We all know about Red Stripe lager which rivals rum as Jamaica’s national drink. But it was other brews that caught my eye on the shelves of supermarkets and bars on my first visit to the island last week.

Wincarnis – a favourite tipple, according to Private Eye at least, of former prime minister’s wife Mary Wilson – is clearly still a very popular line with Jamaicans. So is the other tonic wine heavily promoted in Britain in the 1960s. Wasn’t Sanatogen the one said to “revive the over-45s”?

I was amused, too, to see copious supplies of another drink of my youth, Mackeson sweet stout – the one that “looks good, tastes good and, by golly, it does you good!”.

Stone’s ginger wine, that indispensable ingredient of a Whisky Mac (remember them?), is big in Jamaica as well. It is considered a real he-man’s drink – but only in combination with Campari.

This, I think, would amuse Billy Connolly, who once built a whole comic sketch around a Scot daring enough to order a glass of the aperitif in a very rough bar.

It was with another Scottish gentleman that I found myself discussing the old-fashioned drinking tastes of the Jamaicans. He was Alan S. Young, who runs the Mary’s Bay Restaurant and Boathouse Bar in Negril with his wife Janet.

Hearing that I came from Oxford, he asked if I had known Robert Maxwell (I had). Alan had worked for him with what had formerly been British Airways Helicopters, and had a number of choice stories about ‘the Bouncing Czech’.

He brought me up to speed – with reference to tonic wines – concerning his fellow Scots’ huge appetite for Buckfast, the fortified wine made by the Benedictine monks of Buckfast Abbey, in Devon. On Monday, my first day back in England, I was surprised to find The Times reporting on a Scottish bishop’s condemnation of the drink – known as “beat the wife” and “wreck the hoose juice” – as a serious provoker of violence.

Before talking to Alan I had been having a ‘small world’ encounter at the bar with Brad Bradley, a former relief lock-keeper on the Thames. He used to live in Watlington but now lives with wife Elaine in Negril. Brad’s daughter Angela Clark and her husband Paul will be holidaying there with them shortly. They live in Stanton St John, where I once had a home.

I chose, you might think, the right time to holiday in the West Indies. Up to a point . . . The big freeze caused a seven-hour delay in our flight from Gatwick – Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic, of course; always go with the local boy. The British Airways plane, scheduled for the same departure time, didn’t leave at all.

Its passengers may consider they had a lucky escape, for we arrived at a time of most unseasonal weather. In what is normally the driest month of the year, there had already been five days of rainfall when we arrived and the deluge continued for a further three days. The cause was a cold front that had moved down from the US. In the Sunshine State of Florida the temperature was below freezing.

A colleague who knows about these things tells me that freakish weather has long been noted as an accompaniment to such natural disasters as the appalling Haitian earthquake – tremors from which could be felt, though they weren’t by us, in Jamaica.

But the weather soon improved to allow for leisured days of swimming, eating and reading – mainly, in my case, Ian Thomson’s brilliant new book about the island, The Dead Yard (Faber and Faber, £8.99).

While this might put some visitors off, with its tales of gang warfare and drug crime, I found it persuaded me to explore the brighter side to Jamaican life. This, of course, includes the country’s special contribution to musical culture, reggae.

We attended exhilarating live performances every night but one, bottles of Red Stripe (Rosemarie) and glasses of Appleton’s rum on the rocks (me) in hand.

Sanatogen and Wincarnis – who needs them?