Literary Beverages Part Two

Doppelgänger shreddies and plums

Considerably more embarrassing than my Peter Rabbit inspired fondness for chamomile tea is my gin and orange phase -- inspired, of all things, by a Maeve Binchy book: Circle of Friends, to be specific.

Oddly, for a catholic establishment, the school library was stuffed with Maeve Binchy's and Rosamund Pilcher's -- ripping yarns involving lapsed catholics (in the former's case at least) getting up to all sorts of no good in abandoned cottages and summerhouses. Even to this day I remember vividly my incredulity that a hot bath and a stiff gin offered the sort of dogmatic loophole that a prescription for Microgynon simply couldn't -- but then I always was a contrary sort of a person.

The postlapsarian girls of Circle of Friends drank gin and orange, and in my early days of sneaking drinks, this -- mortifyingly -- was my tipple of choice. The phase was mercifully short-lived, but a phase it was.