She would start her drinking day at noon with her favourite tipple, gin and Dubonnet: two parts Dubonnet - a pink vermouth - to one part gin. "Rarely went a day without having at least one of these and getting the mix right was crucial," writes Burgess. Because getting the mix of this potent drink - which, strangely, has never caught on - wrong would be disgusting.

Lunch with red wine followed, finished off with port. If you found yourself lunching with the Queen Mum, don't think you would ever have got away with drinking only tap water. "How can you not have wine with your meal?" she would ask incredulously.

Her sense of duty to her blood alcohol level never foundered. At 6pm every day, according to Burgess, she would ask, "Colin, are we at the magic hour?" "I would then rather flamboyantly look at my watch, raise an eyebrow and say to her, 'Yes, ma'am, I think it's just about time,' before popping off to mix her a martini."

At dinner, she would down two glasses of Veuve Cliquot pink champagne, leaving her staff to finish the bottle (never let it be said that she was a selfish drinker), before settling down to watch repeats of Fawlty Towers (the one with the Germans was a favourite). If she was hosting a party, spirits would be set out and she would lead a game of spin the bottle, before rounding off the evening by snorting vodka (actually I made those last two bits up).

A conservative estimate puts the number of alcohol units she drank at 70 a week (the recommended limit for a woman is 14) but she's the one who lived until the age of 101, so take that, teetotallers.

No fewer than 11 alcohol manufacturers and wine merchants were awarded her royal warrant, with her distinctive coat of arms bearing a pair of cocktail swizzles and a paper umbrella. This is the woman who would get her dressers to hide bottles of gin in her hatboxes when she travelled. Who else can steer British drinkers through these troubling times, when alcohol is blamed for everything from mouth cancer to public disorder?