Grappa tour of the Europe
On the Amalfi coast for Easter, I was delighted to discover their local version of grappa. Lemoncello is bright yellow, deadly sweet and served extremely cold. At first taste it is delicious -- like some rocket fuel version of Solo. My mind turned to yet more thoughts on the superiority of the Italian civilisation. They'd invented food in Tuscany, crime in Sicily and now they'd tamed the wild forces of grappa into a delicious version suitable for sedating everyone from your faithful correspondant to small infants.

Then the aftertaste kicked in, and my throughts turned to cats being blinded for life because they walked too close to the 'brewing' vat. And just like the effect of its grappa cousins in Czech and Croatia, drink too much of it (and really, how much is too much?) and your throat, like mine, will be sore for days. There is in fact, only one known way to alleive the pain -- more lemoncello. I've yet to see whether its flammable and if so what colour the flame is, but I'm bringing a bottle back to London so there'll will be plenty of grappa-enhanced hangovers for all.