Lemon Daiquiri and the Cultural Cringe

The first time I heard the term ‘Cultural Cringe’ was from the lips of the immortal Clive James. It was, I later found out, the title of a 1950 essay by the Australian critic and social commentator A. A. Phillips. It meant the bone-deep feeling that one’s culture, literature and arts were fundamentally inferior to, in the case of post war Australia, the UK and US. I didn’t like the term then and I don’t much like it now but it came back to haunt me because I picked up some decent lemons in Waitrose.

A while ago, I had the best daiquiri of my life in Venice. It was a rainy night in a dark little restaurant in Dorsodoro called Trattoria Anzolo Raffaele. It was run by a couple who seemed exceptional. She ran the floor, a devastatingly handsome woman, preternaturally serene, maybe in her sixties, who looked like she’d taken to running this glorious place after a career of doing something incredibly important... I don’t know. Head of Art History at the Acaddemia... human rights lawyer... she probably had a Booker prize propping open her bathroom door at home. He was behind the bar. Polishing glasses, looking out over a largely empty room and, in the fullness of time, making me the daiquiri. It was one of only two cocktails on offer.

What made it utterly exceptional was that it was made, not with limes but with gorgeous fresh lemons. I mean you could smell them across the room as he squeezed them. God know what his proportions were because these things were obviously sweet too. Nothing like the mean little buggers we buy in the supermarket that now have all the appeal of a Glade plug-in or one of those squeezy plastic jobs Mum used to buy for pancake day.

So when Waitrose (rarely) gets huge Sicilian lemons, I take out a small bank loan and buy a couple. The skins make a week’s worth of the best martini garnish but the juice gets extracted and mixed with half the quantity of cane sugar syrup and bottled. It starts to lose its magic around Day 2, and two lemons give you enough for 4 good size Daiquiris. You do the sums

I should call this ‘sour mix’ but that’s nowhere near poetic enough. It gets mixed, once again 2:1 with Eminente’s Ambar Claro. A 3yr old (just off-white) rum. Also a couple of drops of Falernum for JFK, and shaken vigorously with ice.

The shite cherries? Indulge me.

So drinking this takes me straight back there, every time. The food was, iirc, outstanding but I’m going to have to go back to check because, once the cocktail was finished, a large English family arrived and sat down nearby.

The noise was unholy, but they had the skill, that moneyed people have, of telegraphing the full panoply of their privilege, in a few loudly brayed words. They evidently owned house or apartment somewhere nearby. A daughter and her friend, dressed, as far as I could tell for an imagined Glastonbury, poked at vegetables while two sons were like unhinged teenage Roman Roys. They were, apparently studying at one of those ‘institutes’ at which the wealthy pay for their children to be occupied in a single lecture a week, to enrich their CV’s. One was concentrating on radiating boredom on a telepathic level... a Midwich Cuckoo of performative ennui. The other had decided it was amusing to engage everyone at the table, against their will, in amusing religious dispute - though a more Godless little fuck, I couldn’t imagine.

The mother Touretted her phone book. Barking out the names of influential people she knew, with about as much intervening and contextualising narrative as a straight-to-VHS porn film. The father paid.

But their main conversation, for the interminable 90 minutes before I hid in the bathroom and tunnelled out with a dessert spoon, was how Venice had been ruined by Foreigners.

I wanted to stand up in the room and apologise for my entire country.

The cocktail lives on. But every time it reminds me of them. Their awfulness and the calm, restrained elegance of the Italians.

I must go back to Venice. Cringe in a corner. Stay very, very quiet.