Spectator Life

Imagine going into an English pub and slapping a tenner down on the bar. ‘All I can drink, please,’ you say. ‘Certainly sir,’ says the barman. ‘You’ve got two hours.’ ‘Right then,’ you say. ‘I’ll start with a pint.’ Ten minutes later: ‘Whisky, please, no ice.’ Shortly afterwards: ‘I think I’ll have a Bloody Mary.’ Then: ‘Pint of that there. The green one. Please.’ Shortly afterwards. ‘Large white wine.’ And so the night wears on. You can have absolutely anything you like: cocktails, double G&Ts, rum and coke, Jack Daniels and Jack Daniels. Two hours is enough to render you senseless. You have drunk the equivalent of £100 of booze for £10, and you need a taxi, a chicken fajita and an urgent visit to the toilet.

I was in Scottsdale, Arizona and, to put it mildly, a little squiffy. Most folk go there to play golf (yawn) but I’d gone there to drink and, after a lengthy tequila masterclass in La Hacienda and several cocktails at Platform 18 (‘best US cocktail bar’ in the 2023 Spirited Awards, incidentally) in nearby Phoenix, I was also more than a little disorientated. No, don’t laugh. Firstly, La Hacienda – a fancy bar in the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess resort – has more than 240 different tequilas and mezcals on its list and, thanks to the resort’s resident Tequila Goddess (its term, not mine), they just kept on coming.

Michelin stars were pitted against hygiene scores when Gareth Ward, chef-patron of the two-Michelin starred restaurant Ynyshir, was recently given a hygiene rating of… one.  Ynyshir, which sits on the edge of Eryri national park near Machynlleth in Ceredigion, has held its second Michelin star since 2022, making it the first restaurant in Wales to receive two of the accolades. The restaurant offers a single 30-course tasting menu, to which changes cannot be made for allergies or preferences, at a cost of £468 per person. Its most recent food hygiene inspection found that its management of food safety required ‘major improvement’.

British pubs are having a moment. Not in Britain: you can blame Keir Starmer’s rise in business rates for that. Instead, they are branching out overseas. Take Wetherspoons, the granddaddy of British boozers, set to open next month in Alicante airport, or BrewDog, which has opened its doors in Dubai and many other international outposts besides.  Perhaps British pub chains will prove to be our next big export market. No doubt there will be the obvious jokes about arch-Brexiteer Tim Martin opening pubs in Europe. But would you really bet against him? Whatever you think of Wetherspoons, I can assure you that you’ll never find an empty one. Just imagine the kind of trade they could do in Barcelona or Rome. Which brings me to Dubai. Did you know there was a BrewDog in Dubai?

Travel to Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, and I imagine one of the last things you’d expect to find is a Frenchman making wine. But tucked away in Hakodate, Etienne de Montille, a ninth-generation winemaker from the 300-year-old Domaine de Montille in Burgundy’s Côte de Beaune, is challenging preconceptions about Japanese wine. The de Montille family has been synonymous with Burgundy for centuries, but Etienne decided in 2016 to try something different, setting up vineyards in both Hokkaido and Santa Barbara, California.  ‘I was touched by what I saw,’ Etienne told the Japan Times last year.

Join me, if you will, for a short stroll down the Charing Cross Road, back in the days when it was festooned with bookshops and Morris Oxfords. At Cambridge Circus, there was a large catering equipment shop owned by my great-uncle, Bill Farnsworth. He made it big when he sold water coolers to the American military. Above the enormous ground-floor showroom was his counting house, where men in tailored suits laboured over ledgers on high sloping desks, dipping their nibs into ink pots. This would have been about 1960. Were you to have a meeting with Bill in his office, say in the late morning, he would invariably turn to his walnut drinks cabinet and offer you a glass of something reviving and strong; a sherry, port or brandy, perhaps. Armagnac? It’s very good.

‘Evidence-based policy-making’ is very much in vogue – until, that is, the evidence doesn’t quite support what the government wants to do. Then governments tend to plough on ahead anyway, evidence or not. Just why is the government proposing to lower the drink-driving limit in England from 80mg/100ml to 50mg/100ml? To many people, government ministers included, it just feels the right thing to do. England does, after all, look a bit of an outlier in Europe, where most countries have a 50mg limit. And then there was a 2010 study by Sir Peter North which concluded that lowering the blood-alcohol limit from 80mg to 50mg would save between 43 and 168 lives in the first year alone, and prevent between 280 and 16,000 injuries. Who, then, could possibly oppose the reduction?

About a week into an open-ended early pandemic stay in Ortigia, the antique, tourist-beloved spit off Siracusa on Sicily’s eastern coast, I had an epiphany. I hated the food. I’d just had a few bites of a clammy aubergine parmigiana, and a plate of oily tuna steak dressed with a bit of lemon was on its way to me. I felt sick and couldn't face another bite – and yet, supposedly, I was right in the heartlands of the finest continental gastronomy. This, at least, is the orthodoxy of the world, of tourists low- and high-end and home cooks everywhere – and especially in Italy itself.

Of all the months to choose for abstinence, January seems the strangest. May is intoxicating by itself; winter, when life feels threatened by the silent ministry of frost, needs cheer. Christmas and New Year are past, the birds are already singing loudly in the early mornings, snowdrops push up their green fuses, hellebores grow fresh leaves, and the magnolia buds swell. They will bloom on sunny but cold days and look perfect for a moment, before frost burns their scarlet and white edges to brown. Spring is coming, but winter retains its hold. January is the time to drink port. Dickens understood this. He mentioned drinks of all kinds a great deal, and port more than any other wine.

On Christmas morning, as you make your first tea or begin mixing your eggnog, spare a thought for our armed forces. Since the 1890s, they have been starting Christmas Day with a drink that sounds more like a bizarre hangover cure than a festive pick-me-up.  Known as ‘Gunfire’, the drink is made of one part rum to three parts black tea. By tradition, the beverage is taken hot and is served by senior officers to junior soldiers, making it one of the few occasions in which the ordinarily inflexible roles of the military are reversed.  Although no one is quite sure how Gunfire got its name, the most compelling theory, according to the Royal Norfolk Regimental Museum, comes from an encyclopaedia compiled by Major R.D. Ambrose.

There’s a trading estate, which might possibly need an envoy. There’s a Pizza Express, whose user ratings online are the equal to the Woking branch. And there’s also a branch of Boots which has a solid range of deodorants. Should Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor ever acknowledge any perspiration issues, desire a pepperoni or feel like taking on a part-time job, he’s moving to a most suitable neighbourhood. At only around seven miles from Sandringham, King’s Lynn will be Andrew’s nearest town when he takes up residence in his new home.

A close relation of mine is taking Ozempic. I shan’t name them or give anything else away other than to say this: they are set to ruin our Christmas lunch. They know it, and we know it. Welcome to British Yuletide 2025 – a country where more than 1.5 million people are estimated to be using GLP-1 agonists such as Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy, with the vast majority (90 per cent) obtaining the drugs privately. NHS analysis of Ozempic hotspots reveals Leicester, Thurrock in Essex and the Wirral to be where users congregate. Clearly, they haven’t done an analysis of private users in Oxfordshire where I live.  This being so, we are locked in a curiously modern etiquette conundrum.

Food courts appear to be everywhere in London at the moment and, for reasons too boring to go into here, I found myself at three of them across the capital in the space of four days last week. (Yes, before you ask, I am beginning to question my life choices as a result.) Not that there is anything innately wrong with food courts as a concept, of course. If you’ve been to one, you’ll know the drill, which is essentially that they are semi-industrial spaces lined with vendors plying all manner of street food from locations that aren’t too challenging to the average British diner.