There comes a point in every British summer when Pimm’s gets boring: its sweetness, its ubiquity, the horrible little claw people make with their hand when they’re trying to fish half a strawberry out of the bottom of their glass. Then there is another, later moment when Pimm’s becomes disgusting. For me, that was last week, when I sucked a fingernail-sized chunk of banana(?!) through a rapidly disintegrating paper straw. It was vile. Absolutely vile.

The thing Pimm’s has going for it is its utility. It’s an acceptable drink to pre-batch and serve in a jug, and you can buy all of the essential ingredients at a corner shop. The thing is, they’re not very good. Pimm’s itself is a little bit disgusting, so we mask it with the chemical sweetness of R White’s lemonade. There is no need for us to be drinking this concoction at a 3:1 ratio, week-in, week-out, from July until the start of September. But we do. We drink it because it’s there, because we can, and because, well, why not? And when it comes time for us to invite our friends over for a barbecue, or a long lunch, or a cocktail in the garden, we serve the same injustice right back to them.

But there are hundreds of cocktails and mixed drinks that were made to be batched, and even more that can be. And none of them require slicing the entirety of the Tesco Express fruit and veg isle into tiny little choking hazards. The more I think about it, the less reason there is to drink Pimm’s at all. So try these instead.