FAX AND WUNDERFAX

I have always been fascinated by fax machines. Too much watching Startrek, I suppose, where people go in one end and come out the other. I remember a splendid cartoon once showing someone in court with the judge looking grim and asking the prisoner at the bar whether he had anything to say before he passed sentence, whereupon the prisoner breathes into his wristwatch "Beam me up, Scottie. I'm in the s***t down here."

Oh well, yes, fax machines. But why stop at mere text is what I have always wondered. Will one day we be able to fax more than just text? I'm thinking specifically of food - or at least a Caesar Salad and croutons. You have a machine, plugged into a telephone line and linked up to a few simple containers of veggie protein, flavouring, starch, and so on - and then you would take a recipe and the machine would whirr and grind and synthesise for you an atomically perfect Caesar Salad - or Boeuf Bourginon if you'd dialled the wrong number.

You might ask why the machine could not simply concoct the Caesar Salad from resources in its own memory bank in the manner of a most marvellous coffee machine I worked with once in Spain which, when you gave it a peseta or two, ground and churned and hissed and produced a perfect cup of freshly ground coffee from starting ingredients of whole coffee beans and water?

Well, the telephone would be necessary so that the machine could check the atomic balance of its ingredients against some sort of master template - which might of course be your Mum. So you would phone up and say, 'Mum - how do I make Yorkshire Pudding?"

And Mum would say, "Put the Wunderfax on dear," and she would then scan one of her Yorkshire Puddings and send it down the phone line and in a few moments the machine in your kitchen would ping and you would open the door and there would be your beef and potato accompaniment and your husband would beam and say, "Those Yorkshires are every bit as good as your Mum's."

The invention would add to marital harmony and join the dishwasher and vacuum cleaner in the annals of domestic essentials.

So why have I put a bottle of whisky at the top of this post? Well there's a back story, which briefly is that running low on my favourite cold cure I went into our local store looking for Highland Park, my favourite malt, only to find that with the budget and VAT rise, prices had almost doubled overnight.

The price of malt whisky, incidentally, seems to fluctuate wildly for no reason at all. The bottle that is £33 today, sells for £19 tomorrow. I do not understand why. Nothing else does this. Nothing I like anyway.

Which brings me at last to the point. You see driven by these cost pressures I eschewed my normal 12 year old malt in favour of a souped-up ('with peaty, smokey malts,' the label said) version of 'Famous Grouse', called 'Black Grouse,' which was half the price.

Unfortunately, it was only half as good, at least to my taste. If you had blended raw spirit with battery acid and left it next to a bonfire you might get an idea of the taste. No doubt the makers have tried very hard but as they suggest drinking it with oranges and Coca-cola, it suggests that the flavour on its own may need disguising.

Now, when you make whisky you distill malt and then you stuff the brew away in barrels and leave it a long time to absorb the flavour and the colour of the wooden barrel. To make a good whisky you need to wait 12 years and a really good whisky, 20.

But why? When we are all constantly beseeched to improve our efficiency this must be the most inefficient industrial process going. Twelve years? It isn't even as if they move the stuff about, stir it, heat it up, mix it with platinum catalysts. No, they leave it in a warehouse.

Well, brother-in-law is an inventor and he has a theory that you can age any wine - or presumably whisky - by zapping it in a microwave oven. One zap per year. If you want to age it by twenty years you give it twenty zaps. I did try this with the Black Grouse and to be fair it did take the edge of the rawness. But you have to be careful that you don't end up with a hot drink instead of a cold one.

Surely in this modern age we could analyse what goes into a good whisky? What are those complex flavour and aromas but chemicals? So much of this, and so much of that. Couldn't we just mix the stuff?

Instead of waiting 12 years you could buy bottles of spirit distilled yesterday and then dial up on your Wunderfax - the same machine that made your Mum's Yorkshires - with a few extra ingredient compartments. There would be little sliders perhaps like those on fancy hi-fi sets - more smoke, less peat, more strawberry, less haddock, more colour, fruitier, richer - and there you would be.

Think of the savings! Think of all that whisky stored for 12 years that would no longer be needed. Think of the sherry casks and all those oak and hickory trees that would now no longer need to be cut down.

And if your father in law was in some far off land enjoying a most excellent aperitif, he could dribble a little of it over his mobile phone and it would pass down the telephone line and into your kitchen Wunderfax and out would come the same thing, same flavours, colours and all.

Of course, you'd be stuck in a power-cut.