Playing to posterity

My second most vivid memory of Brian Brindley — the first was the magnificent sepia risotto he served the first time I had dinner in his Georgian-style Reading dining-room whose walls had been painted a green so dark it was almost black — was the outrageously smelly fart he let rip as he wobbled into the bed next to mine when I went to stay with him one night, in the period after his disgrace, at his less grand new digs in Brighton.

I remember lying there and thinking, ‘Should I make some jocund remark? Or should I pretend it never happened?’, which was always my slight problem with Brian. On the one hand, with his birettas and his 17th-century cloth-of-gold vestments (which dripped ‘golden dandruff’ on the floor of his church, he used to boast), his campness and his air of diligently sustained but arch self-parody, you felt half sure that here was a man who could take a joke, who didn’t take himself too seriously.