Pimm’s Number 6 Cup
Posted: 1st August 2018
In the earlier part of this summer at least, I spent a lot of time thinking about Pimm’s. There was a rumour that the Number 6, Vodka Cup had been revived and that there would be a series of launch events involving the great and good. Being neither great nor good, these passed me by, but I saw pictures of the usual slebs slurping away at Pimm’s cocktails. Then a bottle was promised and I planted some borage specially. The sample failed to materialise and the borage was attacked by a malevolent fly that turned it black and lank before it wilted and died. That made no odds as I still hadn’t had the Pimm’s. Then one evening we were sitting down to dinner drinking red wine from a bottle in an ice-bucket when there was a knock at the door. It was some never-previously-seen neighbours from three houses to the north. They had had ‘this bag’ for some time. I had a quick look: there was the Pimm’s Number 6 and a few mixers too: it had finally made it.
Two boiling days later I made up a couple of drinks for my daughter and myself. I found cucumber and strawberries and in the absence of borage, I picked some fresh mint from my herb-garden. Some people used to throw in apples and slices of orange in the past. I remembered that too much greenery became tiresome by the second round, so I went easy. Also party-givers tended to make it up in a punchbowl, so that the brewage quickly began to look jaded and was diluted by too much ice added in an attempt to revive it.
When I finally made up my Pimm’s the other day, it proved a moment to savour; a properly Proustian evocation as a profusion of Pimm’s memories came flooding back. Pimm’s was a drink enjoyed above all in May and June, and therefore a marketing-man’s (or woman’s) nightmare. Even more of a bind was the fact it required a lot of kit (where the hell did you obtain borage if you didn’t have any in the garden?). Drinks marketeers want things that will sell all the year round and can be adapted to a hundred different uses. As an undergraduate I associated Pimm’s above all with Eights’ Week, when the colleges raced their boats on the river and it was served up in the ornamental boat houses at the bottom of Christ Church Meadow. In my memories of Pimm’s the sun is naturally always shining.
There was very little interest in the oarsmen, who came racing past us at regular intervals, but there was a lot of interest in Pimm’s. One year a man in a straw hat and a stripy blazer fed me eight whole pints of it. He later read for the church and became a college chaplain but then some unexplained faux-pas blighted his career, much as that fly destroyed my borage. I suspect his designs were less than honourable, but the Pimm’s failed to have the desired effect and after a series of adventures with a girl who might have been conjured out of a painting by Titian I ended up falling down the stairs at the Union Society with an Asian lady in my arms. The lady is now sadly dead, but on that occasion she recovered of her fall and went on to make quite a name for herself in politics.
