Rage Against the Tagine: Cocktail and bull

It has always seemed to me that the bar — if you’ll forgive me — is set very low indeed for those wishing to call themselves ‘mixologists’.

Rather as with that other bunch of charlatans for whom the ability to click a shutter is the only qualification for calling themselves photographers, the ability to open some bottles and mix the contents in varying proportions is surely not one that is beyond the wit of most eight-year-olds. And yet the preening and the posturing and the pouting that often accompanies the straightforward co-mingling of a few slurps has to be seen to be believed.

The very curious Scientologist dwarf Tom Cruise is squarely to blame for setting the snowball rolling in the dire 1988 film Cocktail. Reviewing the ‘signature’ shaker-juggling clip, I hope nobody in the bar was expecting to get a drink in their hand within the hour.

I mistakenly walked into a cocktail place myself recently. After watching two supercilious mixamatosed log-rollers blundering about over a very small number of drinks for ten minutes I turned on my heel and headed off in hopes of getting a cold beer elsewhere before I curled up and died of thirst like a stickleback on a sand dune.

As with people who affect interesting clothing or outré hairstyles, mixologists are often surprisingly dull. In fact, a duller — yet inexplicably self-satisfied — bunch I haven’t often seen outside a local government office. They also share the similarity of often being prickly and defensive, as if they know that we know that they know it’s all cock and bull.