James Bond’s ‘Vodka martini, shaken, not stirred’ will never be a mark of sophistication for me because vodka and I go back too far. Our association began when I was nine or ten in that brief interlude after the second world war when Russia was still ‘our noble ally’. Vodka was simply one more new thing, marketed when pizza was still called ‘pizza pie’ and the strict law pushed for years by the butter interests was dropped, permitting margarine to be sold coloured instead of white.