GIN AND LIT.

OK, I accept that reading books and drinking gin may not be the complete solution to our Corona-virus troubles but they certainly help.  And will it surprise anybody that there’s some crossover between these two things?

Here for example is Anthony Powell’s Journal entry for August 29 1990.  Roy Jenkins has come to lunch: ‘Before lunch Roy drank gin on the rocks with a dash of sherry, somewhat exotic taste.’  Which frankly surprised me.  Powell was a sophisticate, surely he’d been around enough to know that Jenkins was drinking a not very exotic variation on a martini.

Barbara Pym’s name pops up from time in time in Powell’s journals, though as far as I can tell they never met, and this led me to her novel No Fond Return of Love.  It’s a cracker. There is some less than exotic gin drinking here, drunk at room temperature with water, no ice or slice.

          And there’s a funny, if not altogether convincing, episode when two of the novel’s characters – Pym would have had no problem referring to them as spinsters – go into an off license to buy a quarter bottle of Gordon’s.   

Dulcie says ‘Perhaps we should have a corkscrew.’

‘A corkscrew? Oh madam,’ the salesman laughed quite pleasantly, ‘you won’t need that, I can assure you.’

         When her fellow spinster says she surely must know how a gin bottle opens, Duclie replies, ‘I know you don’t need a corkscrew for champagne, but I’d forgotten about gin.’

It was a different time, the book was written in 1961, but it still doesn’t quite ring true that a somewhat formidable middle aged woman wouldn’t know that gin bottles have screw caps.

The naivety of course is the character’s, not Barbara Pym’s.  In Jane and Prudence, Prudence is consoling herself by eating alone in a good restaurant ‘She must be unusually kind to herself today.  A dry Martini and then a little smoked salmon; she felt she could manage that.’ 

This was written in 1953.  There was still rationing in England!  I have no statistics but I imagine that very, very few women were drinking martinis alone in restaurants in 1953, though I’d love to be proved wrong.

I haven’t been able to find a picture of either Powell or Pym with a drink in hand, but as you see, cat pictures are comparatively common.