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“Well, dear boy those things did happen at various times, in different places, but mainly not to me” Basil Boothroyd

Dad told me this story (frequently) as a warning not to get involved with birds with expensive tastes.

Yeah right.

Wartime in Edinburgh and he’s a young handsome (don’t know where I got my “ugly” genes from, but anyway..) NCO in the Royal Scots, waiting to be shipped out to India to fight the Japs and teach people how to blow things i.e Japs up.

He and his mate get lined up with two birds and they’re in the pub (2 pints of bitter, 2 G&Ts), when his target for the night opens her handbag and pulls out a flash-looking swizzle stick and proceeds to use it very proficiently to disappear the bubbles in her drink so they don’t find their way into her nostrils and provoke an un-ladylike sneeze.

It’s obvious it’s not the first time she’s done this.

Dad looks at his mate, his mate looks at Dad and they quickly remember that they have to be off, they’re raiding a German port at dawn.

“Close call” he said ” You don’t want to get involved with birds with expensive tastes.”

Not that I listened to him, of course.

But I’ve always wondered where the word “swizzle stick” came from until recently and now I know – it comes from “Zwiesel”, the traditional glass manufacturer from the eponymous town in Bavaria.

They picked up on the trend when it first appeared in America and started including elegant glass sticks with the shipments of cocktail glasses.

Took off like a rocket.

Of course, given the Americans’ inability to pronounce anything with more than one syllable correctly and their penchant for mangling the English language at every opportunity, the “Zwiesel Stick” quickly became the “Swizzle Stick”

There you have it.

And then of course there’s the story about Bernie Ashwell….