Making an evening G&T in the kitchen of Stately Prick Manor last night, young Nick With a Fork wanders in and starts examining the bottle of Bombay Sapphire on the counter.
“Dad, this doesn’t make any sense. It says on the back that they make this from a 1761 recipe , but Queen Victoria’s on the front. Wasn’t George king back then?”
Indeed, son, and well spotted. It was George III, in fact, but who’s counting? In a day and age when everyone is worried alcohol companies are sneakily marketing their wares to children, it’s nice to have a kid who sees through the booze lobby’s lies.
And in case anyone is concerned the boy might be learning about such reactionary tosh as kings and queens in school rather than important topics like colonial dispossession and climate change, don’t worry. He picked it up off the excellent Horrible Histories.
Prick With A Fork 
The little suspects and I whole-heartedly agree with your assessment of HH.
I find myself unable to make it through an episode without referring to the web for further info. And this holidays the kids have been conned into doing ‘homework’ by making presos on the iPad about their favourite historical figures from the show.
Getting all alcoholic & soverneign-like… I’m partial to Peter Lehmann’s “Eight Songs” shiraz, which has a connection to George III.
That aside, without having the faintest clue who was King in 1761 (however, we all know who was King in the 1770’s) even I know well & truly that Victoria wasn’t Queen that far back.
Notwithstanding that one of my great-great-grandmothers was a childhood playmate of VR. (They swapped letters occassionally throughout their lives – which loaded heaps of what would today be called “street cred” onto double great grandma – amongst what passed for society in the Ozzie bush town she ended up in).
My three girls grew up on Horrible Science and Horrible History – the magazines as well as the TV shows. Both present sound information in an entertaining way. All of the girls get great marks in science and have a more than average interest in history, and are great skeptics of climate change, colonialism and other discontents of the left.