The distiller's tale

I know this one is downright pathetic and you want to kill me but please don't since I have a wife and two kids, none of whom are dependant on me, and anyway, I solemnly swear that I won't write any more groaners. 


What do you do when you lose a priceless diamond? You get ticked off soundly for shoving it into a bottle of gin in the first place, further ticked off for not having the foresight to mark that bottle distinctively in any way, and finally threatened with disinheritance if you don't find it by the end of the week.

This is what happened to Jack. Heir to one of London's oldest gin distelleries, and it's most unremarkable one, Jack tried everything in his power to raise sales. He knew the product was excellent. His great-grandfather had concocted it with many exotic materials. Juniper berries. Aniseed. Orris root. Even, legend had it, virgin's tears, before London's supply of virgins dried up. But sales just wouldn't budge.

Jack got the bright idea of inserting a diamond into a bottle of his gin from the cereal companies.

He decided to slip in a diamond into one of the bottles and advertise the fact. Everyone would buy a bottle, Jack reasoned, and his distillery would be the talk of the town. Yes, Jack was not very intellectually gifted.

His father was most categorical about the disinheritance. "That bloody diamond cost more than our entire stock of gin. And finding it means breaking every single bottle. Jack, it's all my fault. I ought to have strangled you at birth"

Mother was more understanding. And, more importantly, she was practical.

"We must think, dear" she said to Jack, since Father had walked off in a huff. "And since neither of us have the requisite apparatus, we must engage someone to do it for us".

"A detective?" asked Jack, tentatively

"Oh, I think not!" said mother. "They're a mercenary lot. They'd pocket the diamond on the sly and we would end up with a whole lot of broken bottles of perfectly good gin. No, we need someone else. Someone with capacity for logical thought".

"A chess player?" Jack piped up hopefully.

"Ummm......I have a better idea". Mother's eyes were twinkling now. "Find the female Go champion. She will find our bottle"


"Go?" asked Jack


"It's a Japanese game requiring great logical and strategic skills"


"But why 'Go' of all things, and why the female champion?" asked Jack, still puzzled.


"Just do it, dear. Now! We have very little time!"


I'll spare you the details and tell you straight away that Jack, though a man of dim wit, was second to none when it came to action. He caught the next plane to Tokyo, located the female Go champion before the day was out, engaged her for a modest fee, flew her into London the next, and the morning after that, sat beaming across the breakfast table with mother.


"Mum, you are simply amazing!" Jack said. "And you saved my life! How in the world did you know it would happen this way? She just asked me for my production records, my time schedules, my storage sequence and deduced which bottle the diamond was in. First time right!"


"It's the basics, Jack. Always the basics. She was the female Go champion. A Go girl. And you do remember what they all say, don't you? A Go girl's the fastest in searching gin"