A £50 million search for love

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When I first knew Michael Cunningham-Reid he was such a strict teetotaller that he would not eat trifle for pudding in case there was sherry in it. For years, not drinking was his leitmotif, along with big cigars and a thirst for gambling, racehorses and catching marlin with just two lines out on the Indian Ocean. At Michael’s funeral at his Lake Naivasha farm, my wife Claire was the first to reveal she had secretly given him a glass of wine. Julian then confessed he had done the same and said over the microphone, ‘Own up, who else?’ Mourners under the fever trees wriggled on their hay-bale seats and the giggles rose to a roar of laughter. It turns out that we had all been helping Michael to fall off the wagon for a decade, keeping it a secret from his beloved German wife Dodo, known as the Panzer. I was in on it, too.