SIX ESSENTIAL COCKTAILS

The Grey Goose Le Fizz, made using proper cocktail equipment

I'm very fond of cocktailing: the very act of ordering a Daiquiri or a Manhattan in a smart hotel bar makes me feel as if I am, despite all appearances to the contrary, a heady fizz of Jazz Age glamour and Bloomsbury loucheness. Every sip contains the promise of an evening at Jay Gatsby's or an invitation to Mrs Dalloway's Party.
You see, it's the myth of the cocktail, rather than the sum of its alcoholic parts, that's so incredibly potent: More than an amusing way to drink alcohol, a well-made cocktail is a sign that you recognise the possibility of a more sophisticated, less frantic world - at least until you slide inelegantly off your bar-stool having forgotten Dorothy Parker's maxim: 'I like to have a martini,/Two at the very most/Three and I'm under the table/Four and I'm under the host.'

Anyway, whilst cocktailing at Claridges or The Connaught is to Town what Bunburying is to the Country, it's the kind of treat one ought to reserve for when one really needs it, in the manner of a peculiarly expensive yet speedy rest-cure. But perfectly acceptable cocktails can, and should, be made at home too: I don't think I've ever managed the full F.Scott.F experience in my own kitchen, but there's something I rather like about making guests a pre-dinner cocktail rather than cracking open the usual bottle of champagne.

People talk a lot about the genius of the mixologist - I'm sure this is true when it comes to conjuring up a spectacularly novel molecular something like they do at Purl, but when you're simply after something with a little retro-elegance and a strong kick, you need neither skill nor a vast selection of arcane ingredients - if you have a decent gin, vodka, a white rum and a whisky or bourbon, some ice and something to measure the booze with, you're off to a good start. You don't need sugar syrup - caster sugar does perfectly well as long as you get it dissolved in the alcohol or citrus, if you're using it, and nor do you need special kit: I used to measure the alcohol in an old baby bottle and shake over ice in a (thoroughly cleaned) Dolmio jar, with a spare lid punched with holes for straining the liquid from the ice. However, although this approach scores ten out of ten for resourcefulness, it does rather ruin the Mad-Men effect - far better, as the marvellously knowledgeable and very kind Dan Priseman of Bitters and Twisted pointed out, to have the proper equipment.

Anyway, here are six classic cocktails everyone should be able to make without going further than Waitrose for the ingredients.

The Claridges Champagne Cocktail

Angostura Bitters
Sugarcubes
Remy Martin VSOP
Grand Marnier
Laurent Perrier
An orange

Put the sugarcube on a paper napkin or bit of kitchen roll before dropping the Bitters onto it - I find that if you lob the sugar in the glass first, it's all too easy to end up with a great, overpowering lug of Angostura. Drop it into a champagne flute and add 2 teaspoons of Remy Martin and one of Grand Marnier. Top up with Laurent Perrier (Claridges house champagne), and then pare a slice of orange peel over the glass so the oil adds a tiny hint of citrus.

Chez Trefusis, we don't usually run to Laurent Perrier and so I've most often made this with cheap champagne - the kind on offer at a supermarket, and an own-label brandy: it's not Claridges-perfection, but then nor is it thirteen quid a glass. I've also used Cointreau instead of Grand Marnier, depending on what's in the cupboard. The slice of orange peel is very pretty, but I like to pop a maraschino cherry in the glass as well. Growing up in the nineteen seventies has left an indelible mark.


The Trefusis Whisky Sour

Trefusis Whisky Sour:
please excuse it being in the wrong glass

I love whisky (and whiskeys), and have a cupboard full of single malts: I rather loathe that hushed reverence that seems to be attached to the drinking of single malts - I want to drink the damn thing, not write a poem to it, but I probably wouldn't make a whisky sour with The Macallan, or one of the older Glenfiddichs - the very slight smokiness of The Famous Grouse, however, does marvellously well. Anyway, a whisky sour is a cold toddy, by any other name. I also ignore people who go on about egg white in a whisky sour - it's fine in if you're in a bar, but chez Trefusis, if there are any egg whites around they go straight into a meringue.

I call this the Trefusis Whisky Sour because I think I may be making it with the wrong proportions of whisky to lemon. Never mind, it works for me.

2 measures of whisky
1 measure of freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 tsp of caster sugar
a maraschino cherry

Stir the sugar in the lemon juice until it's dissolved, or at least until you can't be bothered whether it's dissolved or not, add the whisky, shake over ice, strain into whatever glass you have handy and add a marachino cherry.

I've also made this with Drambuie - I was given a bottle once and it's a very flexible cocktail ingredient. It's already sweetened with honey, so just add lemon and shake over ice.


Grey Goose Le Fizz


An incredibly refreshing alternative to pre-dinner champagne

35ml Vodka (Grey Goose, since it's their recipe, but again, unless you're a super-taster, I challenge anyone to be able to pass the pepsi challenge if voddie's mixed with other ingredients)
15ml Elderflower cordial
15ml freshly squeezed lime juice
60ml soda water (mostly when a recipe states soda water, I use sparkling mineral water, rather than leg it out to the nearest off-license, but I think I've established I'm not a purist)

Serve in a champagne glass.


Classic Daiquiri


When living in Cuba, Hemmingway would write between 8am and 2pm and then hove off to El Floridita for the first of a zillion Daiquiris. He liked them so much, he had his own made for him, the Papa Doble, but I prefer the original, which is deliciously sherberty.

60ml Bacardi (or any white rum)
25ml freshly squeezed lime juice
2 tsp caster sugar
Ice cubes
Crushed ice ( put ice cubes in a plastic bag between two teatowels and bash with a rolling pin)

Mix the lime juice and sugar together to dissolve the latter, add the rum, pour it over a combination of crushed and cubed ice and shake for about twice as long as you would normally. Strain it into a chilled martini glass.


Cosmopolitan

God, I hate Sex and the City for reasons too complicated and long-winded to go into here, but the Cosmo was made popular by the show and people seem to like it.

60ml Vodka
25ml Cointreau (I've also used Grand Marnier, no one said anything)
10ml fresh lime juice
25ml cranberry juice

Shake over ice, pour into a chilled martini glass


Gin Rickey

Ah, who couldn't love F.Scott.Fitzgerald's favourite drink? Apparently F.Scott loved gin because he thought it undetectable on the breath, which it isn't, of course. Anyway, the Gin Rickey is simple, exceptionally refreshing, very low calorie and after three I have no idea how he managed to finish writing The Great Gatsby.

60ml Gin
15ml freshly squeezed lime juice (call it the juice of half a lime)
Soda water (see above)

Put lots of ice into a tall glass (a Collins glass, if we're getting technical), pour in the lime juice, pour over the gin, throw in the squeezed out lime half and top up with soda water.


Old Fashioned

When Don Draper said 'Make mine an Old Fashioned' in series one of Mad Men, I thought, yes, to hell with your Roger Stirling martinis, bourbon is infinitely more devil-may-care and a lot more palatable than neat vodka with a hint of vermouth.
It's a cocktail that deserves a decent bourbon like Woodford Reserve: like a good martini, it's a drink that can't hide behind the other ingredients. Anyway, this is my favourite bourbon cocktail, possibly because of the Mad Men link, but also because of what it has in common with the classic Claridges champagne cocktail.

Sugar cube (or a tsp caster sugar)
Angostura bitters
60ml bourbon
Orange
Ice

Use a short, straight sided whisky glass. Put the caster sugar or a sugar cube into the glass and add a couple of drops of bitters. Carefully pare a long skein of orange over the glass so you catch the oils, then muddle (which is posh bar-man speak for giving it a good old mix around with a spoon or special muddling thingy), add bourbon, ice and stir.


There are, of course, zillions of other cocktails that are perfectly suited to making at home - the naffly named but delicious Flirtini for one, and the mis-named but easy-drinking French Martini for another. The cocktail I most often claim I want to drink is a Hemlocktini - invented by the lovely Waffle and I as an elegant solution to extreme situations - but since a martini glass rinsed with hemlock and filled with iced vodka would be as toxic as it sounds, it's just as well the Hemlocktini exists only as a metaphor.

But whether real or imagined, home-made or bar-bought, a cocktail is always a perfect treat: and as Fitzgerald expert and fellow cocktail-afficionado, Sarah Churchwell, is wont to remind me, 'cocktail' is also a verb. So then, when shall we next cocktail?

EIGHT AND A HALF

Playing tag with the Errant Aesthete

The divine Errant Aesthete tagged me on her beautiful blog just before Christmas. I feel dreadful for having taken so long to respond in kind, but I hope she will forgive me my tardiness, and not reproach me for my manners. She may happily rebuke me for not having fulfilled the rules of the game - the tag requires one to offer ten things about oneself, and I'm afraid I could only manage eight and a bit.

But that reminded me of how much I like Fellini's 8½, which I've not seen for eons, so I frittered away rather a lot of time on YouTube watching clips of it instead of finishing this post. It's a film about a midlife crisis, which resonates with me now rather more than it did when I first saw it. Watch it, it's magnificent, and rather better, by all accounts than Nine, the film of the musical based on the Fellini film.

Anyway, here's my eight and a half.

1.What's in a name?
I was determined to write a blog as an alternative - an antidote, really - to therapy, but couldn't think what to call it. Somehow I felt that the title of the blog would be hugely important. And then, as I was sitting in the back of a cab, patiently enduring the traffic on Bond Street, looking at the love-worn copy of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in my bag, the title Mrs Trefusis Takes a Taxi came to me. In those days, pre-recession, I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time and money in taxis, and I rather liked the way a taxi could be simultaneously a useful literal device for taking me from one place - and blog post- to another and a metaphor for the journey of self-discovery I'd embarked upon.
And as for the Mrs Trefusis bit - Mrs Dalloway took me to Virginia Woolf, which lead me to Vita Sackville-West and in turn to naughty Violet Trefusis, who I'd always rather loved after reading 'Portrait of a Marriage'. I have nothing in common with Violet Trefusis, but the name had exactly the kind of patrician, stiff-upper-lip, Britishness I'd been looking for. I hope that here, and on twitter, I'm living up to it.

2.Solipsistic Wailing

I used to write a diary. It was utterly, appallingly, rubbish, indecipherably written in a hand that even a GP would be ashamed of, and full of poor punctuation and self-pity. Blogging, on the other hand, forced me to be a little more mindful of how and what I was writing and the result was that it became vastly more therapeutic than my diary ever was, despite being much less confessional. But then, I am the kind of person who would put lipstick on to put the bins out, in case anyone was looking, so a degree of self-consciousness must be in my nature. In fact, the one and only time I left the house looking shocking, almost but not quite in coat-worn-over-pyjamas mode, with unbrushed hair and smudged day-old mascara, I bumped into Colin Firth in Ravenscourt Park - we'd both taken our children there at the unearthly hour of half past eight in the morning. Trefusis Minor played happily with Mr Darcy's children in the sandpit, whilst I tried to hide underneath the swings, scarlet with shame at looking like a bag lady in front of one of the great Romantic Heroes.

3.Resolutions

Who actually makes proper New Year's resolutions and sticks to them? I don't think I know anyone, least of all me. It's not that I'm without resolve, and I can exercise enormous willpower when absolutely necessary, despite being a bit of an all or nothing girl, but mostly my New Year's resolutions barely outlast breakfast on 1st January. And really, January is far too long and depressing a month to give up booze and chocolate: if one wants to show off one's ascetism, far better to wait for the mercifully short 28 days of February

However, I have made a resolution that I will try to maintain. I'm going to try to blog more frequently. The challenge will be learning to be concise. It doesn't come naturally.

4.Running

Four years ago, I resolved to be fit enough to run the Fullers Thames Towpath Ten Miler. I started with a little hesitant jog around the block one icy January evening, and by April I was ready to race ten miles along the Thames from Chiswick Bridge to Teddington Lock and back again. I did it in a perfectly respectable time and even kept up the running afterwards, recording my best ever 10k time of 51 minutes a few months later when pregnant with Hunca Munca*. I kept up the running until I was five months gone and people started pointing and laughing, and so I gave it up in favour of lounging on a chaise longue, eating vast amounts of cake and chocolate.

I've run since in a desultory kind of way, for therapeutic rather than aesthetic reasons, but now it's time to maximise its benefits: I need a proper goal, a challenge to keep me going. I suppose I'd better sign up for the Towpath Ten again. Oh God, I'm tired just thinking about it.

5. Astrology

A very long time ago, I trained in astrology with The Company Of Astrologers. Alongside the day job, I used to write horoscope columns and features for various women's magazines but gave it all up when the children came along and I became far too knackered to care about my own future, let alone anyone else's. But I still like to keep my hand in, which is why you'll be subjected from time to time to an astrology post on Mrs Trefusis.

6. French without Tears

For complicated reasons that have a post all of their own, Trefusis Minor goes to a French school. Not being very, um, capable in any language other than English when he got there, he cried every day for the whole of the first term. A year later, he can speak french (and a lot of franglais) but still sings in English. This holiday he's been mostly singing Cheryl Cole, which is slightly odd in a five year old.

7. Vanity

I used to lie about my age all the time for all sorts of dropped-on-my-head-as-an-adult reasons, mostly to do with the fact that until you're forty you can pretend you're still all potential. But after the big Four-Oh, really, one has to admit that life is no longer a rehearsal. I didn't feel nearly grown up enough to be forty, and in fact went to a lot of trouble to put a thick smokescreen round the big birthday, giving birth to the Tiny Trefusis* three days before as a distraction technique, and so I could truthfully say that I had both my children in my thirties.

Anyway, the botox has been banished in the Great Trefusis Economy Drive and I had to get reading glasses so I couldn't really lie about my age anymore. Fortunately, writing this blog and the high jinx of twitter has given me a new-found self-confidence and at last I feel I can come clean: I'm 42. The profile picture of me with complicated hair was taken in November 2008: believe me, having your hair pulled back that tightly does things botox can only dream about.

8. Accents

I would say that I didn't have an accent. Well, when I'm quite awfully drunk I speak terribly- terribly carefully and enunciatedly in accents of Celia Johnson. What I mean to say is that I don't have a specific regional accent. However, I can, when required, offer you a marvellous Merseyside. When I was sixteen, I went to live with my cousins on the Wirral so I could go to school with them for my A' Levels, rather than continue at the boarding school at which I'd been so miserable. I arrived at their door with an accent that was pure Fotherington-Thomas and which they quickly established would get me into all sorts of trouble, and probably get me beaten up, quite aside from the fact that few people understood what I was saying. So they gave me reverse elocution lessons. To this day, I am able to speak scouse like a native. Try me.

8½.* Tiny Trefusis

Tiny Trefusis was formerly known as Hunca Munca. But she's a little less destructive now she's coming up to three, so it seems unfair to stick her with the soubriquet. She's very funny and told my mother over Christmas that she liked the vicar at church because he wore curtains and a party hat.

My blogs to watch in 2010

I love all the blogs on my blogroll, look at all of them with unerring regularity and heartily recommend them.

However, it's hard to chose which seven to actually tag, and pass this meme onto, but here are a few that were new discoveries for me in 2009 that I'd like to share with you.

SmackCrumpleBang. Oh, I'm devoted to 'Dougie' Houser. He's clever and funny and talented and one of the most delightful people you could care to meet. His utterly original blog is, on the whole, picture-led, him being an artist and all. He does wonderful pop-ups too.

The Spice Spoon. I'll confess a bias: S is a real-life friend of long-standing, but look at her blog and judge for yourself whether I'm allowing a personal relationship to affect my objectivity. I don't think so - I'm mad about this site, which is more of a food memoir than a typical food blog, and was recently, and rightly, recommended as one of her Top Ten Blogs to Follow in 2010 by ace blogger LibertyLondonGirl.

All Best Wishes. Like me, All Best Wishes is not a prolific blogger, so when she does post, you fall upon her writing with ravenous hunger. Broadly, her subjects are motherhood and work, but her themes are universal. I hope, like me, you'll enjoy the discovery.

Mr London Street. It's more a collection of essays than a traditional blog, and the quality of prose makes for a terrific read. I'm not going to say anything more - check it out for yourself.

One of 365. 'One' posts every day without fail, as the title of her blog suggests. The scope of her blog encompasses everything from fashion and beauty to depression and heartbreak. Follow her journey.

Helena Halme. Another of LLG's 2010 picks, Helena Halme's chronicle of love for her English Sailor has been keeping her readers hooked for months. An expat Finn, her writing is compelling stuff.

Knightley or Elton. This is a comparatively new blog by a very young and very clever aspiring actor. Originally from Australia, he talks and writes as if he's straight from the pages of Brideshead Revisited, and I really rather like that. I include him here not merely because I like him, but also to encourage him to keep up the good work.

I GROW OLD...I GROW OLD...I SHALL WEAR THE BOTTOMS OF MY TROUSERS ROLLED

I can no longer pretend to be young. I celebrate my birthday in tacit agreement that no one will be so ill-mannered to enquire as to the particular anniversary, and Mr Trefusis has kindly taught Trefusis Minor to tell everyone that I'm thirty-five. But then, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, 'no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating'.

I've been gazing at my aging navel lately. Time slips through my fingers, yet winds itself around the body. I find I can no longer defy the signs of aging, despite the exortations to do so from the Olay adverts. Some of it is insidious, like the slow contagion of reading glasses amongst my closest friends: our book group has been meeting for more than fifteen years, yet in the last six months, I've noticed that as soon as we start talking about the latest book, seven pairs of spectacles are simultaneously repositioned on noses. Some of it is merely the inevitable triumph of comfort over style: no one my age ever bothers to try and walk anywhere in taxi shoes - we simply adopt a large enough handbag in which to hide the spare flats, and hop back into the heels round the corner from the destination. The list of aging evidence is seemingly endless. Oh, God - everything - modern music is just TOO LOUD, particularly in clothes shops, and I wore all the fashions the first time round. I even found myself looking longingly at a KitchenAid mixer in the John Lewis catalogue - the last time I looked longingly at anything in region of four hundred quid, it was a pair of killingly high raspberry-glacé Louboutins. Actually, I'm not dead yet: they're much nicer than a KitchenAid, and just as inaccessibly priced.

Until shamefully recently, I was rabidly anxious about getting older: I loathed the creeping lines on my face, and my white, skinny, Ancient Mariner hands. I hated myself for both being absurdly perked up by a shout of 'Oy! Darlin'!' from White-Van-Man and for resenting the fact that I was no longer the woman at the party the men wanted to talk to. I felt the missed opportunities of youth too keenly: I longed to get back the time when life was all potential, when it was still a rehearsal. I wanted to smash something when Kazuo Ishiguro said that it dawned on him that most of the literary masterpieces had been written by people under forty. So I pretended to myself that it wasn't happening: I grew my hair defiantly long. I had vats of botox pumped into my forehead. The effects were superficial: I was still the same person inside.

But lately, there has been rather a change. I am, for the first time in my life, genuinely bien dans ma peau.

What happened? Well, on the vanity front, money got tighter and so I gave up Botox. My self-esteem didn't fall the same distance as my brow and it made me ponder a while on the current vogue for a one-size-fits-all ideal of grown-up beauty (yes, Nicole Kidman, Madonna, Kylie Minogue et al, I'm talking about you), particularly after visiting an eminent cosmetic dermatologist for work and hearing about an experimental rejuvenating treatment involving sucking out your own fat, harvesting the stem cells from it and then reinjecting it into your face at a cost of nearly eight thousand pounds. Is it just me, or does that sound really quite horrid? It sent me scuttling into google to look at images of beautiful ancients. Lauren Bacall (above) is no stranger to sun and cigarettes, yet still manages to look rather fabulous. The face I want at seventy is one which reflects the wisdom and character that time has built, rather than the skill of a cosmetic surgeon.

Yet, it's not just about conquering my besetting sin: I think the revolution about the way I feel about myself has had an awful lot to do with the therapeutic qualities of writing this blog (and lovely twitter, to which I'm still addicted). It's not only that it's given me an identity outside the - admittedly lovely - ones I already occupy as wife, mother, career-kind-of-person, but it's also introduced me to the whole glorious world of the internets - the burgeoning blog-roll down the side of Mrs Trefusis is testament to the quantity and quality of fascinating minds out there in the ether.

And most of all, I hear the words of Virginia Woolf echo in my head - 'One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.' - and feel reconciled and content.

KILLING THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE (2)

I woke up this morning fighting my way out from the duvet, still locked in a suffocating dream in which I was crushed under a mountainous heap of laundry, with only my Louboutin-clad feet sticking out like the Wicked Witch of the East. True, it made quite a change from my current recurring nightmare, in which all the hopes of my company rescuing itself from the brink of financial disaster rest solely on my shoulders. I guess I should be grateful for any kind of dream at all, since even my unconscious collapses into an exhausted heap at the end of the day and can't be bothered to serve anything up for me to analyse on the tube into work, Jungian textbook in hand.

Anyway, having fretted all week about the difficult circumstances in which Modern Woman finds herself, I find I have the answer: there is no miracle that can't be worked if one is knee deep in staff. Unfortunately, one also has to be knee deep in cash for this to be an option, but it's an answer of sorts. My real issue is that Nature abhors a vacuum and so do I. The straw that breaks this camel's back is always housework. When I think of dust I immediately think of Philip Pullman, or even Eliot, rather than the ghastliness that lurks under the bed and the sofa and on every surface. Divine VW would never have contemplated starching Leonard's collars. I can't see her ever having a meltdown over the Hogarth presses about his inability to move a coffee cup from sitting room to sink, or a trauma about repatriating socks and pants with laundry basket. Her marvellousness was entirely predicated on armies of people 'below stairs'. So I am convinced I'm living a century too late. I should have been a nice Edwardian lady with suffragette leanings, much in the manner of the mother in Mary Poppins: Chicly campaigning in a costume of green and purple without having to involve oneself with anything ghastly like force feeding or the King's racehorse. On reflection a spot of elegant marching or a little light chaining to the railings of the Houses of Parliament might have been possible. I would have been sustained in any attendant creative endeavours by an army of loveliness. Think how blissful it would be to have someone to do the washing and the shopping and to remember to put food on the table at regular intervals. All these things appear to be beyond me. But if there was a collection of willing helpmeets, imagine how much fabulousness I'd be able to radiate, and how many bon mots I'd be able to offer, and how delighted Mr Trefusis and I would be to see each other every evening instead of snarling in a way that's only ever really mitigated by the consumption of vast amounts of wine. Yes. It all comes down to The Servant Question.

And here I am, struggling womanfully through a life that resembles a king size duvet inside a cot bed cover, horribly peeved at the injustice of being too poor to have a housekeeper, a nanny and hot and cold running maids in every room. I have a reputation for competence at work completely belied by my domestic situation, in which the entire family is often faced with a total lack of matching socks and an absence of essentials like milk, cereal and lavatory paper. My only saving grace is our proximity to the Co-op.

In truth, I do have 'help'. I have a cleaning lady for what is supposed to be three and a half hours a week, though judging by the evidence I can only think that the cleaning takes her half an hour and she spends the rest lying on the chaise longue eating violet creams. But she speaks no english, and I'm unable to offer her any written or spoken instruction. The best I can hope for is that she intuits what needs doing around the house. Mostly she intuits that the orchids need rearranging, and that the bears in Hunca Munca's cot could be more agreeably positioned, happily ignoring the snowdrift of dust and fluff that has built up behind every door and on the bookshelves. The house is marginally tidier when she's been, but certainly no cleaner.

And this is why I'm writing this post at six minutes to midnight, with dirty dishes still stacked in the sink, the last load of washing still unhung, a dusting of ground cocopops underfoot unswept up from breakfast yesterday, Kafka still languishing on the side unread, and another week wading through the blood on the office carpet looming ahead of me.

On second thoughts, what I actually need is a wife.