Gin though. Isn't it a bit, you know...thin? Like a nice drink of water.

[Sir C]

Have you any idea what original tonic tasted like? When it was basically just liquid quinine?

How on earth could we govern the natives/suppress my forebears with us getting malaria all the time?

If you consider it fundamentally gay for a small company from Leadenhall Street to take over an entire sub-continent, or their successors persuading 2.5m Indians to volunteer to give the Japs biggest kicking in Jap history, could you please define "heterosexual" for me?

Wouldn't have thought I'd have to flog you the imperial angle, C.

Or the Glorious Revolution.

We only drink Gin cos Billy O brought it over to liberate us from Divine Right papist oppression (or at least the fear of it). That's why us Brits drink Gin. Though we were a bit too patriotic - hence Hogarth's Gin Lane half a century later.

Like Special Brew - the drink brewed to thank us for liberating Europe in WW2 - Gin and G&T celebrate the birth of modern parliamentary democracy and the slaughter and economic exploitation of loads of Indians (but at least we taught them English so I can spend **** loads of time there chatting to locals while only picking the basics of the lingo. Though my missus speaks it conversationally now, that wouldn't have happened if they she hadn't had native anglophones to help her learn.}

No G&T, no Gandhi. I rest my case.

(And all my mates from Kashmir to Kerala would be speaking Ruskie or Jap which, however much I hate our empire, is a fück sight worse.}

My dear chap, you mustn't misunderstand me; heaven forbid I should ever belittle the achievements of England's sons and daughters who built our magnificent empire. I am an eager student of the trials they underwent, from Malaya to India, from Africa to the Caribbean, the empire was built by people who were absolutely rock hard whilst remaining, in the most, wise and compassionate. Truly, they were the finest of Englishmen and we are wuite right to be proud of them and hold them in the highest esteem. Like many Indians I know, my greatest regret is that our glorious empire was forcibly dismantled by Yankee bullying when we were at our weakest, having saved the world from Nazism.

I merely contend that these superhumans drank gin and tonic for medicinal purposes only, and that their drink of choice was the whisky and soda, known in the East as the stengah.

No gentleman would drink gin as a matter of choice.