With neighbours putting gin and tonics on each other’s doorsteps during the COVID-19 lockdown, we select the most amusing quotes about this fine spirit
In a letter, published in The Telegraph on Tuesday, one Madeline Glancy remarked:
SIR – Every Friday in lockdown, my neighbour has left a delicious gin and tonic at my front door. Beats tinned tomatoes hands down.
Madeline Glancy
Prestwich, Lancashire
If only if all neighbours were so community minded.
Some of the best quotes about gin follow for your amusement:
Not so strangely, most of them are without citation – probably due to the fact that they were likely made when their originators were suitably imbibed in juniper flavoured heaven.
“Let the evening beGIN!” – Anon.
“I don’t know what reception I’m at, but for God’s sake, give me a gin and tonic” –the well-known gin lover and husband of Margaret Thatcher, Denis Thatcher.
“Life is too short for single gins” – Anon.
“Red meat and gin” – America’s answer to Keith Floyd, Julia Child, on the reason for her longevity.
“I love water, especially when it’s frozen and surrounded by gin” – Anon.
“I exercise strong self-control. I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast” – American actor and comedian W. C. Fields.
“Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt are a greater [vice]” – Charles Dickens, Sketches (1836).
“When life gives you juniper, make gin!” – Holistic health author Laurie Buchanan.
“Don’t cry over spilt milk, it could’ve been gin” – Anon.
Night school tutor: “Write a horror story in six words.”
Student: “I-have-run-out-of-gin” – Anon.
“A perfect martini should be made by filling a glass with gin then waving it in the general direction of Italy” – Noël Coward.
“The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest lived” – American historian Bernard DeVoto.
“The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen’s lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire” – Winston Churchill.
“Of all the gin joints, in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine” – Humphrey Bogart as Rick in Casablanca (1942).
“Gym? I thought you said: ‘Gin’” – Anon.
“The only time I ever enjoyed ironing was the day I accidentally got gin in the steam iron” – Comedian Phyllis Diller.
“Stop saying I’m hard to buy for… You know where the gin aisle is” – Anon.
“You’d learn more about the world by lying on the couch and drinking gin out of a bottle than by watching the news” – American radio personality Garrison Keillor.
“Fortunately there is gin, the sole glimmer in this darkness. Do you feel the golden, copper-coloured light it kindles in you? I like walking through the city of an evening in the warmth of gin” – French philosopher and journalist Albert Camus.
“I tried to say no to gin… But it’s 40% stronger than me” – Anon.
“I’ll stick with gin. Champagne is just ginger ale that knows somebody” – Dr. Hawkeye Pierce from M*A*S*H.
“Things, since you left, have not gone well with me: they have taken me from a place where there was gin to a place where there is no gin” – British barrister and detective story author Sarah Cockburn (pseudonym Sarah Caudwell).
“According to chemists, gin IS a solution” – Anon.
“Gin and drugs, dear lady, gin and drugs” – The reply of T. S. Eliot when asked about inspiration.
“It’s always gin o’clock” – Anon.
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I prefer vodka. Gin makes me cry.
My neighbour leaves a huge gin and tonic on my garden table at 2pm each afternoon we then holler ‘cheers’ over the fence. Wonderfully welcome!
Bring on the Gin with Tonics, Negronis, Martinis, John Collins and Gin Sour all are delicious tonight I will have Marmalade Gin Martini perhaps two.
Churchill was right. If we drink more gin now, maybe we will be beat the virus more quickly.
Gin is not a solution, it is always the solution.
Myself I’m a fan of the gin without the tonic.
Why on God’s great earth would you want to water down such masterpiece.