Some eggs and a glass of wine

Caviar feasts stay in the memory. I remember one occasion when I scoffed a satisfactory quantity of the stuff with that old monster Bob Maxwell. As he wanted a favour, he was the acme of charm and encouraged me to dig in to a tin of beluga ‘given to me by President Gorbachev himself’. At that, I thought I saw the butler twitch. I gathered from others that the Gorbachev tin was in constant use for favoured guests, so there were only three conclusions. First, that Mr Gorbachev was using a sizeable proportion of Russia’s GDP to fund Bob’s entertaining. Second, that Bob had discovered the philosopher’s stone, or at least a moulin mystique, for caviar. Third, that he had a daily order from Fortnum & Mason, paid for out of the pension funds. But most Mirror pensioners were lefties, so who cares?

It is possible to enjoy the stuff in less ambiguous company.