Dick emptied a bottle of Wyborowa (the house vodka), filled it with water, and let me practise while he attended to business.Reader, I blew it. My first 10 tries were short, the next 10 slopped all over the bar. I emptied my 50ml into a large water glass after each failure, and since the glass filled up, I drained it as I went along After a few glasses I noticed a woman watching me. She looked alarmed, and with reason: what she saw was a guy pouring clear liquid from a vodka bottle then drinking it by the half-pint. I grinned at her as if to say, “Don’t worry, it’s just water”.

She looked away, and left soon after.At Detroit measuring is done accurately and honestly Other places use cheater’s tricks Dick showed me a few. In a mixed drink, like a G&T, the bartender might pour gin over the ice, squirt in the tonic, then add gin to top up. That usually means you’re getting one quarter-measure and one half-measure, but the final shot (less diluted) makes it seem strong. Dick has also been in places where the bartender poured into the bottom of the measuring cup, which holds about a teaspoon.

“You have to let the customer see what’s going into the drink,” he says.Apart from the endless glasses of non-vodka, I pour-ed no drinks. Dick made the offer – a gesture born of kindness, not confidence – but I wanted more practice. We ate dinner – Detroit serves good food – and talked, and at 11.30 I left On the Tube, I experienced pangs of self-doubt. Was I ready for the big time? Could I count to 1-2-2 1-2? Is the Pope Jewish?At least I had my book. If I ever got to mix drinks and someone asked for a Presbyterian or a Joumbaba, I’d be ready for them.! Next week: Dick tries to teach me the art and science of mixing cocktails.

There is a complicated relationship in terms of coolness between London and other British cities, both sides pretending to think they are the coolest while privately fearing the other is actually cooler in ways which they are not cool enough to understand. It was bold then of Oliver Peyton, the man behind London’s extremely cool Atlantic Bar & Grill and Coast restaurants, to head off to Manchester to set up a pounds 2m cool restaurant there. Mash and Air is a name which seemed very well to sum up the contents of our stomachs when we visited two days after Christmas. The multi-floored set-up: bar, casual pizza/pasta diner, and posh restaurant at the top, is housed in a former textile mill on the banks of a canal. It’s on the edge of an area known as Manchester’s “gay village” in a landscape so urban, industrial and satanic-looking, as to be practically LS Lowry.
We entered through plate-glass doors, to be ushered by a girl in a sheepskin coat and woolly hat into a big white grey warehousy space, then whisked up in a lift to the top floor, and Air, where there were handsome George Michael-style serving men sporting dark grey suits and intricately kempt facial hair It is a beautifully designed space.

The floor and walls, both the same pale white-grey seem to merge into each other. There are delicate metal beams, halogen downlighters, chairs in the style of arched girders, a bar at one end and a sunken seating area beside floor-to-ceiling windows. Startlingly, in the centre, was a glass, apricot-lit cylinder housing all manner of pipes, thermometers and large metal containers, which my brother described as “the illuminated beer producing department” as if no fashionable restaurant in the North would be without one. This micro-brewery, it turned out, was the origin of the “mash” bit of the name, mash being something to do with the beer making process. We were offered a range of repulsive- sounding but subtle-tasting fruit beers which had a pleasantly hip air of the alco-pop about them.Although the restaurant had only been opened a week it was filling up nicely with a clientele, who seemed more dressed up, and studiedly stylish than their London equivalents. A foursome with the girls in lip gloss and sleeveless dresses, a cheery guy with dreadlocks, two gorgeous blonde career girls at the next table in platform shoes and Seventies blouses who over-excited my brother, and many boys who looked like Liam Gallagher or Jarvis Cocker. The only fly in the ointment was the background music – a protracted drum solo.