My hero, Kingsley Amis, once said that the most depressing words in the English language were: “Shall we go straight in?”, closely followed by “red or white?” It is a mercy of a sort that he is no longer around to see the grim trend he fought against become the orthodoxy of our age. Because the sad truth is, no one offers you a proper aperitif these days.

When Amis was in his pomp, no lunch, and certainly no dinner, could possibly commence before the palate had been teased with the appropriate bone-dry sharpener. In later years he was very much a whisky man - especially fond of the Macallan - but the classic preprandial glass should, ideally, be a very pale, very cold sherry or something with a lot of gin and not much else.

In Amis's memoirs, appropriate tribute is paid to the height of artistry to which the Americans elevated cocktail making. The aperitifs were the point of any social gathering, the meal simply a punctuation point at the end, like the applause after a sublime concerto.

Now those days seem unimaginably distant. In the new film about Brian Clough's doomed tenure as manager of Leeds, The Damned United, we are back in a different world, when ashtrays were laid out with the oranges in the dressing room at half-time.

That was in my childhood, although it might as well have been in Boadicea's, given how unthinkable such behaviour has become. Through my twenties and early thirties, it was natural to be offered whisky, gin or some other spiritual bracer alongside the KP dry roasted before dinner was served. Now it never happens.

There was a period when the habit survived, rather like morris dancing, cavalry twill and comb-overs, in the more remote parts of these islands. Until fairly recently you could count on a wee dram being offered before your tea in Scotland, and in moorland and dale a gin was the natural choice for a sundowner. No more.

The terrible metropolitan habit of offering chilled white wine as the first drink of the evening has, like the grey squirrel, spread almost everywhere. On special occasions, and in those homes insulated by rare good fortune from recession, you might find that white wine fizzes gently. And, like all hospitality, such generosity should be cherished.

But I still think that social gatherings, like grands prix and Apollo moonshots, really need some high-octane fuel-injection right at the beginning to get things going. And for that, nothing beats a proper boneshaker, fashioned predominantly from something 40-proof and viscous. Which is why we need to do what we can to help this endangered natural resource. In the 1970s when real beer was on the verge of extinction, Camra came to the rescue. Will anyone join me in the Campaign for Real Aperitifs?

With no respect due

While I share Amis's sense of letdown on hearing the words that lowered his spirits so, I have to say the phrases he chose are not, to me, the most depressing man can utter. I'm inclined to think the most depressing words in English are: “Your call is important to us”. It's a close-run thing between those and “I hear what you say”, “with all due respect” and “partnership working”.

What unites them is that you know they mean the precise opposite. The real meanings are: “Your call is so important you will be left waiting in telephonic limbo for hours while our profits accumulate and your blood pressure reaches thrombotic levels”, “There is some ambient noise around which may be you speaking but what you say means nothing to me and I will not change my infinitely superior mind”, “I have as much respect for you as I have for any other runt who gets in my way” and “I am a bureaucratic god answerable to nobody who will shield his workings in a fog of jargon that gives the impression of co-operative accountability but which in truth amounts to diddly-squat”.

The common thread behind these responses is a philosophy that Amis himself once identified - a high-handed approach that you get in both public and private sectors from people who think they are superior to those they are there to serve. It was a philosophy he called “sod the customer”. And it deserves the pithiest of responses from all of us.

And that's flat

My Shadow Cabinet colleague David Willetts is among the most brilliant people I've met. It's not just difficult political problems (where should the taper be set for the working family tax credit?) he can resolve. He's also a shrewd reader of social change. It was wrestling with an Ikea flatpack the other day that made him realise how decisively power relations have shifted between the sexes. It is women who now drive our economy, and whose time is much, much more precious, David concluded. Because we live in a world where our food is ready-made but our furniture requires hours of careful assembly.

Michael Gove is the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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