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Half the point of the above list is what it leaves out. The most important and controversial of your non-needs is a cocktail-shaker. With all respect to James Bond, a martini should be stirred, not shaken. The case is a little different with drinks that include the heavier fruit-juices and liqueurs, but I have always found that an extra minute’s stirring does the trick well enough. The only mixture that does genuinely need shaking is one containing eggs, and if that is your sort of thing, then clear off and buy yourself a shaker any time you fancy. The trouble with the things is that they are messy pourers and, much more important, they are far too small, holding half a dozen drinks at the outside. A shaker about the size of a hatbox might be worth pondering, but I have never seen or heard of such.

An electric blender is also unnecessary, though by all means use one if you are quite confident of not having to clean it afterwards. Those little battery-powered whirlers are fun to play with, but in my experience they do nothing that a vigorously rotated spoon will not do.

Ice-tongs have become acceptably replaced by the human hand. Thanks to the ring-and-tab arrangement, beer-tin openers are no longer required, and, thanks to the innovation of the screw cap, item 10 of the kit will be droppable any day.

The same policy of sticking to essentials has been followed in selecting your

GLASSES

1 . A wine glass holding about eight ounces when full, though it’s a sensible general rule not to fill it more than about two-thirds of the way up. (Same goes for sherry, port, etc.) It will do for all wines, including champagne. The only essentials are that the bowl should be the right shape to be cupped in the palm for warming a chilly red wine, and that there should be some sort of stem to prevent your fingers warming a white wine.

Those hock and moselle glasses with the brown and green stems respectively are pretty and practical enough, but they break easily, and you may earn cries of horror and contempt if you try to serve anything but hock or moselle in them, so they are an extra, or an extravagance.

A third characteristic of the decent wine glass is one it shares with all other decent glasses: the part containing the drink, indeed the whole thing in the case of tumblers, etc., must be of plain glass so that you can see and appreciate the colour of the wine (though a light floral or similar pattern on a basic plain-glass ground is acceptable).

There are plenty of coloured drinking glasses about, and not quite all of them are horrible to look at, but the exceptions belong on your display shelf, not on your table. If somebody you are really very anxious to outdo should ever try to give you black burgundy, or bottle-green beer, ask politely if you can have it out of a white plastic tooth-mug instead, explaining that that at least allows you to see the true colour of the drink from above.

2. A sherry glass. This, filled to the brim, should hold about six ounces. It should have a stem to avoid hand-heating, like the wine glass, but that stem need only be long enough to be held comfortably between thumb and forefinger. The shape is up to you. I favour a sort of small wine glass with a U-shaped bowl. In this you can, with perfect propriety, serve not only sherry, but port, vermouth, liqueurs and brandy. Yes, brandy. If you notice any foreheads beginning to pucker at this, say you have always thought the traditional brandy snifter looked frightfully pompous and silly, and add carelessly that only inferior brandies are worth sniffing anyway. If you object that the amount of liqueur you feel like dispensing to your guests appears rather mean in a six-ounce glass, then you are just a mean sod.

3. An Old-Fashioned glass. In other words, a short broad tumbler holding about eight ounces when full. The point of it is not just that it looks pretty—though it does, very—but that in it you can get a lot of ice cubes into a short drink without piling them up above the surface and so numbing the