Without a word of advice, Paul Methuen set me free

At the time he will barely have noticed me. In his mid-forties and (to me at 18) middle-aged, he was our host at a dinner in his beautiful old house in Kingston, Jamaica: a wooden mansion that in its time had seen the town spread up from the harbour and push back the sugar plantations. But as you’d expect from a man for whom garden design was a passion, Paul’s house had kept its generous grounds from the age of sugar.

Everything about Paul Methuen was generous: from his hospitality, to the sheer variety of his guests, to his warm and wicked sense of mischief and the measures of the whisky he dispensed (and consumed). In truth there were no measures: the idea of measuring a drink — indeed of measuring anything except the interiors and gardens he loved — would have been alien to Paul’s nature.

The great mahogany table was magnificently laid, the candle flames hovered motionless in the still, tropical night, and the crystal and silver shone.