Spain: an easy country to enjoy; very hard, even for Spaniards, to understand. I remember a dinner party, sitting next to a girl who seemed to want to talk about what had been on television the previous night. She was pretty enough, but I feared that I was in for a long evening and a
My last column discussed Lady Thatcher and drink. It is now time to move on to sex. But there is little to say. Hard as it may be for moderns to contemplate, she was uxorious. A million years ago, in her days in opposition, I was in the House having a drink with an elderly
It is impossible to think about anything else. Her death was more of a shock than a surprise. She had, alas, outlived the quality of life, so the immediate sadness is more appropriate to the human condition than to her own passing. But when such a mighty figure moves on, the world seems diminished. Margaret
We should all perform good works. A friend of mine helps to run a soup kitchen in Soho. She summons the wives of the mighty from their seats, in order to fill the lowly with good things. There is a degree of competitiveness. Soignée ladies arrive from Belgravia and Knightsbridge, keeping narrowed eyes on one
There was a splendid old fellow called Ian Winterbottom, successively a Yorkshire businessman, a Labour MP and a junior defence minister in the Lords (he later joined the SDP). He was the sort of Labour supporter who dismays Tories, because his politics were based on social generosity. It would have been impossible to dismiss him
There ought to be a wise adage: ‘If invited to do good works, always procrastinate. A better offer is bound to turn up.’ About a month ago, the phone rang. Would I attend the Oxford vs Cambridge wine tasting, sponsored by Pol Roger, which would also include a wine hacks vs wine trade contest? Festivities
At a club table, a group of us were discussing horse–eating, marvelling at the confusion and sentimentality of our fellow countrymen while telling hippophagic anecdotes. I mentioned a typically Provençal street market in Apt. There had been a group of horses. They were not looking happy. More intelligent than Boxer on his way to the
My reference to Taylor’s ’55 elicited a number of communications about the glories of old port — and one on a less glorious veteran: old Edward Heath. When the Tory Conference was in Bournemouth, Le Grand Epicier would always bid a group of admirers to dine in the Close at Salisbury. In those days, Ted
Like half of London, I gave the new year a surly greeting. It was time to diet. There are two sorts of diets. First, the ones that may work for girls. Breakfast, part of a lettuce leaf. Lunch, the leftovers from breakfast. Supper, some cottage cheese with watercress. Second, boys’ diets, which all concentrate on
Even though they efface the landscape, the snows of midwinter make the deeper symbolism more apparent. The psychic differences between the Northern and the Southern Kingdoms, which long predate Alex Salmond, are most explicit in this season. When I was a child, Christmas Day was not a bank holiday in Scotland. It was celebrated, but
There is mixed news. It must be a long time since the nightingales sang in Berkeley Square. The traffic drowned them out long ago. There are still relics of grace and piquancy, most notably in Maggs Bros bookshop. But the old Mayfair, where the nouveaux riches learned to wear the fauns’ garlands of refinement, had
The wines change, and we change with them. It is 1980, in Washington, and a girl gives me a bottle of 1974 Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon reserve as a birthday present. It would have been churlish not to drink it together, though I feared it would be too young. It was; much too young: too
Like many soldiers, my old friend is a life-enhancing character. Whenever he phones up and says ‘Need your help’, one’s spirits rise. The help always seems to involve pleasure. This time was no exception. He was long on some young-ish wine, and wondered whether a few cases ought to be redeployed via the sale-room. In
British education has a lot to apologise for. Over the decades, our schools not only blocked their pupils’ access to literacy, numeracy and serious examinations. They perverted their taste in food. This was as true in the public schools as in the state system. Think of the liver we had to eat. Fried until it
A miserable day: grey, grizzling, drizzly — October going on February. Our host had reluctantly given up the crazy idea of lunch in the garden; the first guests helped him move the tables and chairs inside. It may have been an attempt to warm ourselves against winter, but the talk turned to Italy, further stimulated
There was a girl who had a goat. By the standards of her species, she (the goat, that is) was not excessively surly or truculent. She permitted herself to be milked, and rarely butted the milkmaid. The girl turned the milk into cheese. News of this reached Peter Rich. Peter, who runs Jeroboams, is one
A Lincolnshire farmer died and went to Heaven. St Peter told him that there was a custom. Over dinner on his first evening, the new arrival would give a talk to the Heavenly Host on a great world event during his lifetime. ‘That’s easy,’ said the farmer: ‘the Lincolnshire floods in 1953.’ Peter was incredulous.
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
A double magnum is a triumphant spectacle. A single bottle of claret looks slender, elegant: a suggestion of a late Gothic spire. In the 15th century, architects bent their efforts to achieve effortlessness: stone sublimated into light; ethereal, disembodied, breath-taking columns, ad maiorem Dei gloriam, shooting upwards like fireworks to make love to the sky:
History is duty as well as pleasure. We ought to chronicle our own times, so that posterity will know what manner of men we were. The other night, that thought struck me in the context of John Smith. When it comes to his politics, the task can safely be left to historians; there will be