By Guy Venables

I’ve often thought that when it comes to drinking toasts there’s invariably something sentimental about them. “Well, obviously,” I hear you say, as they’re usually conceived with an arm around a best friend and a bellyful of wine. Being a keen amateur enthusiast in the life of libation, I’ve collected in my head (but first of all on bar mats or it’d be a non- starter) some of my favourite toasts from around the world. Firstly, I heard the following in an Irish pub somewhere up the Shannon during a three-day sailing-drink marathon: “Here’s to you and here’s to me, friends may we always be! But, if by chance we disagree, up yours! Here’s to me!”

My second favourite is a loose translation from the Russian: “May we suffer as much sorrow as the drops of wine we are about to leave in our glasses!”

But the most relevant on a classic boat is probably this, heard on a Thames Barge full of barrel-chested men at the opening of several bottles of rum. “There are good ships, and there are wood ships, the ships that sail the sea. But the best ships, are friendships, and may they always be.” Fine and witty sentiments I’m sure you’ll agree.

In a move befitting of our age when nervous bureaucrats wait tentatively in oak-lined offices for non-existent people to be offended, the Navy is changing its time-honoured traditional daily toast system. On a Monday, they used to toast, glasses raised, thus: “Our ships at sea.” Tuesday: “Our men.” Wednesday: “Ourselves.” Thursday: “A bloody war or a sickly season.” Friday:
“A willing foe and sea room.” Saturday: “Sweethearts and wives (may they never meet)”, and Sunday: “Absent friends.”

In order to reflect the number of female sailors now serving at sea Tuesday’s toast will be simply, “Our sailors” instead of “Our men”, which I understand and am fine with. They are doing their job and Tuesday’s toast never stirred the soul nor granted a smirk. Saturday’s toast on the other hand has been changed to the joylessly Disneyfied: “Our families”, thereby robbing a poetic and witty phrase of common usage and squeezing more and more grey and cowering apologetic sludge in its way. This was a move not due to a single complaint but of this creeping meddling by Whitehall that will soon have enough clout to decide everything for the Navy as they’ll finally have their way and actually outnumber them.