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One large gin and tonic is acceptable as a thirst quencher. You will do better, even so, with gin and Schweppes ginger beer (and plenty of ice). I would name this one of the great long drinks of our time, almost worth playing a couple of hours’ cricket before imbibing.

For further, serious, drinking I recommend gin and water—and ice and lemon. This combination is favoured by the understandably popular George Gale. My advice: make sure you don’t overdo the water.

Gin and water is an all-round improvement on gin and tonic: cheaper, less fattening and less filling as well as not being sweet or gassy. Gin is a real and interesting drink, carefully prepared with those botanicals and all, and it deserves to be sampled with its flavour unimpaired. Try it un-iced, with a little Malvern water—and nothing else. Very comforting in cold weather. Do this persistently and you will find marked differences between brands.

The Singapore Sling is a famous old gin mix with many recipes, some of them elaborate. As served in the Long Bar of Raffles Hotel, Singapore, it has eleven ingredients. My corner-cutting, tasty, forceful version calls for two parts gin, one cherry brandy (Cherry Heering is the best) and two or three parts fresh fruit juice (orange will do very well).

Now, an unusual gin cocktail: the Salty Dog, which I picked up on a trip to Nashville, Tennessee. (No, nothing to do with the bloody music.) Moisten the rim of a glass and twirl it about in a saucer of table salt, so that it picks up a thickish coating about a quarter of an inch deep. Carefully add one part gin and two parts fresh grapefruit juice, stir thoroughly, add ice, stir again, and drink through the band of salt. Splendid for out of doors.

Just why the British pub has declined so disastrously in recent years is a matter for argument. The greed of the brewers, the rise of youthful affluence, changes in the wage structure and the new stay-at-home “culture” must all be something to do with it. But that there has been a disaster is beyond dispute.

Once, an evening in the pub was a joy, a social event unlike any other. Now, in most places it would be a severe ordeal for all sorts of people, people of widely varying ages and tastes. An ordeal in what ways? I may as well spell them out.

First, the first thing you notice is the music—to be heard in what proportion of pubs? Seventy per cent? More? And what music? Usually, the least imaginative, most predictable records in the Top Twenty, picked for their supposed catchiness, the musical equivalent of bubble gum. If not this, then country music, Irish records, whatever, as long as it’s loud, loud enough to make conversation a strain.

Next, the decor, intended not to please the customer but to set trends, win prizes for interior design and look good in trade photographs. The effect is showy and obtrusive, with red walls, red carpets, even red furniture, not quiet and pleasantly restful as it should be. On the plus side: more places to sit down than formerly.

As regards drink itself, the decline is less marked. Various bland-tasting, weak and overpriced lagers, often with foreign names, are on draught, also many a sweet, gassy “best bitter,” but nobody is forced to drink them in preference to real ale and higher-gravity bottled lagers. On spirits, no complaints. In fact you will be served a better gin and tonic today than you used to get. Only the wine is a scandal, particularly the red, nearly always poor to plain bad and again overpriced. Remember the shouts of victory when at last the pubs agreed to serve wine by the glass!

The food, though I suppose one should be glad to see it there at all, is frequently appalling, greasy lukewarm hamburgers and sausages with tinned veg and rehydrated potato.

The clientele is usually amiable enough, but some patrons regard the increasing presence of women, and even more that of children, as an encroachment and an attack on the pub’s time-honoured function as a male refuge.