Gin & It

It's a little outside of my Guyrope Gourmet persona, but I'm delighted to have been asked to contribute to a rather exciting new publication called Gin & It.  

It promises to be a boozy tome and as well as submitting my copy and illustrations (yes there's pics in there too!) I was moved to rattle off the following:

Sibling rivalry has shaped the world that we live in.  It can be a destructive force, or it might lead to the foundations of a civilization destined to dominate and influence a world for centuries beyond its demise. 

For a parent to witness offspring squabbling, bickering and vying for attention can be a pain almost impossible to endure.  On the other hand, to watch your brood nurture, support and care for one another over the years, must be one of the most satisfying rewards a parent can reap. 

In this day and age of carefully rationed free school milk, and capped child benefit, parents are invited to think carefully before bringing new progeny into this world.  It’s a risk, but someone’s got to do it.

Having delivered his first in 2009, award winning food writer, broadcaster and expectant father, Tim Hayward has sired another.  The new arrival, set to make an appearance in early December, has already been named.  Gin & It will be the naughty little sister to the popular, and award winning food quarterly Fire & Knives.  No breast for this new baby.  Bottle fed from the off, this quarterly journal ‘for drinkers, thinkers, barflies and boozehounds’ looks set to replenish the drinks cabinet left empty since the last drops of Cyril Ray’s ‘Compleat Imbiber’ evaporated in 1971.

Edited by Kate Hawkings, a distinguished writer and self-confessed food and wine trollop, Gin & It pulls together the best of new writing on booze from an array of hip young gin-slingers and scribes of a more mature vintage.  Dressed, as it were, in hand-me-down clothes bearing the style and the cut of its older brother, Gin & It stands out as a beautifully crafted journal, set to celebrate the glib and oily art, culture and humour of those who sip from the loving cup.

Like Fire & Knives, this naughty little sister is free of advertising and financed through subscription.  Gin & It does not pay for content, her contributors are happy to slake their thirst for exposure by hanging their words in the windows of what looks set to be the bawdiest saloon in the west.

As Hayward and Hawkings wait anxiously before popping the celebratory cork, as ‘parents’ they must be aware of how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.  Ease their anxiety by subscribing to this amazing sensation, better still how about a gift subscription for your drunken uncle or that old soak of an aunt, it is nearly Christmas after all! Wassail!

Visit www.ginandit.co.uk to see what all the fuss is about.