Low life | 27 October 2016

There were six of us round the table to celebrate Trafalgar Day. We ate the same dinner served to Her Majesty the Queen aboard HMS Victory for the bicentennial: smoked salmon with two sauces (lumpfish caviar and dill); roast beef on a bed of cabbage with Dauphinoise spuds; and plums poached in red wine. We drank gin, home-made red wine, white Burgundy, Madeira and Marsala. Our host, chef and chief inspiration wore the HMS Jupiter T-shirt presented to him on his voyage from England to the first Gulf war. Our hostess wore an unprecedentedly slinky black cocktail dress. Catriona’s hair was in plaits. Tom and Tessa, whom I had not met before, were dressed casually and youthfully. I wore a Regency-buck tail coat with gold and silver curlicues, a jolly Jack Tar stripy T-shirt under a yellow moleskin waistcoat, blue neckerchief densely patterned with skulls, pillar-box red canvas trousers, a broad cowhide belt with a toy cutlass shoved through it, and fake blood smeared copiously about my visage.