While America voted I was busy in my kitchen listening to WNYC (via the internet) and playing around with ingredients to create a cocktail to mark the occasion. I’d just bought in a bottle of Dubonnet, a fantastic ingredient that goes well with gin. Indeed, gin and Dubonnet is apparently a favourite of our own head of state, the queen, as it was for the late queen mother. I came up with the following and, being a fan of the Smiths, I named it The Queen is Dead, kissing goodbye to any future chance of a knighthood, but the real sentiment is directed towards Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton.

The Queen is Dead

• 10ml gin
• 20ml lemon juice
• 20ml Dubonnet
• 20ml rosehip syrup

Place all of the ingredients in a Boston shaker with three ice cubes and shake until mixed. Strain into a collins glass filled with crushed ice. Can be drunk as is, but to turn it into a Prince of Wales is Dead, top it up with soda water.

As I tweaked the cocktail, of course drinking each incarnation, I texted Paul, the managing editor of Alderman and told him of my latest invention, and I wondered if I should call it We Are All Dead after Trump’s victory over in the US. Paul told me that Trump is teetotal—adding that if he can’t trust himself to drink, why should we trust him to do anything else—and this reminded me that Hitler was too.

Seems that it wasn’t just Hitler, as Mugabe doesn’t touch a drop, nor did George W Bush while president, Tom Cruise doesn’t drink, and Putin only does during state functions. Jeffery Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal, reportedly gave up what he referred to as “his medicine”.

Interestingly, Bush and Dahmer both gave up the booze, like Trump they didn’t trust themselves to drink, which makes me question whether alcohol plays a role in keeping some of the darker elements of society in check. If this goes against conventional wisdom, well, conventional wisdom isn’t having a very good year. In any case, it doesn’t make me trust teetotalers much.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a wanker.
(with apologies to T S Eliot (The Hollow Men))

Andy Hamilton (Bristol, November 2016)

Andy had his first alcoholic drink at eight and has never looked back. He now works as a freelance drunkard and does many booze related things to earn a crust. These include taking people out into the woods and teaching them how to make booze from wild plants, writing about booze in his books, the bestselling Booze for Free, the in-depth treatise on beer, Brewing Britain, and more recently the book he is working on, Wild Booze and Hedgerow Cocktails. He often writes for the Telegraph and occasionally for the Guardian. He’s also been know to help various establishments design their own signature drinks. Andy is known as one of the politest people in the drinks industry, he never swears and is always convivial and never an incompressible drunk. Honest. And he really is the editor at large for Alderman Lushington.

Twitter: @andyrhamilton Website: The Other Andy Hamilton