Life’s Too Short to Drink Bad Wine

We had a fine party at 67 Pall Mall last night to launch the new edition of Simon Hoggart’s Life’s Too Short to Drink Bad Wine, a cult classic which I have had the great pleasure of revising and updating. Not that it needed much of either. All I really did was to write a foreword and add twelve new wines to the 100 or so wines that Simon had chosen ‘for the discerning drinker’.

I first met Simon decades ago when I was in my early twenties. He and my father – Cyril Ray – were colleagues on the late, lamented Punch magazine and my father was keen for me to meet someone whom he greatly admired. So, one day the three of us went out for a fine, shirt-popping lunch at Brooks’s in St. James’s Street. Simon entertained us with scurrilous and hilarious stories of the Westminster village which chiefly focused on two MP neighbours of ours: Alan Clark, the notorious imbiber and shagger-about-town and Sir Peter Tapsell, the frequent target of Simon’s wit in his parliamentary sketches for the Guardian.