navy, Angostura bitters were used to combat stomach problems, and were often mixed with gin. It just goes to show that you can learn to like anything if you have it enough: both are vile drinks.
These days, Angostura is used principally in cocktails (Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe was very particular about whether he would have any in his gin gimlets). Even at the Savoy, you never hear anyone asking for it by name. But Guardian readers being what they are seized upon Rank's query as though it presented another kind of challenge. "A worse drink is mentioned in Michael Holroyd's book Basil Street Blues when he describes 'sherryvappa' . . . a combination of sherry and evaporated milk," asserts Carol Phillips, while Ian Payn says that "in Bill James's Harpur and Iles novels, Colin Harpur is always drinking gin and cider".
Literature apart, since reading this, I have been wondering what the most disgusting socially acceptable drink might be. A slurry of bad drink memories bubbles to the surface like effluence. One: the oxidised "wine" served without shame to accompany a deliciously fresh dinner at the water's edge in the Cyclades. Two: bottles of sherry opened one Christmas and drunk the next. Three: the lemonade and vodka we served - in watering cans, for practical reasons - to guests at a university house party before distributing numbered cards and stickers and getting everyone to play Snog Bingo. (No one left the premises that night without entwining, in one form or another, with at least ten people, and the most common cry was: "Ugh! Have you seen how big Ellis's tongue is?")
But none of these is on a par with sherry and bitters - and anyway, drinks spoiled through incompetence (to which add warm beer, pub gin-and-tonics, and cheap, flabby cocktails) should not count. Nor do the likes of Bacardi Breezer, advocaat, snakebite and black, and Babycham, which are more bad taste than anything else.
A truly horrid drink should be one that could be served straight-faced on a silver salver, accompanied by a toadying nod. And the taste bud-defying drink of our age, only we haven't realised it yet, is Buck's Fizz. This octogenarian drink (it was invented at the Buck's Club in 1921) won't go away. Yet it is a sad, feeble, watery thing drunk by sad, feeble, watery people too health-conscious to opt for straight champagne, and too keen to please to have the courage of their convictions and go for neat orange juice instead. For some time, I tried very hard to pretend to myself that I liked it. I think I even spent an entire evening drinking it and wrote about how refreshing it was, but given that I have avoided it ever since, I can only conclude that I must have misled myself.
It is far better to alternate glasses of champagne and orange juice than to mix them together. Yet we persist in thinking that Buck's Fizz is very proper - a treat, even. One day, the Guardian will be full of letters asking if it's true that people used to serve a pale combination of champagne and orange juice - two perfectly good drinks, spoiled. But what literature will they quote? I can't think of any novels, bar those with bumpy covers, that refer to Buck's Fizz. In fact, the only cultural reference that springs to mind is the Eighties pop group. Why hasn't that stopped us drinking it already?
