“Shall we go straight in?” is, according to the late Kingsley Amis, the most depressing question ever asked. He was not alone in abhorring the idea of lunch or dinner without an aperitif: the unthinkable prospect of “going straight in” was used by the late distinguished but disorganised Oxford philosopher, Michael Dummett, as an analogy for the inexcusable absence of a preface to a book. (His own prefaces were famously long and often had more to do with his other passion, the vexed question of immigration policy, than philosophy.) As with so many other aspects of civilised existence, there is no single word for an aperitif in formal English – “a snifter” might be the closest colloquialism – and, unsurprisingly, being offered something other