An hour earlier I had stepped off a plane from Dublin and I was three-quarters deaf in one ear. I had a drink in the bar at Boisdales Canary Wharf and a gander at the seating plan. Fourteen to a table. I was on table 18. I went up the stairs. Only one person was already in place: a poised woman wearing a three-string pearl necklace. Everyone else must have been finishing their cigars on the terrace. My name card placed me beside her. I put my complimentary five-pack of hand-rolled cigars on the table, plonked myself down, and said, ‘Hallo, I’m Jeremy.’ ‘Jean. Jean Trumpington,’ she said. ‘Do you smoke cigars, Jean?’ I said. ‘The last time I smoked a cigar was behind a cowshed in East Kent,’ she said. ‘And that was many, many years ago.’ Further conversation revealed the startling fact that she was Baroness Trumpington, agriculture minister in Lady Thatcher’s government. ‘Have you ever been to the House of Lords,’ she said. ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Then you must come to tea,’ she said.
The vast room now filled with people wearing evening dress searching for their tables and places. A pleasant chap seated himself on my left and introduced himself as Tom. He enjoyed reading The Spectator, he said, particularly the Low life column. I asked him what he did. He was a restaurant critic, he said. And then Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared like a tanned, solid-looking genie, right in front of us. I could have reached out and caressed him. This was the Spectator Cigar Smoker of the Year 2014 awards and the Terminator was a nominee, apparently. He smiled unflinchingly into the repeated volleys of the jostling photographers’ flashguns.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in