More 'cocktails'

To round off last week's posts on the Lobotomy and the Aegrotat, I thought I'd share with you a few more of the bizarre drinks recipes we came up with for cocktail parties during my wild student days.

The Terminator - this was an adaptation of an existing recipe I found in a book somewhere, though I can't for the life of me recall what its proper name was. Nor indeed am I very precise any more as to what was in it. I think it was just vodka with a dash of grenadine, diluted with lemonade or tonic water - probably lemonade (sweet'n'fizzy usually did the trick for party drinks). We made it in quantity, in a punch bowl. And the gimmick of it was that we didn't mix in the grenadine; we just let the thick red pomegranate syrup swirl streakily through the otherwise clear liquid. It called to mind the scene in the first Terminator film where Arnie's cyborg, after the latest bout of ultra-violence, conducts some self-repairs in a seedy motel bathroom, slicing open his damaged eyeball with a scalpel to reveal the laser within - and tossing the excised tissue into a bloody washbasin. We'd put a glass eye or a coloured contact lens in the bottom of the punch bowl to underline the reference. It was a big hit.

The Iconoclast - another sweet'n'fizzy classic, and another for which, like last week's Aegrotat, I must give the credit to the egregious "Mr A". This was was a mixture of port and Blue Curaçao - again diluted with lemonade, to make it a little more readily palatable, and to make it go further. I used to add a little real lemon juice as well, to take just a bit of the edge off the heavy sweetness of the drink. The intriguing thing about this concoction was that, by some freakish trick of optics, although the ingredients blended together, they appeared not to - from certain angles, at least, the drink would look layered: blue at the top, grading down to a purplish red at the bottom. Also, of course, it would turn your tongue BLUE. What larks! I have several party photos of smashed friends proudly displaying their discoloured tongues - like so many Maori warriors in the middle of their haka.

The Empire Builder - the signature cocktail of the small 'dining society' I founded (more of an anti-'dining society', really - we had more drinks parties and wine tastings than dinners; no-one [except me] knew who all the other members were, because most of them were very bad about actually showing up for events; and it was intended as a send-up of the pretensions - and the objectionable right-wing politics - of most of the similar clubs of that era). It was a variation on the classic Planter's Punch, using both light and dark rums (something of the same philosophy behind my orignal - sacrilegious! - blend of gin and vodka in the Lobotomy: I was seeking to offend and/or confuse!). It worked pretty damn well. Also, of course, the dark rum had to be Wood's Old Navy Rum - 100°proof! We'd try to use some fresh lime juice in the mix, although, of course, we couldn't possibly obtain enough for the quantities of the drink we were producing. However, I did find a lime concentrate (I forget the name of it now, alas) that was less excessively sweet than the standard British brand, Rose's Lime Cordial. And I think I would usually indulge my frequent strategy of boosting the sugar content further with a dash of gomme syrup, but then trying to disguise the fact with some lemon juice. As I said, it worked pretty damn well.

Rocket Fuel - yet another of "Mr A's" great contributions to drinking history: the greatest summer garden party drink. Delightfully simple, too: sparkling wine with a good slug of Pimm's No. 1 in it. Yes, you can use champagne if you want to be fancy, but there's really no need. Any old fizzy crap will do. A Prosecco is a good middle path between the cheap and the extravagant. It was a particular hit with the ladies. Sweet'n'fizzy again - it's such a simple formula! I think, back in the late '80s at Oxford, rather a lot of sex - probably rather unmemorable but, crucially, deniable sex - was had with the assistance of this drink.

Ah, we were young then.........