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And then begin.

But try not to go on too long.

Evelyn Waugh’s Noonday Reviver

1 hefty shot gin

1 (½-pint) bottle Guinness

Ginger beer

Put the gin and Guinness into a pint silver tankard and fill to the brim with ginger beer. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the attribution, which I heard in talk, but the mixture will certainly revive you, or something. I should think two doses is the limit.

Woodrow Wyatt’s Instant Whiskey Collins

As much bourbon whiskey as you fancy

½ standard split-size bitter lemon drink

1 maraschino cherry

Ice cubes

You can work this one out for yourself. For once, you can use rye or Irish whiskey or Scotch whisky* if you feel like it.

Whatever the purists may say, this is a good drink; it pays to remember

G.P. 7: Never despise a drink because it is easy to make and/or uses commercial mixes. Unquestioning devotion to authenticity is, in any department of life, a mark of the naïve—or worse.

The Bloody Mary

½ bottle vodka

2 pints tomato juice

2 tablespoons tomato ketchup

4 tablespoons lemon juice

4 tablespoons orange juice

1 tablespoon (at least) Worcester sauce

1 level teaspoon celery salt

Ice cubes

You will want to make up a lot of this before the party starts, or before the last breakfasters have finished. Put into some smallish container the vodka, ketchup, sauce and celery salt. Stir furiously until the ketchup is fully emulsified and the lumps in the celery salt broken up. (The ketchup is the secret of the whole thing: I am not at all clear on what it does, but it does something considerable.) Mix the tomato juice and (strained) fruit juices into your usual jug, stir in the vodka-ketchup-sauce-salt mixture, add ice, stir again and serve in wine glasses or the equivalent; as with the Dry Martini, the bottom half of a too-large drink is warm when you get to it.

This delicious and sustaining potion is often thought to relieve hangovers, and certainly it will make you drunk again if you drink enough of it, but there is hardly anything distinctive about that. Some would argue that the tomato juice is food smuggled into a stomach that would shrink from it un-softened with alcohol, to which one might reply that there are more digestible alternatives; further, that those whose stomachs are in fair shape, probably the majority, are having their appetites for lunch spoiled to no end. And yet, on the principle—very nearly worth erecting into a G.P.—that in all alcoholic matters subjectivism plays a big part, a lot of people will feel better after one or two Bloody Marys simply because they expect to.

La Tequila con Sangrita

¼ pint plus (i.e. equal to the mixture that follows) tequila

¼ pint tomato juice

1 tablespoon fresh lime juice (or 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice)

½ teaspoon tabasco

1 small pinch cayenne pepper

An exotic short-long drink to round off this section. I have never seen it served outside Mexico, though since drinking a good deal of it there I may not have looked very hard, I admit. Tequila is distilled from the juice of a cactus, and tastes like it, too. “Sangrita” means “little blood” or “blood-ikins” (and “con” means “with,” if you must know). The drink is a sort of Bloody Maria, very hot, and unique in being kept in two halves: the tomato concoction and the tequila do not meet until they arrive to start a joint operation on your stomach. Each partaker gets a small glass of neat, unchilled tequila and a twin glass of the stirred, also unchilled red stuff, and sips at each in alternation.

I have had to specify ¼ pint because any smaller quantity makes the measurement of the other ingredients difficult; I am not suggesting that this is one round for one chap. The formula will serve three or so. You will find it a splendid pick-me-up, and throw-me-down, and jump-on-me. Strongly dis-recommended for mornings after.

HOT DRINKS

There is not much to be said in general about these either. They will warm you up, and they will make you drunk if you drink enough of them. Remember that their alcohol will affect you sooner than if you drank