Put Bloody Marys served in Harry’s Bar on my bucket list – and buckets of them

It’s now the beginning of 2022. You might have noticed. If you’d told me in March of 2020 we’d still be like this two years down the line, or as near as makes no difference, I would probably have been sorely tempted to punch your lights out.

But you’d have been right, let’s face it, which means you saw further ahead and much more clearly than I did – and, unfortunately, further than many of the public figures still allegedly running the show ever did.

Blizzards of “ums”, “ahs” and “ers” emanating from the mouth of the PM do not make a coherent sentence, let alone a coherent policy but it is one of the great truths of life that nobody ever went broke underestimating the presence of logic and organised thought in what passes for current political debate.

All is not quite doom and gloom, however, providing you like your humour black. Especially when one witnesses the contortions of the libertarians among our powers-that-be who oppose mask-wearing, social distancing, night-club restrictions and compulsory vaccinations, as they get their pinstripes in a fankle over the refusal of the Land of Oz to admit tennis great Novak Djokovic, whom the Melbourne authorities decided to send homeward to think again.

This was, apparently, little to do with his well documented opposition to vaccination but more due to the fact that he didn’t have the correct Covid-19 documentation (or can’t or won’t produce it) to get into the country to defend his Australian Open title. Australia (how very dare it) has rules about these things, it would seem, and expects visitors to obey them.

Which is not unlike the arguments posited by many of the above lovers of “freedom” in favour of our own great nation’s “taking back control” and “policing its own borders”.

Only now, some don’t like that when it affects someone they see as agreeing with them. Strange that…

Anyway, with my tongue still firmly somewhere up the back of my face, while no one in their right mind would wish to go back to lockdown in any major shape or form, I personally think it had something to be said for it.

As you know, one of the few things I learned to do in lockdown was make cocktails. Not a slew of lewdly-named novelty mixologies fit only for the kind of drunken night out that those with any sense have eschewed during the current Covid rampage.

I give you Blood Marys, margaritas and the aptly-titled old-fashioned. There are some recipes, for success, disaster or otherwise, that should definitely be left to speak for themselves and I, for one, albeit delighted when someone comes up with a good idea for a new form of self-indulgence, tend to think that sticking with the devil you know is, in many respects, never a totally bad thing.

It’s like all those slogans you used to see on the side of treats you loved declaiming: “New! Improved!” and it became obvious on tasting them that neither claim was true. Or, in these days of culinary exploration, the efforts of chefs who always seem to have an unstoppable compulsion to take old favourites “to a new level”, while “turning up the volume” or “adding their own stamp”.

A stamp, in my case, of my carefully aimed foot when I find that the ensuing dish tastes and looks nothing like the one I thought I had ordered.

By all means, make up new stuff and “add a twist”. Just call it something different and don’t mislead my already befuddled senses. As my late father-in-law once exclaimed back in the 60s when presented with a bowl of spaghetti bolognese: “What have you done to my mince?”

No wonder I cleave to the happy world of cocktails where “with a twist” usually means “pointlessly but decoratively adorned with a piece of carefully mangled citrus zest that you either swallow by accident or knock into your drink with your nose”.

Such a twist does not tend to involve the addition of a so-called “original” touch or approach that usually does nothing to improve and everything to thoroughly muck about the recipe as it first appeared. So on to the Bloody Marys, then. Best of the lot, if you ask me, if only because you can, theoretically, have one before a meal and pretend it’s the soup course. Heinz Cream of Tomato with a twist, obviously.

And in a timely fashion, the Bloody Mary was, it would appear, invented almost exactly 100 years ago by a gent called Fernand Petiot of Harry’s New York Bar in Paris. And – wait for it – the eponymous Harry who bought said bar in 1923 and whose family still runs it, was actually Harry Macelhone from Dundee. There is always, as they say, a Dundee man.

This Paris institution still apparently sells upwards of 12,000 Bloody Marys a year, even though I’ve never even been anywhere near it.

Now, that’s a post-lockdown plan.

I do love a bucket list that might just involve something drinkable by the bucket…

All is not doom and gloom, providing you like your humour black

THAT’S THE SPIRIT: Learning to make a tasty Bloody Mary cocktail during the depressing lockdowns helped keep Helen upbeat.