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Many other countries import malt whisky from Scotland in bulk, blend it with locally distilled grain spirit and market the combination nationally. I wouldn’t mind trying, say, Zambian, Egyptian, Thai and Guyanan whiskies. Just once.

I think the nastiest drink I’ve ever drunk in my life was some stuff called mezcal in a Mexican market town. It’s made, I find, from the same aloe-like plant that gives us tequila, of which mezcal is a kind of downmarket version, if you can imagine such a thing. When I bought my bottle at the grocer’s it had a small packet tied to the neck. Inside was what looked like a shrimp in talcum powder. “What’s that?” I asked my American friend. “That’s the worm,” he said, “the best part. You can try it without.” I tried it without. My head filled with a taste of garage or repair shop—hot rubber and plastic, burnt oil and a whiff of hydrochloric-acid vapour from the charging engine. When I sold Mack the rest of the bottle he emptied in the pounded-up worm, recapped, shook, and poured himself a tumbler of greyish liquid with little pink shreds in it. Give me Tizer any day.

I haven’t yet sampled Ruou Tiet De, a North Vietnamese mixture of rice alcohol and goat’s blood, or Central Asian koumis, fermented from mare’s and camel’s milk. Sake, a sweetish rice beer from Japan, goes well with Japanese food, so if you happen to like eating raw fish and seaweed this is obviously your tipple. You drink it warm. I may say that when I heated some on the stove recently to check that it was as horrible as I remembered, it took all the deposit off the lining of the saucepan.

You needn’t go as far afield as that to find a drink offensive to any person of culture and discrimination, especially if mixes are on the agenda. In South Wales you’re liable to find them throwing down Guinness with Lucozade and Ribena, or Mackeson and orange squash—not in the more refined areas, true. In Scotland they put fizzy lemonade in their whisky. Yes, in respectable places in the Highlands there are quart bottles of the stuff on the bar alongside the Malvern water and the siphon. The objection is not that it’s vulgar, but that, of course, it kills the Scotch and tastes frightful.

Not that we down south have any excuse for self-satisfaction while we allow the atrocity of the Pina Colada to flourish unchecked in our midst. I ask your tolerance while I explain that this disgusting concoction is made by pouring into a tumbler over ice a measure of something called Malibu, which describes itself as tropical coconut laced with light Jamaican rum, and filling up with a semblance of pineapple juice, fizzy or still according to whim. Just the thing for a little 95-IQ female, fresh from a spell on the back of the bike, to suck at while her escort plunges grunting at the fruit machine.

Mind you, he’ll be no ornament to his sex either, quite likely clutching a lager and lime—an exit application from the human race if ever there was one.

Bourbon whiskey blends into cocktails. Irish whiskey gives us Irish Coffee, Canadian whisky goes well with most mixes, Mexican whisky is probably all the better for a shot of tequila—but Scotch stands apart, proudly resistant to being combined with fruit juice, bitters, vermouth, anything.

Well, almost anything. Certainly anything that goes to make a cocktail of whatever sort. So at least I’ve always found, but with my famous impartiality I’ll describe one well-regarded drink you may care to sample. This is the Rob Roy cocktail. At its simplest it consists just of equal parts of Scotch and sweet (red Italian) vermouth poured over ice and mixed in a smallish glass. With proportions two to one, a dash of Angostura bitters and a cocktail cherry, this becomes a Scotch Manhattan, and an added teaspoon of Drambuie produces a Bobbie Burns. To my mind all versions are bearable, but quite unrewarding. Then, of course, one or other of them might turn out to be just what you’ve been waiting for all these years.

To turn to more serious matters, Scotch and ginger ale, with or without ice, is a reasonably