I think I may have invented something --

-- and I think I'll call it the Sour Blossom Martini. I quickly google its ingredients -- gin, vermouth, lemon juice, orange juice -- and I find no cocktail, in the first page or two of those that pop up immediately, contains them all. I begin to be thrilled.

• We know that a martini is a dash of vermouth and a jigger of gin, stirred over ice and poured into a cocktail glass. Garnish with green olive, with pit.
• We know that a sour is a jigger of any spirit, shaken with ice, the juice of half a lemon, and a dash of sugar or simple syrup, and all strained into a cocktail glass.
• An Orange Blossom is simply two parts gin to one part orange juice, shaken with ice and .... you picture the rest.

So then, an amalgam of all three would be, equal parts lemon juice and orange juice -- say, half a jigger of each -- plus a jigger of gin and a dash of vermouth, shaken with ice in a cocktail shaker. The orange juice is sweet enough to obviate the need for sugar or simple syrup. Strain into a glass, garnish with anything you like except maybe an olive, and serve. 

Meet the Sour Blossom Martini. Or the Martini Sour, which is quicker to say but leaves out the explanatory why-is-there-orange part.

It is delicious, especially on a day when you have just learned that your son must have his wisdom teeth out and so there go most of the funds you had planned to spend on ... well, other things. You content yourself with a Vera Wang scarf and some new socks. And the cocktail.  

While we think of it, we begin to question the endlessly repeated assurances that all those chic French women only have a handful of things in their closets because they prefer to buy one or two very fine pieces at a time, and love and wear the little they have, rather than go shopping with say $100 in their pockets which they then try to make last for the purchase of six cheap tops. We think perhaps they only spend a little at a time because they're socialists, too, and the government has their money.