Roger Scruton on the Cocktail

The effect of the cocktail is not so much physical as moral. People learn to divide themselves in two. There is the pre-cocktail person, who rises early, works industriously and thinks constantly and kindly of the folks at home; and there is the post-cocktail person who, once the first dagger has been stabbed down the throat, falls into a stunned abstraction. The speech that eventually emerges is slow and deliberate, and although the folks at home are frequently referred to, it is with a distant and slightly mournful affection, as though remembering people long since dead. The cocktail drinker is carried home to dinner at some unconscionably early hour, and with a fixed smile on the face, divested of all the habits of the workplace. It is hard to learn to drink cocktails in moderation. Like chocolates, they are designed to tempt you, with every stop pulled out. Nevertheless, the cocktail culture has overcome the demon alcohol in a way that the whiskey culture of the hill-billies has not. Murders in rural Virginia occur between consenting adults in private; and rye is almost always the catalyst. Cocktails, by contrast, belong to the world of people who have to get up in the morning - people who slice their day in two, so as to be alone with themselves for the better part of it. When unable to bear the chatter of their intimates, such people do not shoot them, but approach them with an eerie smile and silence them with an irresistible drink.

New Statesman - Drink: In the mix