A royal cocktail almost stumps English cricket bosses

A potentially embarrassing clash of two Great British institutions was only narrowly avoided last week and, as has often been the case in the past, the culprit was in a sense French.

On Friday Queen Elizabeth II was a guest at Lords in north London, the "home" of cricket, to attend day two of the second test in the Ashes series between England and Australia.

And as is befitting whenever and wherever the Queen is invited, every effort was made to ensure that things were "just right".

Except the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), which owns and runs the ground had overlooked one particular regal request ahead of the visit - a bottle of Dubonnet, that ruby red, French aperitif with a spicy aroma, reputed to be one of Her Majesty's favourite (lunchtime) tipples.

When the Powers that Be realised there was none on the premises, an MCC committee room steward, Brian Levitt, was promptly dispatched to buy a bottle. But when he dropped in at the local off-licence he was reportedly told it wasn't in stock as nobody had asked for it for 30 years.

Levitt had better luck at a nearby supermarket and, bottle in hand, hotfooted it back to the ground.

But he probably hadn't reckoned on a notoriously over-eager gate steward zealously imposing rules set by the MCC itself; spectators are permitted to bring only small amounts of beer and wine into the hallowed ground, but certainly not spirits of any kind.

A right royal dilemma and all the potential of becoming an ignominious affair for the venerable MCC was avoided with a quick call to its chief executive, Keith Bradshaw, who gave the green light for the bottle to be brought into the venue.

So an "incident" was avoided, the Queen got her drink and, as should befit such occasions, never had the slightest inkling of the behind-the-scenes last-minute kerfuffle.

For those of you unfamiliar with the drink, after all it's perhaps not as popular today as it once was (although its manufacturer insists that it's "the number-one selling aperitif brand in the United States"), Dubonnet is a fortified wine-based aperitif blended with herbs and spices and created in the mid-19th century by the Parisian chemist Joseph Dubonnet.

It was originally used to mask the taste of quinine taken by French Foreign legion troops in North Africa to prevent malaria, but has also become a mainstay in cocktails and aperitifs.

Just for the record, the Queen apparently gets her love of the drink from her late mother, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, and A BBC television documentary broadcast a couple of years ago "The Royal Family At Work" showed her butler mixing her favourite tipple, Dubonnet and gin.

Cheers.