Alcohol

Over the weekend, although I hope that I was not committing blasphemy, it occurred to me that two splendid festivals virtually coincide. The first is the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin: the second, slightly earlier, the feast of the ascension of the red grouse. I used to think a grouse needed a two-week hang. I was wrong. A couple of seasons ago, a blind tasting was held One of life’s great pleasures is introducing a girl to Venice. Obviously, this will include the Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. The architecture is not that magnificent, but is there a more glorious name anywhere? And as for the interior… We enter and as we process down the nave, I tell the neophyte to imagine that this is indeed the Feast of the Assumption.

Walking through Gatwick airport recently, it was heartening to see so many bleary-eyed travellers enjoying a pre-flight drink in the terminal’s Wetherspoons. Few organisations can be said to have done more for the nation’s morale, or more specifically to ease the pain of those with a long journey ahead, than Spoons. That jolly scene, played out in airports across the country, is now under threat from Michael O’Leary. Due to the increase in disruptive passengers, the Ryanair chief executive, who loves to play the stage baddie, wants to ban airport pubs and bars serving drinks in the early morning and to restrict all sales to a two-drink maximum. ‘I fail to understand why anybody in airport bars is serving people at five or six o’clock in the morning.

Rachel Johnson’s raillery is reminiscent of Beatrice and Benedick, in the early phase, but with no danger of a predestinate scratched face. The Johnson family are not egalitarians. When it comes to morals, there is no equal distribution. But to be fair to Rachel, she has never tried to become prime minister. That charming fellow William Sitwell would be a good Benedick. He is always worth reading, but it appears he has recently been unlucky with some customers in his restaurant. They insisted on sauvignon blanc to the exclusion of all other grapes. Yet, and especially in this weather, there’s plenty of good sauvignon blanc, from the Loire, New Zealand – though one can have too much Cloudy Bay – and Bordeaux, where, alas, the best growers charge accordingly.

In the vermuterias of downtown Palma, locals talk of little other than ‘totality’. That is, the moment on 12 August, just after 8.30 in the evening, when the sun will almost be touching the horizon and there will be a total eclipse. It will be the first time since 1905 that Mallorcans have been able to witness a total eclipse at home, and they won’t get the chance again until 2180. You can see why it is dominating discussion in la hora del vermut. It would certainly elevate a negroni, but you fear wasting its potential ina cocktail  The vermouth hour was once a custom in most Spanish towns. It’s the moment after midday but before lunch, when one can enjoy a break from the heat of the day with a glass of the fortified wine.

Mocktails. Even the name sounds dodgy. Who is this apparently innocuous canned drink mocking, pray? Probably you, if you’ve shelled out close to four quid for a can of artfully tinted water. Like much today, mocktails in tins make me want to cross my arms and make a ‘humph’ noise. When I was a girl, you drank alcohol from the age of 14 or – if you were on primitive antibiotics for VD, this being the sexed-up 1970s – you drank plain tonic with a twist, hoping that no one would spot the absence of gin and mock you as a milquetoast. In the 1980s, my American father-in-law introduced me to a cocktail without alcohol, the Shirley Temple. The contempt in the name was clear: composed of ginger beer, lime juice and grenadine, with a cherry on top, this was a drink for small children.

It was my friend Alex who tipped me the wink. I bumped into him at a party earlier this year and to my astonishment he’d lost about two stone and was nursing a glass of fizzy water. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, draining a goblet of red wine. ‘You’re usually about three sheets to the wind by now.’ He explained he was on Mounjaro, the slimming drug, and one of its side effects was to suppress his desire for alcohol. He’d had a couple of glasses earlier in the evening, but had then lost interest. ‘You should try it,’ he said, eyeing my unsteady gait. After a particularly heavy night a few weeks ago, I decided to follow his advice.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna ‘Fortune’s a right whore: If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels,/ That she may take away all at one swoop,’ wrote John Webster in The White Devil. I find it hard to disagree. I know fortune and luck are not quite the same thing, but I don’t believe the standard rebuke of the smug and the successful to those less fortunate: ‘You make your own luck in life.’ So it was that by a strange quirk of fate, King Charles III and Queen Camilla chose Ravenna rather than somewhere more touristically famous as the only place outside Rome they would go on their state visit to Italy the other day. It was as if somehow they knew that I lived here. Or else that some higher force wanted us to meet.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I have just refused to accept the local equivalent of an Oscar, which was to have been presented later this month in the Basilica di San Francesco next to the tomb of Dante Alighieri. I have done so because I believe I am not worthy. To accept would be unbecoming. It would dishonour both the award and me. They want to crown me with the ‘Alloro di Dante’ – the Laurels of Dante – which each year they do to a tiny number of people they feel have made an important contribution to literature. The ceremony involves the placing of a wreath made of bay leaves, similar to the one in the Botticelli portrait of Dante, on the heads of those awarded the prize.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna The closest I get to a social life these days is when I sneak off into town for an hour or so to buy red wine, trying not to get caught by my wife and six children. I have found a place that sells a fantastic Sangiovese at €2.60 a litre which is dispensed like petrol from a cask behind the counter into one-and-a-half litre plastic bottles that once contained mineral water. I buy four bottles each time I go. Once home I smuggle them through my study window, then I enter the house through the main door as if I had come back from a hard day’s work. The wine is simple peasant stuff so, unlike most bottled wine, it contains hardly any chemical additives such as sulphites. Regardless of the damage being done, at least there is no hangover.