Drink

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 were to continue over lunch. The likelihood of a wooden spoon did not deter me. I was joyously accepting, when a horrible thought occurred. I checked the diary. My forebodings were justified. I was already engaged, to speak at the King’s School, Bruton. There was one possible solution: do both. Get thee behind me, Satan. There could be worse embarrassments than finishing last in a tasting.

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 had an unofficial PPS, whose job was to humour him into being slightly less curmudgeonly. In the late Eighties, that thankless post was held by my old friend Rob Hughes. To enliven the dinner and mitigate the sycophancy, he invited me. I am sure that Ted was as surprised by my arrival as I was by the summons. I had often been rude about him in print, and once in person. It was at a drinks party when I was not dieting.

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 avoiding carbohydrate. That is not easy. We all enjoy sinking our gnashers in a warm bread roll, liberally buttered, and good pasta is a culinary glory. That said, il faut souffrir pour être beau — and at least with a high-protein diet you can have something to eat. There is a downside. The boys’ regimes all involve cutting out grog, at least for a penitential mini-Lent.

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 only as a trial match for the major event: Hogmanay. No one has satisfactorily explained its etymology, but the word is so appropriate. It has a moral onomatopeia. Christmas: despite the best efforts of commerce, it has not lost contact with its origins as the greatest festival of all.

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 been driven deeper into Georgian houses in quieter streets — until now. There has been a counter-attack. -Earlier this week, even though there were still no nightingales, I heard the music of the spheres. There was talk of a new wine merchants called Hedonism with an interesting Russian owner; I had meant to obtain further and better particulars. Strolling down Davies Street, I gave an idle sideways glance — and there it was.

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 young, even, for Jimmy Savile. It was like eating green strawberries. Not that I admitted this to my companion. Knowing nothing about wine, she thought six years was old. If it lacked immediate appeal, she blamed her own lack of sophistication. Anyway, it was a pleasant evening. Last week, an oenophile gathering, and a merchant produces a bottle of the same wine which he had picked up in a cheap mixed-case purchase. 1974 had been an excellent year in California.

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 his comfortably stocked cellar, I reminded him that Andrew Lloyd Webber used to say ‘Goodnight, boys’ as he switched out the lights on his magnificent collection of Rhône. This had aroused ridicule — perhaps even a mention in Pseud’s Corner — but I could see the point. A great cellar is an epiphany. It almost invites a salutation. My companion agreed, though insisting that he had no plans to speak to his more modest array.

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 could have been used to sole a boot, but not enough to remove those evil-looking tubes. Where did that liver come from: mule, blaspheming Jew? By and large, the boys cleaned their plates; schoolboys will eat anything. But in those days girls were equally coarsely fed. Someone ought to write a PhD correlating the incidence of anorexia to the way that British girls’ schools served offal. I know females who still refuse to touch it, except in foie gras: stuff the geese.

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 by someone spotting a copy of David Gilmour’s In Pursuit of Italy. In the event of your not having devoured it already, a treat awaits you. We agreed there is a basic distinction in the way that one thinks about Italy, and about France. Although there are vast differences between the French regions, there is an ultimate unity; there lives the dearest Frenchness deep down things. There is a France profonde.

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 of the more important wine and cheese entrepreneurs of our times. He asked for a sample. She sent him four chèvres. He ate one — delicious — and put the other three on the shelves. They quickly vanished, to be scoffed with enthusiasm, and repeat orders. He phoned the goatherd and asked for 24, with the promise of repeat orders. The girl was astonished: ‘But I’ve only got one goat.’ ‘Get more, then,’ barked Peter.

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. ‘The Lincolnshire floods in 1953. Was that a great world event?’ ‘It certainly was. I lost six sheep. Jan Stewer lost 12 sheep, and six cows. Further down the valley, a man was drowned.’ Super Hanc Petram, who had heard enough about Lincolnshire to last an eternity-time, interrupted the flood. ‘Very well. But do remember: your audience will include Noah.

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.

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: flamboyant. A double magnum rests on firmer foundations. Robust and proud on its massy haunches, this is Atlas or Antaeus, not Ariel. A double magnum is Romanesque, Norman. Far from seeking to conceal power, it revels in it. In its mighty eminence, Durham Cathedral tenses itself on primevally igneous rock, like a crouching lion, overawing the heavens and the earth.

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 plenty of material. But some crucial records are in danger of effacement. I am referring to the John Smith legal archive. John used to delight his friends with stories drawn from his career as a lawyer. There were, apparently, about 35 of them, and it is time that they were collected, before old men forget. Two follow, both related to drink. In the early 1970s, in a major crime case, John was led by Lionel ­Daiches, a distinguished Scottish silk, the brother of David, the literary critic.

My recent drinking has been straight out of Hopkins: ‘All things original, counter, spare, strange.’ A dinner party in Chinatown ended with mao tai, the Chinese rice spirit. I have never been able to decide about mao tai. It has a nose like a school changing room: some would say, a taste to match. It packs a wallop. At around 86° proof, it can be heartburn in a glass. Girls rarely enjoy it. When mao tai is on offer, even the ones who delight in a Havana with some serious armagnac tend to dodge the column. But a ­digestif ought to pull the strings together: a final movement which makes sense of the symphony.

We were discussing the economic arguments of the early 1980s when I had a Proustian madeleine moment. I remembered my first White Lady. It must have been in late 1981. In those days, God help me, I was a self-proclaimed Tory Wet, agreeing with Ian Gilmour that we were heading straight for the rocks. Ian Gow, the most Thatcherite of the Thatcherites, the greatest of all PPSs, an altogether wonderful fellow, summoned me to dinner at the Cavalry Club in an attempt to recall me to the paths of righteousness. To dry out Wets, Ian believed in homeopathic medicine. We started with a White Lady: my first. And another one. And… I lost count. All good drink is moreish, especially white ladies.

These days, Anne Jenkin is one of the Tory party’s grandest dames. David Cameron sent her to the House of Lords as a reward for her efforts to persuade able girls to become Tory MPs — and for trying to keep her husband, Bernard Jenkin, in order: well-deserved, on both counts. Years ago, the Noble Baroness herself was interested in the Lower House. In the early 1980s, to get mud on her Pradas, she stood for Glasgow Glottal Stop and was brave enough to hold a public meeting. A glowering member of the public fired a question: ‘Whit’s the can’date think aboot fizz?’ Anne leant forward, as if looking for the simultaneous translation. ‘Fizz’ was repeated, in even more menacing tones.

I have drunk the Hallelujah Chorus. It was in Cambridge, circa 1970. I was walking back to College, past the 1950s extension to the University Arms hotel, a work of striking ugliness, even by the standards of postwar Cambridge architecture. Like Handel, I felt the heavens open, but not to see the face of God: merely the successor to Noah’s Flood. I fled into the hotel. It was divine providence. Waiting for the heavens to close, I nursed a pint of pasteurised gas. This was in the days before Camra, the campaign for real ale. Over the past 40 years, the culture wars have gone badly for conservatism. But there is an exception: proper beer. There is also an irony. One of Camra’s early leaders was Roger Protz, a Trotskyite. One is glad that he escaped the ice-pick.

Why sheep? As a small boy, that thought sometimes occurred to me after a Church of Scotland service. In a Presbyterian dies irae, the Minister would have proclaimed the Son of Man’s intention to divide mankind into sheep and goats on the Day of Judgment. Afterwards, my parents explained that the goats were the bad guys. That struck me as odd. Goats were much more interesting than sheep. I often found it hard to get my head around the pastoral elements of Christianity. Most children are made to wriggle with embarrassment as their elders re-tell some charming incident from earlier years. In my case, it was an aunt trying to explain about the Good Shepherd. I had thought that she was talking about shepherd’s pie. Not an anima naturaliter Christiana.