A very strange reversal has occurred. You used only to hear the Bacardi bar-call in market town pubs and city nightclubs, the natural habitats of footballers and those who seem to have stepped straight off the set of The Office. It has not deserted such places, even though now, one rarely hears the word cooed in isolation from "Breezer". But it also seems to have found a new market among types so fashionable, they're already bagging up their peasant tops (sooo this season) for Oxfam.
All this faddism can be a bit hard to swallow, and I'd be the first to say you should drink only what you like (as long as it's not Southern Comfort). But I plead a special case for Bacardi, which deserves some rescuing; however, please note that my magnanimity does not extend to those truly execrable ready-mixed drinks, Bacardi Breezers. It must be said: until recently, I, too, would no more have ordered a Bacardi than I would have worn a pair of white stilettoes in public. Then one of my more glamorous friends (her idea of a crisis is discovering that her opera-singer boyfriend is about to give up the evening job to become a policeman) sailed into a bar and ordered a Bacardi-tonic right in front of several people she knew.
"Rum and tonic is my new drink," she explained. "And I like asking for Bacardi because it sounds so naff and people always giggle and say, 'So that's what media girls drink now.'" So I looked around, and realised that those people who two years ago replaced their vodka-cranberries with vodka-tonics are beginning to move on to something with a little more flavour.
We've perhaps been reintroduced to Bacardi through cocktails based on white rum (the caipirissima, a variation on the cachaca-based caipirinha, and the daiquiri) from which it's a small step to the longer, more refreshing rum and tonic. I prefer rum and tonic to be mixed with a slightly richer, aged rum that's golden in colour. But then again, I also prefer my rum mixed with soda, as I drank it last week on one of the few evenings when it was warm enough to sit outside.
This was no fashion decision: I was in Bradford visiting my boyfriend's parents, and his sister and brother-in-law were over from Trinidad. Catherine, who after a decade there is more patriotic than her native husband, insisted we drink Trinidadian rum. Al sighed and said that Guyanese rum was getting very good these days. He mixed me an "Al Special" - rum, soda and an inch of Diet Coke ("a big girl's blouse drink", said Catherine, and my media friend would have agreed, "I never ever drink Bacardi with Coke"). And I reflected that, for all my fancy city ways, here I was, drinking rum and Coke and enjoying it. You can take the girl out of Bradford but look what happens when she goes back again . . .
