The Lessons of History

The joy of O level chemistry was that you got to do stuff that was vaguely dangerous and marginally subversive. In the days before risk assessments and no-win no-fee, chemistry teachers had licence to push the boundaries of classroom propriety, encouraging attention and motivation. So we got bangs and flashes and smells, smoking piles of ash, test-tubes getting mysteriously hot as we held them, evil brown gas creeping across the floor of a "fume cupboard", volatile liquids causing dancing flames across the top of the lab bench, spontaneous combustion, and noxious mist rising from crystal-encrusted bottles of concentrated acid when the glass stopper was removed

Sometimes you had to work through the boring bits to get to the exciting part (almost like it had been planned that way). Simple hydrocarbons comprise carbon atoms, bonded into a chain, with some hydrogen atoms bonded around them: methane - 1 carbon, 4 hydrogen; ethane - 2 carbon, 6 hydrogen; propane - 3 carbon, 8 hydrogen; and so on (yawn). But listen to this, class: if you take away one of the hydrogen atoms in any of these, and replace it with an oxygen atom bonded to a hydrogen atom (a 'hydroxyl group'), you get an alcohol (heads up, eyes focus, ears prick): respectively methanol, ethanol, propanol

The following week the lesson covered 'fractional distillation': heat a mixture of liquids - e.g. water and ethanol, created by fermenting the sugar in germinating barley - to a certain temperature, then pass the vapour produced by the heated mixture through a tube that is chilled by running cold water through a jacket that surrounds it. The vapour condenses into a liquid that can be collected in a beaker. If all has gone well, the contents of the beaker are pretty much pure ethanol - what we normally mean when we say "alcohol", of course. Full focus on this lesson was assured by the promise that we would get to taste it at the end. We did and, as you see, I remember the lesson

I suspect there is someone somewhere making a good living by advising a special class of entrepreneur how to set up a distillery, how to pitch the marketing, how to lay out the shop, how to manage the cash flow (start with gin, while your whisky matures), what associated products to sell, the required ambiance of the cafe, how to run tours, make sure shiny copper equipment is on display, and so on. There hardly seems a district now that does not have a shiny new distillery with a gravel car park, lots of bare timber and glass and landscaped grounds, as advised. This is our local example - smart enough to snap up the name "Cotswold Distillery" before anyone else

You might think the traditional Scottish distillers would be concerned, but I read recently that they are one of the few industries that are experiencing a boom. The world has fallen in love with British spirits, particularly whisky. Certainly the prices project confidence. This place offers the opportunity to bring your own bottle and fill it from a cask (much the same way my father used to sell paraffin), on display in the shop. Price £99.95

Winston Churchill drank heavily, particularly whisky, and admitted he was dependent on it. During the war, the usual Prime Minister's official retreat of Chequers was considered too vulnerable to enemy attack, so Churchill used Ditchley Park instead, just down the road from here, presumably bringing his own whisky. Ditchley features in an incendiary report in tomorrow's Observer that a secret meeting took place there on Thursday between leading government and opposition politicians (current and ex) and other key establishment figures, drawn from both "remain" and "leave" factions of both parties. The idea was to brainstorm ways out of the economic vortex that post-referendum political choices have drawn us into. I'm not sure if humble pie was on the menu. Churchill was of course the leader of a wartime coalition. Perhaps if I have another drink I'll be able to join the dots