Cruising it at cocktail school

A Sloe Comfortable Screw Against A Wall isn't as enjoyable as it sounds, especially when there are 20 people watching. Still, here goes. Hold shaker in left hand, half fill with ice. Turn round, reach for one measure of vodka, one of sloe gin, a splash of orange juice, one measure of Southern Comfort, a dash of Galliano and away you go. Hold right hand firmly on top, shake, strain and pour. Rinse shaker with left. Bend down, reach for pineapple and cherry garnish. Up again, hold glass by stem and push forward. Stand straight, shoulders back, arm on hip and smile at customer.

I never thought professional cocktail making would be quite so, well, aerobic. I've made something that looks like my old bath water and I need to lie down for half an hour to recover. It seems exhausting, quite frankly, when a lager and lime would do just as well.

This is just the sort of slack attitude Bas Basian, owner of London's only cocktail school, will iron out over the course of a few hours. He started out making cocktails at London's Playboy Club and then had his own bar in Fulham for many years - he even invented his own cocktail, the 'Isla', named after the girl who asked for it.

Bas is the king of cocktail makers, the Swiss Tony of the mixology world. He could tell you that mixing a dry martini is like making love to a beautiful woman, she needs to be shaken not stirred, but disappointingly he doesn't. Instead, he explains that cocktail making is an art. You need a flair for ingredients, an instinct for performance, an agility behind the bar, and a photographic memory. Bas aims to teach his 20 or so pupils more than 150 cocktails in a six-week course and there's also a written exam.

In a leafy suburban road in Northwood, Middlesex, Bas has converted one room of his house into a cross between a Marbella nightclub and an austere schoolroom; pupils sit at a row of desks pouring over reams of Bas's fastidious notes, facing a mirrored cocktail bar that runs the length of one wall. Every 15 minutes we repeat like a mantra the ingredients of another cocktail. 'Everyone say "Blue Hawaiian".' 'Blue Hawaiian: light rum, pineapple juice, Blue Cura?ao, coconut cream.' 'Everyone say "Chi-Chi",' and so on.

My mouth is watering already. I can't wait for Bas to choose me so I can get my hands on the shaker - a little more rum, a soup?on more Malibu - and sip and slurp away the afternoon in a pleasant fug of unguent liquids and brightly coloured parasols. But horror, it is not to be. Bas tells me we don't work with alcohol. Don't work with alcohol, Bas, you can't be serious. Or sober, even. He is both, sadly. It's the best way, says Bas sympathetically. Anyway, he says he can mix the perfect cocktail without even having to taste it. But where's the fun in that? After that crushing disappointment, Bas asks me to the bar and I mix a Chi-Chi with some nasty-looking watered-down milk and fruit juice.

I soon cheer up, though; Thursday is, joy, Pina Colada day. They may not be real but I can still dream. A real slag's drink - not classy, not cool and marginally less ironic than a Babycham. But then Bas's school is definitely of the unreconstructed Eighties variety - for a start, the size of Bas's pineapple and cherry garnishes would probably make Dick Bradsell wince.

These are comfort cocktails for well-covered women in warm climates, a world away from anorexic beauties sipping minimalist lychee martinis in cool hotel lobbies - and far more delicious. You know where you are with his old-school concoctions, subtle as a Screaming Orgasm. Maybe you wouldn't catch Dan Macmillan or Kate Moss drinking one, but you can bet Princess Margaret has had a few.

Bas' School of Bartending, 16 Murray Road, Northwood, Middlesex (01923 823 858)