“I went to a Chinese restaurant
To buy a loaf of bread bread bread
They wrapped it up in a five-pound note
And this is what they said said said:

[dramatic decelerando]

‘My…name… is…

[dramatic accelerando]

Elvis Presley
Girls are sexy
Sitting in the backseat
Drinking Pepsi
One had a baby
Called it Crazy
Then she had another one
Called it Bubblegum!’”

[fin]

Of course, I knew the song. You do to. It is a playground classic from the 1980s, perhaps earlier and it instantly transported me to my own primary school, somewhere between the hopscotch and the snake, where girls with names like Carla and Cheryl and Lena would perform complicated clapping rituals as us boys ran around them playing Catch the Pigeon. I could suddenly see it all. The pink gingham dresses, the patches of damp on the asphalt, the occasional foot stuck out to trip a passing classmate, just to see what happens.

Where did this song come from? I assumed this was a matter beyond the realms of academic research; but then I came across a book called The People in the Playground, published by the folklorist, Iona Opie, in 1993. (I am attempting to build a novel out of this stuff; we’ll see!) Opie and her husband Peter devoted their careers to the study of precisely this kind of thing, publishing The Language and Lore of Schoolchildren in 1959 and following it with anthologies of songs, games and nursery rhymes, attempting to demonstrate, as Opie puts it, “the quantity, diversity, and astonishing longevity of children’s lore.” This was not widely seen as a worthwhile pursuit at the time. One high-minded critic on a late-’50s BBC review programme said: “;Horse, pig, dog, goat — I stink, you don’t’… well, I don’t think anybody could say that was very witty or clever, and nor is it poetic’”. Opie considers that he must have forgotten — “or perhaps never known” — the need for “punchy, defensive weaponry in the playground, made powerful by the magic of rhyme.” Besides: “Children’s rhyme and games satisfy the requirements of children.” Not adults.

The People in the Playground is essentially Opie’s detailed field notes from her close observations of one junior playground in Hampshire from January 1978 to July 1980. (“China-blue sky and stinging wind. The first children came out, ran to see why one of the drain covers had been removed, and stood gazing at the brimming water…”). It’s a wonderful book, out of print of course, so you’ll have to look on eBay, but you can probably get it for a couple of pounds. I haven’t come across I Went to a Chinese Restaurant yet though there is a song that seems to have the same rhythm:

My father went to war, war, war,
In nineteen seventy four, four, four,
He brought me back a gun, gun, gun,
And shot me in the tum, tum, tum

Elsewhere she documents a real gem of a limerick:

There once was a man from Brazil
Who ate a dynamite pill
His heart retired
His bum backfired
And his willy shot over the hill

“Always something new in the playground,” says Opie.

WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING #1

“I dreamed about Mark Zuckerberg again. We were on a family holiday and he was just sitting there in the middle of our hotel room as I tried to get my boys ready for breakfast. He seemed disconsolate. He held his curls in his hands and then tapped at his laptop forlornly. It was obvious why he was upset. It was the news from California: his company Meta, encompassing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, had reached a surprise settlement in a landmark lawsuit that had been expected to last for weeks. It would pay up to $18 billion and it would be forced to make its products more safe. “Today, we have secured a settlement with Meta that will make social media less dangerous for our kids and make a world of a difference for children and their families,” the attorney general of California was saying.

So it wasn’t quite a dream, I realised as the radio alarm ushered me into the land of capital and courtrooms and the Today program. But apprehending this news between conscious and subconscious thought felt somehow apt; characteristic of the neural zone that Mark Zuckerberg has made it his business to colonise.…”

Yes, I wrote about Meta’s ‘Big Tobacco’ moment; the ruling in California that represents the most significant curtailing of the extractive model that Zuckerberg has exploited. I really did have that dream, too; I wouldn’t normally see fit to report on the night nonsense of my neurons but this dream really did seem to capture something that rational narrative couldn’t. He really did seem sad. I mouthed to the boys to try and ignore him but of course I was meanwhile trying to sneak a look at what he was writing on that laptop of his. I couldn’t make it out. (UnHerd)

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SIX ways to make a better GIN AND TONIC

I am not quite back into my usual cocktailing rhythm. At such times, I reach for a Gin and Tonic. It is simply what I want to drink most of the time. I considered making this a Gin and Tonic post in the classic Spirits format; but you know how to make this thing and besides, I am quite enjoying these algorithm-defying ‘Summer Musing’-style diary posts. Still, I didn’t want to stray too far from the matter in hand. Here are six G&T-related insights that I have come to treasure. I am assuming we all know which gins we like and the need for copious ice.

1. The Fever-Tree corporation are right. If three quarters of your G&T is tonic, you need to pay equal if not more attention to the tonic than you do the gin. Sadly, having done the Lord’s work in promoting a better class of tonic water in British pubs and bars, Fever-Tree rather ruined it, to my mind, by reformulating their recipes around the time that the Sugar Tax came in. You will notice that most of their tonics, the Mediterranean one, the Elderflower one, etc, now come in “Refreshingly Light” as standard. To me, they all taste of artificial sweetener. It seems eccentric, to say the least, to punish the aperitif-drinking sophisticate for the sins of Tango, Monster, Red-Bull and the rest. So take heed: be sure to go for Fever-Tree Premium Indian Tonic water — the original formulation. The rest are, in my opinion, a waste of time. I actually don’t mind Schweppes; Waitrose own brand is decent too; and London Essence, that’s not bad. I did try Lidl own brand once, however, and it was dogshit.

2. The best glass is a short wide tumbler — an Old Fashioned glass (or maybe what is known as a double Old Fashioned glass). I can see the logic in making a G&T in a highball glass. This is certainly preferable to the Spanish-style goldfish bowl that is common now in many English pubs. Embarrassing. But a wider aperture, I feel, allows the aromas to circulate more effectively.

3. The best garnish is a slice of lime. I’ve come full circle on this. I would often throw in a nice fat wedge of grapefruit. Maybe a few basil leaves if I had them to hand. Or a rosemary sprig or even a piece of lavender. But the lime does the job better than anything else. I wouldn’t squeeze it too hard either; you just want to break the outer vesicles and give a slight hint of acidity — rather than pollute the whole thing.

4. I am, as a rule, against pairing cocktails with food. However, I do like a G&T with a curry. Lager is too heavy; wine is too often swamped; the G&T not only shares a certain terroir, it is close to the classic Indian Fresh Lime Soda and its brisk, bitter effervescence cuts through like nothing else.

5. I am unconvinced by glassware of the Spanish G&T. But I do like the timing of the Spanish G&T. In the early years of this century, chefs in the Michelin-starred kitchens of Arzak and el Bulli took to sipping “gin-tonics” in large red wine glasses filled with copious ice to keep them cool during hot shifts. They then began to serve the drink to their guests after dinner and soon, a cult emerged. As it turns out, it is just as delicious sipped in the sobremesa — that long lingering moment after dinner as it is in the aperitif zone. What’s nice about this is it brings you full circle.

6. I don’t think the Gin and Tonic should be messed around with too much. But there are a few things that are good in it. A good slug of Angostura bitters is excellent in a post-dinner G&T. A measure of Suze is a fine thing in a pre-dinner G&T. Absinthe! Absinthe! Absinthe! As much as you dare. This gives you my Arsenic & Tonic (though you should retain the gin). A dash of eau-de-vie is nice. And then there is my Rave Gin & Tonic — with a dash of Galliano.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING #2

You wait months for the opportunity to write about the evils of a tech behemoth — and then two such occasions show up in the same week. Yes on Monday, I published an essay on Netflix and its peculiar erasure of place. Every beloved British TV character you can think of comes from somewhere to the extent that is impossible to think of, say, Slough and not David Brent, or Torquay and not Basil Fawlty. Netflix shows all seem to take place in Netflixland, a strange zone where the vibe may change but the high-key lighting and incidental music does not.

“A more aspirational Netflixland is showcased in the comedy Sex Education, starring Gillian Anderson as a glamorous sex therapist, shot around the Wye Valley — only its sweeping river views, stunning architectural homes, and American high school evoke Californian as opposed to Welsh levels of affluence; more Santa Cruz-on-Wye than anywhere that actually exists. Similarly, Netflix’s many Harlan Coben adaptations take place in aspirational mid-Atlantic suburbs that seem part-Cheshire, part-Connecticut; the show home Rowan Atkinson destroys in the slapstick Man vs. Bee appears to be located in a screensaver. When England does get to be England, it is an England designed for the American gaze: the unLondon of the sinisterly unfunny genderswap comedy Ladies First; the ludicrous luxury five-storey castle that supplants the crap Haywards Heath retirement home in the adaptation of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club.

As we know, Americans are terrified of Europe — and so it must be made safe, affluent, legible. Where real locations are essential to a story they become vibes, keywords, placeslop, exaggerated versions of themselves: see the macaron Paris of Emily in Paris, the tourist fantasy of My Oxford Year or the InstaSicily of The Leopard. “Plenty of aesthetics but the algorithmic soul (l’anima algoritmica) is obvious,” complained one Italian writer. It’s a glimpse of what the world might look like under a Zuckerberg dictatorship.”

The common point between Meta and Netflix — two corporations that loom large over modern childhood — is their reduction of humans to users and our behaviour to data-points. Meta’s version of this seems to me basically evil; but the Netflix version is depressing in its own way. There seems, deep within the platform, a determination to flatten out human experience, to remove all its particulars, to render all culture as content. Is [gestures futilely] all this an inevitable result of our mania for data — our fixation on arbitrary numbers as a marker of success? (UnHerd)

Back to the playground — maybe one of the last bastions against the algorithm. As much as technology has encroached on childhood, in various nefarious ways, children will always choose the company of other children to the loneliness of screens. Their culture is resilient, too. The song my nieces were singing had survived the decades more or less in tact; the reference to “sitting on the backseat drinking Pepsi” struck me as a particularly nice piece of period colour — a line that wouldn’t be out of place on Madonna’s True Blue (1985).

Is there some racialised sleight in that opening line? I don’t think so. The Chinese restaurant is merely presented as one aspect of the merry chaos of modern life; in much the same way, Opie dismisses the notion that the popularity of “an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman” jokes evidenced any particular anti-Irish sentiment even at the height of the Troubles; “they might just as well be called Mr White, Mr Brown and Mr Green.” This particular Chinese restaurant doesn’t sound particularly Chinese or very successful anyway. It not only sells bread but hands you a five pound with it. Then again, it is run by a predatory Elvis impersonator.

But is this song entirely nonsense? That little coda about the baby — I don’t remember that from the 1980s original. But it contains a clear folk warning: be wary, girls, of men who offer you cash and fizzy drinks! And what drama there is in that final quatrain: “One had a baby / Called it Crazy”. You can just picture the despairing teen mother! But then she has another one and called it Bubblegum — as if to say, “Oh well! I guess this is my life now. Better make the most of it.”

Opie writes beautifully about what happens when you step into the playground.

“A kind of defiant light heartedness envelops you. The children are clowning. They are making fun of life; and if an enquiring adult becomes too serious about words and rules, they say: ‘It’s only a game, isn’t it? It’s just for fun. I don’t know what it means. It doesn’t matter.”

But I think it does, doesn’t it?

I left my phone on the plane on my way back from France. It had been such a restful week, in spite of the insane heat, really just one long rollover lunch, French supermarkets are the best. But this was not a good landing. I immediately realised, as soon as I stepped onto the runway but I wasn’t allowed back on to search for it. I have privatel…

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~ BLUE CURAÇAO ~

Orange liqueur that is blue / 15-35% ABV / £15-£30 for 700ml.
Friends with: rum; pineapple, coconut, almond, citrus, tropical fruits; cocktail umbrellas, gardenias, etc. But frankly it goes with almost everything in the cocktail universe and especially lightly coloured things: gin, pisco, French vermouth, etc.

Curaçao (pop. 157,000) may have exited the World Cup at the group stage, suffering a 7-1 defeat to Germany on the way but the achievement of this tiny island nation in qualifying at all is really something to celebrate. Not only was it the smallest nation ever to qualify for football’s premier competition; it was also the first cocktail ingredient ever to do so — and under the management of a man named Advocaat too. Liqueur aficionados will further note how fitting it is that the team has a core of “orange”, i.e. Dutch players, renationalised from the Curaçaoan diaspora within the Netherlands. And yet they play in blue, too — which, as everyone who has sipped a Blue Lagoon under a palm will know, is the colour of tropical dreams.

But why? Why? Why did they make curaçao blue? Here we must follow the dream logic of Paul Éluard’s classic surrealist sonnet: “La terre est bleue” (1929), which opens with the lines: “La terre est bleue comme une orange / Jamais une erreur les mots ne mentent pas” (“The Earth is blue, like an orange / It’s not a mistake, words don’t lie"). Like the best nonsense, this is not entirely nonsense. The Earth of course is blue — and it is also like an orange in that both are round; and so it follows that the Earth is blue like an orange. By the same reasoning, a Martini is transparent like the Sahara, while Campari is bitter like the planet Mars. And so, according to wisdom of the glass camels of Timbuktu and the resentful Martians of Olympus Mons, a liqueur made of oranges must be blue. This arcane truth cannot have been far from the minds of the creators of the Franco-Belgian live action Tintin movie, Tintin and the Blue Oranges (1964), in which Prof. Calculus invents a special orange that can solve world hunger — and this orange is, of course, blue.

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A cursory history of Curaçao

Anyway. Curaçao is a small island off the coast of Venezuela not far from Aruba. It was Columbused by the Spanish in 1499 who promptly enslaved the 2,000 or so native Coquetio tribespeople, shipping them off to Hispaniola. The European colonisers brought with them Valencia oranges, with the intention of starting some groves and nipping scurvy in the bud. Only the oranges didn’t do so well in the dry climate and salty soil, evolving instead into a distinctly hard, bitter citrus known locally as the laraha. The laraha is orange, like a resentful lover. Larahahahaha.

But there was, quite literally, a bitter twist. The laraha isn’t much good for juicing but it does give excellent peel — a quality noted by the Dutch, who came to “own” the island in 1634 under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company. Indeed, in another piece of cocktail-themed history, Curaçao was briefly administered by Peter Stuyvesant, who would go on to be the Director General of New Amsterdam, an island colony up in North America, which he would later swap with the British for nutmeg. As fond as I am of a grating of nutmeg over my Blue Mai Tais, I am not sure I would exchange it for all of Manhattan.

But I digress. Curaçao the liqueur is generally acknowledged to have been created by the venerable Bols company — founded in Amsterdam, 1575 — whose distillers exploited the delicious bitter rinds that the Dutch West India Company merchants were bringing back from the colonies in order to create a fine orange liqueur. And curaçao became popular. If you’ve spent much time perusing old time cocktail books (I mean the really old ones, like Jerry Thomas) you will surely have noticed that “orange liqueur” is always referred to as curaçao. (French triple sec came later — and Cointreau only really took hold in the 1920s.) Most of this “curaçao” was made in places like Amsterdam or Turin or Seville as opposed to Curaçao. Neverthless, a domestic market for this stuff developed too. The Senior & Co company — founded by one of many Sephardic Jewish families who settled on Curaçao — opened a commercial distillery near Willemstad in 1896, and to this day is the only company that makes true curaçao, i.e. curaçao from Curaçao using authentic laraha fruits cultivated on the island itself.

How did curaçao become blue?

It’s worth noting that these early curaçaos would have been transparent or slightly orange. It was only later, as commercial food dyes became common, that curaçao would gain its lapis lazuli hue. Still, in the Café Royal book of 1937, curaçao is described as a “sweet digestive liqueur from the Dutch West Indies” that can be coloured, wait for it, red, white, blue, green and orange. It was only later — from the 1960s on, really — that blue gained pre-eminence, most likely because a) it has a tendency to make drinks look like a tropical lagoon and b) no other foodstuff is blue which makes it instantly stand out. And so from the 1960s on, the stuff became synonymous with holiday drinks: the Blue Hawaiian, the Blue Lagoon, the Swimming Pool, and so on. These are the sort of drinks that come with umbrellas and tiki mugs and gardenia blossoms and hopefully a friendly dolphin garnish like this one:

Nevertheless, with my pedant hat on, for all its tiki associations, BC is not an ingredient Don the Beachcomber or Trader Vic much used. In fact, the annals of actually venerable blue curaçao tiki cocktails are relatively small. It was really much more popular in the Disco era of the 1970s and 1980s through until the 1990s when it took hold and it took hold for precisely the same reason my five-year-old begs me for blue slushies at the ice cream van, i.e. it really looks like the sort of thing you should not drink.

It bears stating that as much as you and I like to think of cocktails as a sophisticated business, and the likes of Michters and Foursquare as the great standard bearers of our movement, I’m afraid this is not the case. The UK’s fastest-growing alcohol brand is in fact the Swansea-based Au Vodka, and now that I’ve pointed this out you will notice their gold bottles and amusing glassware in Duty-Frees from Magaluf to Ayia Napa. These contain such “ultra premium” delights as Blue Raspberry vodka, (blue) Bubblegum vodka and, yes, Blue Hawaiian RTD (five-times distilled you understand).

So the thing about blue curaçao is, you have to make peace with the fact that it is the opposite of “authentic” and “hand-crafted” and “natural”. Even the most “classic” blue cocktail, the Blue Hawaii, was commissioned by the Bols company in order to sell more blue curaçao. And while there is no earthly reason why blue curaçao cannot be well-made — there are some half-decent ones out there, including the Senior & Co. version — it is not in most cocktails because it tastes great. It is in most cocktails because it is blue. I have the semi-respectable Edmond Briottet version and it is approximately six times not as nice as the Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao and four times not as nice as Cointreau. But I haven’t poured it down the sink! No. Because it looks cool — and it is not so offensive flavourwise as to upset the balance of most sweet drinks. I particularly like using it in slightly unexpected contexts such as, well, this:

I can see you shaking your head, Stanley Tucci, but the thing you must ask yourself is this: why do you think Campari is red, dum-dum? That stuff is full of food colouring too! And if you admire the futurist dash of the Carousel, then you should not turn up your nose at my Blue Raspberry Sgroppino (above). As much as I like my Martinis dry and my Negronis stirred, Stanley, I am fond of blue curaçao. It is at once populist and avant-garde; it is Love Island Futurism; it is Katy Perry Cosmism; it is electric surrealism. The cocktail has tides, like the ocean. Recipes below the line.

SOME MORE ESSAYS IN THIS AMUSING VEIN

🐿️ Amaretto
🌶️Ancho Reyes
🧡 Aperol
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🕊️ Bénédictine
❄️ Brancamenta
💕 Cherry Brandy
☕ Coffee Liqueur
🍌 Crème de Banane
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🫐 Crème de Cassis
🌷 Cynar
🦌 Drambuie
🍐 Eau-de-vie (coming soon)
🌸 Elderflower Liqueur
🏝️ Falernum
🦅 Fernet-Branca
🏄 Galliano
🌿 Green Chartreuse
☘️ Irish Whiskey
🐻 Kümmel
✈️ The Lillet-Bianco Family
🍒 Maraschino
🌵 Mezcal
🍈Midori
🦜 Overproof Rum (coming soon)
🦙 Pisco
🍶 Saké (coming soon)
🦥 Sloe Gin
🐂 Sherry
🧙‍♀️ Strega (incorporating Yellow Chartreuse)
🌻 Suze

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~ THE KENTUCKY BUCK ~

Two strawberries
60ml bourbon
15ml lemon (or let’s be real, lime) juice
10ml golden sugar syrup
Angostura bitters
~150ml ginger beer (I used Fentiman’s)

Catch a strawberry, trap it in the bottom of a shaker and bludgeon it along with the lemon and sugar. Now drown it in bourbon plus a three or four doses of Angostura. Add a single ice cub…

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“Richard Godwin has written a beautiful and magical story about the gigantic phantasmagorical digital universe that is being built around us day by day. It’s a powerful, funny story that slips between what we think of as the real — and something else. A strange, haunted world, built of our dreams and our fears that is half us and half not. It is the kind of fantasy world that can also be very frightening. And it is breaking back through the membrane into our real world, as the doors to the outside begin to close.”
— Adam Curtis

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Hello.

A few years ago, I woke up with a dazzlingly clear idea for a book I wanted to exist. I wanted to write a fantastical adventure that got to the heart of the strange new extrahuman domain in which we currently reside — a sort of Alice in Wonderland for the Black Mirror era. Most fantasy exists in a world of castles and steam trains. I wanted to explore the dark magic of the 21st century: children possessed by smartphones, adults bewitched by AI, powerful sorcerors unleashing terrible spells upon us — spells that happen to be excellent for their share price.

I knew who I wanted at the heart of the story: a girl with no special powers in a world where everyone else has easy access to magic. (This seemed to me closer to the basic experience of being a person than the usual child wizard arrangement.) I knew immediately what this girl’s name was, too: Stella Fury. And when I retreated to our old garage to set her story down, I had the most fun I have ever had writing.

I finished the book last Autumn. I sent it to various trusted readers as well as my agent, Rachel, who loved it. Only our attempts to find a publisher have not been successful. The feedback from children’s editors has been positive; but the book is, alas… not quite in line with what we feel is currently really working in the market. The writing, full of verve and sophistication and charm though it is… veer[s] into a more challenging zone than many children can access in this current era of the reading crisis. Essentially: people really do seem to like it — but no one can work out what shelf to put it on.

Naturally, I am saddened by this. (Also drily amused: Stella Fury is very much a person not quite in line with what is working in the market, who does indeed veer into a more challenging zone than many children can access…) But I can’t really complain. I wrote the book I wanted to write rather than the book that would easily fit current trends — and it’s true, The Disenchantment of Stella Fury does sit in a difficult space between children and adult fiction. It has an epigraph from Karl Marx and a talking pangolin; it is a page-turning adventure with some thoughts about consumerism. Then again, plenty of my favourite things sit in this difficult space: Alice in Wonderland, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Spirited Away, His Dark Materials, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Impossible Creatures, Rick & Morty, etc… And I think, from the responses of my early readers (aged eight to 71), that it is a book that different people can enjoy in different ways.

So where there are doubtless more sensible publishing strategies — none of them appeal to me nearly as much as simply putting the book here, in a place where everyone who might want to read it, can read it. You’ll find the prologue below — and some links that will allow you to continue reading for free (you can choose a fancy EPUB edition if you have an e-reader like a Kobo or Kindle, a PDF if that’s easier for you, or just a Google Doc if you’re really basic). You can support my work by subscribing, if you like — but mostly I’d just like you to read it. Perhaps aloud to an older child? But on your phone is fine too. And please do share with anyone who might like it too.

If you’re a regular reader thinking this is a strange departure from cocktails — don’t worry, we’ll get back to all that soon. But I should say, I wrote it with the same intentions: to spin a good story and hopefully spread a little enchantment. After all what is a cocktail but a magic spell that actually works?

Richard Godwin, July 2026

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THE DISENCHANTMENT
OF STELLA FURY

“A society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether-world that he has called up with his spells.”
Karl Marx, economist, 1848

“The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose, is magic… I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying — but how it’s done I can’t even begin to wonder.”
Virginia Woolf, novelist, 1928

“A.I. will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”
Sam Altman, businessman, 2015

* * *

Prologue

A FEW seconds ago, a couple of centuries up and to the left, a woodcutter’s daughter walked through the Forest of Arden to fetch water from the stream. It was a beautiful spring morning, all glistening and fresh. The girl paused to look at a spiderweb strung with droplets of dew, glimmering like gems in the morning sunlight. “What a beautiful universe this is,” she thought.

What the woodcutter’s daughter didn’t know was that inside each of those beads of dew, there was another tiny universe. And inside the universe in the 37^th bead, spiralling out from the centre of the web, there was a tiny star. And orbiting that tiny star was a tiny planet and upon that tiny planet lived a tiny girl.

She had brown wavy hair, a gap between her front teeth and a talent for squeezing her body into the smallest of hiding places.

Her name was Stella Fury.

And Stella Fury had a pretty massive problem.

Stella Fury was not all there.

From an early age, she had been completely lacking in spark. She was immune to all charms and quite charmless herself. In fact, the girl had no presence at all, no get-up–and-go, no can-do spirit, no force of will, no main character energy. She clicked her fingers and nothing happened at all. Except for a tiny click, obviously.

It was a terrible worry for everyone concerned. She was a mystery to magical science — incompatible, unformattable, untouchable from the moment she was born. The most advanced infra-red spectroscopes could detect no trace of gnostronic activity in her whatsoever. Nuclear magnetic resonance provided no hint as to what was or wasn’t firing inside her. As far as magic went, the girl was a non-starter. She lacked the basic particles. She was on nobody’s wavelength. She fell under no one’s spell.

Doctors attempted to jolt her into life with sorcery transfusions. Therapists tried her on special diets. Surgeons carried out aura transplants. She was even taken to the Institute of Gnostronic Medicine where they tried turning her off and then on again. Nothing. Stella was restricted only to the cardinal senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. And so she lived in a tiny world all of her own.

“Sad, really,” the consultants said to one another as they filled out her medical notes. “Her experience of life will be as that of a horse… or an intelligent pig. She may never know what it is to be fully human”.

Her classmates at the Cymbeline Quin Memorial Academy, the school Stella started at in the Martober of 2061, found it particularly astonishing that she couldn’t operate a wand — the basic instrument of magic that they had all been using since they were old enough to grip.

“Are you actually serious?” Nancy Gemini said to her on day one. “No wand? How do you even breathe?!”

As a matter of fact, Stella breathed oxygen in much the same way as other mammals, i.e. with a nose and lungs and bronchioles and things like that, though it’s true she had a touch of asthma as she lived by a particularly filthy bit of dual carriageway in west London.

As for magical devices, however, the 10th generation Honey Co. Spellcaster+, the Wandex Bang!, the Apple iWand XXV, the Xiaomi Easy-Cast PRO — these incredible devices were about as useful to her as a dead pigeon, or an underwater towel.

She could hold them. She could wave them about. She could stroke the wood and caress the featherwork. But you know that satisfying zzhm that a wand makes when you pick it up? Stella did not feel it. She did not connect. Her voice went unrecognised. And so a simple command — “write my homework”; “tidy my room”; “make me a sparkleberry smoothie with pistachio spirals and a side of dancing ham” — produced no result. It was like trying to close a door made of jam, or riding to school on a sponge bicycle.

As you can imagine, this made life extremely difficult.

For Stella’s classmates, eating was a simple business. A quick swipe of the wand would call up the day’s menu from the Honey Co. Café — and then it was a simple matter of deciding what to order. Wonderfruit tacos and rainbow salad? How about McSweeney’s popcorn fritters with watermelon spirals and honeymint Zing? A few swipes and swooshes and it was theirs for a handful of gems. Yum.

Only, Stella could not access these miracles of modern cuisine. And while she could technically eat the more basic food that her mum emanated, it always gave her a terrible stomach ache and tasted like mushed-up woodlice.

So, rather like wild animals — or mediaeval peasants, perhaps — Stella and her mum Kim spent much of their time preoccupied with the business of eating. Let’s say Stella wanted to make pancakes, one of the “free” items on the Honey Co. Café menu. Stella’s mum would have to go to Shepherd’s Bush Market and find one of the few traders who still sold old-school eggs and retro milk — plus various obscure grains, muddy roots and obsolete vegetables. Back at their flat, they would mix these storybook items in a special way like witches creating a potion, then cook them on a burning hot “stove” using “frying pans” and “wooden spoons” and various other items that Kim managed to fish out of antique shops and dumps. Once Stella had finished her meal — using metal forks and china plates, by the way — she would wash the special equipment by hand using actual chemical water that came into her building through a metal pipe that was over 150 years old.

It was a similar story with the rest of the housework. Laundry spells gave Stella a rash, so her clothes — bought second-hand from charity shops for the most part — had to be washed in an antique spinning machine and hung out to dry around the flat. If she needed to tidy her room, Stella would have to pick up every single item herself. No instant tidying spells for her. As for entertainment, she had to make do with an extremely old television, a still more ancient DVD player and a pile of — get this — books.

Her classmates considered this life to be like something from the Dark Ages. When Nancy Gemini heard about it, she said it reminded her of a “sad movie… you know the kind that sad people watch.”

And there were other difficulties too. Naturally, most of Stella’s classmates subscribed to the London Pod Network so they could conjure up a nice comfy bubble to take them wherever they wanted to go for two or three gems a pop. But Stella fell out of any bubble conjured for her. Kim never managed to collect enough gems for an old-fashioned automated car, either. So mostly Stella had to walk. She did this by placing one foot in front of the other and following the small strip of pavement that ran alongside the snarling roads near her house as the other children floated past in their private bubbles.

Sometimes they laughed at her.

“Hey, walker!”

“Look, it’s foot girl!”

“Sucks to be you, Stella Fury!”

Mostly they ignored her. Stella’s classmates usually spent their bubble journeys bewitched by their wands. They would be catching up on their homework with their fairy helpers, or spellcasting to Cuckoo, or playing little games to replenish their gem supplies — so they didn’t tend to notice what was happening on the streets around them. After the initial novelty of having a classmate who was basically a stegosaurus wore off, they paid little attention to Stella and more attention to their wands.

So the simple business of making her presence felt was anything but simple for Stella Fury. Indeed, throughout her long and difficult childhood — a childhood of injections and inspections, pills and scans, therapists and pataphysicians talking above her head — Stella heard enough people comment on her lack of presence for it to become a simple fact of her being.

“You know, I’m a bit worried about her,” said a health visitor to Kim once, when Stella was two. “It’s like she’s not all there.” Little Stella picked up on this phrase. “Stella not here! Stella not here!” she would say, as the adults in the room exchanged awkward looks.

Even as her own story begins, Stella is not quite here.

It is true, she is standing in the middle of the playground in a small crowd of Year 7s, making no special effort to conceal her body. But if you were to look at this particular group of children, with their avatars and helpers and shimmering skins and bubble pipes, she would be the last one you would pick out. Nobody hides like Stella Fury.

Look carefully, however, and you might notice one girl with no wand holster on her belt, no lanyard on her wrist, no Disney helper hovering near. Her skin is dull and unfiltered, her eyes are distant and grey, her hair is a nondescript colour between mousy and dark and her school uniform is made of tired old fabric. Look closely at her face — the anxious pools of her eyes, the tight concentration on her lips – and you might notice how hard she is working to keep up with the other children. But most people don’t look that carefully. They take her for an extra, a detail, a bit of background that the artist hasn’t bothered to colour in properly. This is more or less how Stella Fury wants it.

Your eyes are drawn instead to the girl in the iridescent trench coat, the one with the glossy auburn hair, the shimmering peachy skin, the grace, the poise, the look-at-me brown eyes. The one who is totally prepossessed, who is casting spells from her little finger to a chorus of oohs and aahs. This is Nancy Gemini, the most famous girl in Stella’s year, maybe the most famous girl in London. You immediately take this glamorous and intriguing person to be the heroine of this story. And again, that’s exactly how Nancy Gemini wants it.

But as you may have noticed, even in worlds full of magic, people rarely get what they truly want.

…to continue reading, please download for free:

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~ THE GIN STINGER ~

60ml gin (frozen)
20ml crème de menthe
Dash absinthe

Freeze your gin. Freeze your glass. Freeze all. Now, add the ingredients to the shaker, add copious ice and shake, yes, shake. Strain into an appropriate vessel and garnish with a pair of vintage aviators…. see below.

🧟ZOMBIES USA PLAYLIST🧟

A Bri…

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Click here for the deal of the summer

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The moment feels auspicious. Britain is due for its seventh Prime Minister in as many weeks. We are approaching the tenth anniversary of “Take Back Control”. Football is coming home. And moreover it is hot. Unbelievably hot. The schools are closing. No one is answering their emails. Stokes Croft is even sketchier than usual. And look, the Met O…

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~ THE FRENCH MARTINI ~

50ml vodka
15ml Chambord (but see note 3)
30ml pineapple juice
~5ml lemon juice
~5ml sugar syrup
Dash Peychaud’s bitters (optional)

Freeze a glass and for heaven’s sake make sure it is V-shaped. Add the liquids to the shaker and taste for balance. Yum huh? Just wait til it’s all cold and frothy! Speaking of which: throw in plenty of ic…

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~ THE CHAMPS-ELYSÉES ~

40ml brandy
10ml green Chartreuse
15ml lemon juice
5-10ml sugar syrup (use a stingy hand at first)
Dash Angostura bitters

Freeze a coupe. Introduce all the liquids to one another in the context of a cockt…

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~ THE PICANTE DE LA CASA ~

A fresh red chilli
8-10 fresh coriander leaves
60ml tequila (reposado)
30ml fresh lime juice
15ml agave syrup

Fill a tumbler with ice and freeze. Now listen carefully. Slice off a 1cm piece of red chilli and throw this into the bottom of the shaker along with your fresh coriander. Muddle awhile. Now measure in the liquids, add a hal…

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~ THE PORTO TÓNICO ~

50ml white port
150ml tonic water
Squeeze of lemon
Herbs and fresh fruit to garnish

There really isn’t much to this one. Simply fill a glass with ice. Add the port. Add the tonic. Squeeze in some cirtus. Add a fragrant garnish. Mix — and sip with something salty.

A green playlist

Notes on the Porto Tónico

1. I am recently returned from Portugal where I spe…

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If it is fresh Godwin you’re after, well, here are two recent Guardian wine columns for you. Here, I tried to think about vegetable matching. And the other week, I looked into why wine is so expensive in restaurants — and offered a strategy for the impecunious oenophile.

I am off to Porto next week to would you believe judge a cocktail competition and cruise up the Douro drinking excellent wines. Any tips welcome. And I think it’s fair to say that next week’s shopping list should be: white port (not expensive!) and tonic.

Richard

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~ BROWN DERBY ~

45ml bourbon
30ml pink grapefruit juice
10ml maple syrup (or honey, loosened with a little hot water)

Place all the ingredients in a shaker. (NB: If you’re using honey, you’ll want to loosen it with about 5-10ml hot water from the kettle first - a good way of rescuing honey that’s crystallised in the jar). Fill about halfway with ice and shake until your fingers go numb. Fine-strain (i.e. through a tea-strainer or similar) into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a strip of grapefruit zest that you removed with a vegetable peeler. You can cut it into a parallelogram, as above, if you’re feeling swank. And why not?

Some music. Oh yeah and if you have a nickel for the phone booth, the dial code for tonight’s destination is 90027.

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The Brown Derby restaurant opened at 3247 Wilshere Blvd, Los Angeles, in 1926.

It was called the Brown Derby because it was in the shape of a Derby hat and it was brown. It is an example of mimetic architecture, i.e. architecture that is designed to mimic something else. Like this massive duck on Long Island. Or this jumbo toilet in South Korea. The sort of building that makes children go: “Look!” And (so the idea went) passing motorists go: “Hey! Let’s stop there and get a Cobb salad!” (The Cobb salad was invented at the Brown Derby).

The gimmick worked. The Brown Derby soon established itself in Hollywood iconography, a place to see and be seen. If you have Disney+, and have made peace with the finitude of existence, you can look up the sequence in ‘Mickey and the Beanstalk’ (1947) in which Willie the Giant jumps down from his beanstalk fortifications, chases the eponymous rodent around L.A., spies the Brown Derby and puts it on his head.

Three more branches followed. The most famous was the one on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, where the walls were filled with caricatures of the clientele. Marlene Dietrich once caused a scene by turning up in slacks. Clark Gable proposed to Carole Lombard (pictured below). Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (the inspiration for Paige Sinclair in Bojack Horseman, aka my secret TV crush) held court in the booths. There was another branch in Beverly Hills, too, and a fourth one followed in Los Feliz, owned by Cecil B. DeMille. That one had a Drive-In “Car Cafe” that looked like this:

As for the Brown Derby cocktail? I had hoped to find you a suitably Hollywtf picture of, e.g., Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Theodor Adorno and Toto from the Wizard of Oz, all sipping them in situ. Sadly, no such picture exists. It turns out that the Brown Derby drink was actually invented at a rival establishment, the Vendôme Cafe, which occupied the unimprovable address 6666 Sunset Blvd. Which seems a bit like Burger King serving a burger called the McDonalds? Still, the Brown Derby did serve a famous Grapefruit Cake - so perhaps that has something to do with the recipe, which is sort of a honey sour made with grapefruit.

Anyway: the cocktail is delicious, surprisingly so, considering it’s not that well known. It’s simple to make - three ingredients, only one of them alcohol - but surprisingly complex to drink. A lot of that has to do with the bitterness of the grapefruit, which deepens all the other flavours. And a lot has to do with not-using-sugar as the sweetening element. The Vendôme recipe called for honey syrup. I’m not sure who subbed in maple syrup, but it’s a great choice and has a particular affinity w/ bourbon.

Another good thing about the Brown Derby cocktail? It’s damn near unmessuppable. You can up the bourbon content significantly and it still tastes obligingly sweet. It also works well as a non-alcoholic drink template. Either sub the bourbon for cold black tea and shake it up; or else make a long honey-grapefruit soda, topping up w/ fizzy water.

🍸

Sadly, the Brown Derby chain is no more (unless you count the replica Brown Derbies at Disneyland). The original dome is interred in a shopping mall on Wilshere Blvd. The Los Feliz one is a bank. The Hollywood facade was demolished in 1994. There’s a Trader Joe’s supermarket there now. I bought grapefruits there a few times when I was living in L.A. But the once iconic Hollywood and Vine intersection is now sort of busy, tacky, generic, full of tourists going: “Is this it?” L.A. is like that: lax / arcane / corruptible planning laws mean you get a lot of meh architecture. But occasionally you get a hat.

And were Willie rampaging around contemporary L.A., he would still have a few props to choose from. There’s a Frank Gehry-designed building on Venice Blvd. where the entrance-way is a pair of binoculars - perfect for giant-scale snooping. That building is now the Google HQ.

OFFER!

Online alcohol shop The Drop Store is giving readers of The Spirits a discount. Head HERE, have a mooch and if you add thespirits10 (i.e. lowercase!) in the promo code you will get 10% off at checkout. There’s a good deal on Eagle Rare bourbon at the moment.

PLAYLIST

Baby remember, I'm not drinking wine
But that Cherry Coke you serve is fine
And our love's sweet enough on the vine
Bartender, bartender

Yeah, we’re in Hollywood this week. (Or at least, the wider L.A. County area…) Link here if the embed doesn’t work.

(CW: Kanye.)

ASK RICHARD

Journalist and ocean child Elle Hunt writes:

“Hey Richard, what do you make of the budget spirits stocked by Lidl? We have a few in our flat – Finton's gin, Bitterol etc – and as a lazy, indiscriminate person I don't find them too bad!"

Glad you asked! It’s surprising (but maybe not that surprising given the amount of marketing ca$h thrown at this) how many people think of cocktails as an expensive, high-falutin’ pursuit. Truth is? Most spirits are OK in 2020. It’s not like it’s London 1780 or L.A. 1925 or Siberia 1995 when drinking the wrong stuff could kill you. Lidl and (especially) Aldi actually have decent reputations for spirits and often outclass their more upmarket rivals in blind tastings. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that their copycat gins, ersatz-Aperols, etc, were distilled in the precise same stills as some of your more boutique-y stuff.

Anyhow, the whole point of cocktails is to make cheap stuff taste better. Use what you have. If it tastes good to you, it is good.

Got a Q? Send it over and I might just give you an A.

SOUR CHALLENGE

I was impressed - humbled even - at the diligence and creativity with which the Sour challenge was taken up last week: Brandy Sours, Bourbon Sours, eau de myrtille sours w/ lavender syrup, are you serious? But particularly pleasing was this creation made by Kevin Goodall: cachaça, lemon, marmalade, egg white, garnished w/ a strip of orange from the marmalade (which apparently sank 😔 ). Sort of a Brazilian Breakfast Martini? I too have had a bottle of cachaça lurking at the back of a cupboard for some time and will be trying this forthwith (😄).

WHAT I’M READING

• Susanna Clarke’s new novel, Piranesi, a bit Secret History, a bit Borges. (Your local bookshop).

• No idea who Mike Francesca is, no real opinions on Kazuo Ishiguro, but this (from 2017!) made me hoot like an injured owl (Slate).

• John Gray on the crime writer Lawrence Osborne (New Statesman).

• Kirsty Major on Scouse stew and the unhappy fate of British regional cooking (Vittles - scroll past the italics to get to the actual piece).

• The chilling complicity of Mike Pence (NYT).

Couple of my pieces from this week:

• I went to the Newt, the huge Somerset garden museum that weirdly reminded me of Jurassic Park for the Notting Hill set (Observer).

• On the new fish sustainability guidelines (The Times).

SHOPPING LIST

French vermouth, gin, lemons, green olives. 🍸

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~ EAU-DE-VIE ~
Unaged fruit brandy in various forms / 40-55% ABV / c£25-£!!! for 500-700ml
Friends with: champagne. Gin, vodka, pisco, light rum. Vermouth, quinquina, white port. Fruit. And from here it very much depends on the particularities of the eau-de-vie itself.

Note: the below is a substantially expanded version of a column I recently wrote for Guardian Feast. This one features all the recipes!

“I’ve had people burst into tears tasting these — it takes them straight back to a moment in their past.” I have come to visit Barney Wilczak, a soulful young spirits producer, at his Capreolus distillery near Cirencester in the Cotswolds. We are surrounded by stainless steel vats of eau-de-vie – the clear, fragrant brandy that he distills from apples, gooseberries, cherries, pears, plums, raspberries, grapes, quince and various other fruits grown within a 35-mile radius of his sunny English hilltop, one of the finest fruit-growing regions in the country.

I say “distillery” — and that might make you imagine something vaguely industrial. In fact, we are in his dad’s garage. The still itself is in the shed. The production is defiantly domestic. At one point Wilczak uses the word “Burgundian” to describe his set-up, alluding the great shed-based pinot-noir-smiths of that blessed wine region; and given the emphasis that he places on the locality of his fruit and his extremely lengthy fermentations, this is indeed a form of spirit-making that is much closer to wine-making than, say, commercial Scotch production. Indeed, Wilczak, who has a background in botany, wildlife photographry and graphic design, is blithely dismissive of workaday commercial considerations — preferring to concentrate on making the best spirit he possibly can, even if this limits his audience.

One such consideration might be the fact that hardly anyone know what eau-de-vie is in the first place. So we may as well dispense with that now. The term literally means “water of life”; whisky and aquavit have the same root. I have also heard eau-de-vie additionally referred to in France as simply “un alcool” which gives you quite a lot to work with. But for our purposes, I am talking about transparent, unaged fruit brandy — and while I’m using the French term, I’m using it as catch-all for various different spirits from various different places made to various degrees of refinement.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE MY EXHAUSTIVE GUIDES TO

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✈️ The Lillet-Bianco Family

…and MORE.

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In Germany they call it schnapps. The best known is probably kirsch (or kirschwasser): cherry eau-de-vie, a speciality of Austria, Germany and the Alsace (though it says something about its present obscurity that you’re more likely to buy it as a fondue ingredient than a cocktail ingredient). Poire williams, distilled from pears, is something of a Swiss apres-ski obsession (you may have encountered the kind where they grow the pears inside the bottle itself as I did in this charming column from 2013.) Across the Balkans as well as in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Poland, you will also find slivovitz, which is distilled from plums. And then there is the Hungarian palinka — made from whatever surplus fruit the farmer may have had lying around (ideally: apricots!) I also own an extremely likeable bottle of Albanian rraki rushi — unaged grape brandy — that I picked up at Mrizi i Zanaze, the finest farm-to-table restaurant in Europe. Rough stuff but somehow it’s often the thing I reach for when I need a quick consolatory slap round the face.

All of this points to the cultural niche of eau-de-vie: it is for the most part a rural product, made domestically, around harvest time in a waste-not-want-not spirit. As such, there aren’t really any huge brands; the closest would probably be Jelinek, the Moravian slivovitz giant, or perhaps the Distillerie G. Miclo in the Alsace. Quintessentially, it will be served to you by a Hungarian farmer from a jerry can — or nipped in the dead of winter to fend off the blues.

There is, moreover, no particular English tradition of making eau-de-vie, hence the French borrowing. Indeed most of Wilczak’s equipment is Czech, including his pot still, which on my visit had recently seen a batch of quince distillate and smelled like autumn in heaven. But actually, a lack of tradition can be a good thing; it forces you to do things from first principles. Each of the 60-litre containers in Wilczak’s garage represents around 4,000 kilos of fruit from local orchards, all picked within a day of ripeness, fermented into a fruit wine, and then triple-distilled to exacting specifications that vary fruit by fruit, batch by batch. Some of the recipes he had to translate from German or Polish sources. Some he had to figure out himself — since no one had ever thought to try and make, say, gooseberry distillate before.

Obsessive doesn’t quite cover it. When Wilczak made the first batch of raspberry eau-de-vie, he reckons he and his wife hand-graded two million raspberries, rejecting any fruit with the slightest imperfection — which he assured me would only be magnified in the final product. The raspberries were then wild-fermented using naturally occurring yeasts A typical whisky distillery will use off-the-shelf yeasts to ferment their grains ; the process will last a couple of days. This took three to four months. “Honestly when we first tasted that raspberry wine, we were tempted to bottle it immediately, it was so delicious,” he said.

What he did instead was to distill this wine not once, not twice but thrice, amplifying the potency each time. He is, he thinks, the only person in the world to make raspberry eau-de-vie like this. You may come across products labelled raspberry eau-de-vie or schnapps from time to time — but these will be made using a Geist; by macerating raspberries in neutral spirit (i.e. vodka), to extract their flavour and then redistilling, a bit like gin. This is the sensible way of doing it because raspberries don’t really give up a lot of juice. But for Wilczak, this isn’t really a true spirit — merely something raspberry-flavoured. He sees his mission as capturing not only the fruit but the entire orchard: the blossom, the bark, the soil, the sensory memory of all of the above. Distillation as a four-dimensional photograph. “We are really reductive in the way we think about plants,” he says. “We say: this is the fruit and this is the plant, but that fruit has all the elements that make that plant just in lower concentrations”.

Now. As with using terms like “burgundian”, one needs to be careful not to sound extremely pretentious when describing this stuff — but when I stuck my finger into that vat and tasted the undiluted c.85% ABV distillate, it reminded me why we call these things spirits. It took me right back to what must be my earliest memory of raspberries. My great granny, who died at 98, was a terrific jam-maker. Her garden was full of raspberry bushes. My memory of this is extremely hazy; I must have only visited her house once or twice when I was four or five. But tasting the eau-de-vie immediately disinterred some long-buried memory of scones and homemade raspberry jam in her kitchen. It was more like having some intra-species communion with raspberriness than merely drinking something raspberry-flavoured.

Now. I don’t normally make a practise of feeding spirits to minors. But I tried a version of this out on my son Teddy, 12, when I returned home with a few little Capreolus sample bottles. (The finger-dip method only imparts minimal alcohol). He immediately said it reminded him of that patch of raspberry bushes that grew outside the nursery classroom of his old primary school — which his reception class used to go and pick sometimes. How interesting, I thought, that the liquid exorcised a formative rapsberry experience from within him, too. How intense the world must taste to a four-year-old! Is this what we are forever chasing as adult drinkers — alcohol a kind of methedone, a rough shadow of the amazing sensations we experience as children? Quite possibly!

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