Alcohol

Heat and dust, plus nonsense. If the high temperatures had arrived earlier, the England cricket authorities could claim that their brains had been cooked. But the dégringolade over Messrs Atkinson and Stokes had already occurred. Curfews: what nonsense is this? We are dealing with Test cricketers, not schoolboys. If a batsman can decide when to leave a ball outside the off stump or a bowler whether to go round the wicket or over it, the chaps can also decide when to draw stumps on their celebrations after a match. I have a rule for walking in boiling foreign cities. Move at funeral pace and never pass a bar These are the same authorities who want us to refer to batsmen as batters. Some battering may indeed be in order, though only verbal.

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.

Many years ago, when entertaining my then girlfriend (now wife) for our first Valentine’s Day, I spent a considerable amount of time and effort preparing an authentic beef bourguignon. With more than one bottle poured in during the slow-cooking process, it did not offer the lightness one might desire on such an occasion. After pushing it around the plate for an hour, she was less than delighted to then be presented with pudding – a sherry trifle. In the years since, not unreasonably, she has insisted on planning the menu. I have been left in charge of drink. For an excellent white wine, I would suggest Bodega del Abad’s San Salvador Godello 2021.

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.

The first week of Dry January was relatively easy. Not falling asleep in front of the television was a pleasant change, as was waking up in the morning with a clear head. I started to remember things I usually forget, such as where I’d left my keys, and began to work through my ‘to do’ list, getting round to jobs I’d been putting off for months. It wasn’t that my willpower increased. It was that making myself perform tedious administrative tasks took less effort. My inner clerk woke up. The novelty of being calm and even-tempered wears off pretty quickly Two weeks in and I’m beginning to get bored. High on the list of benefits of being teetotal, according to the finger-waggers, is that your mood stabilises – and I’ve definitely noticed that.

Back in January, I wrote about my new year’s resolution to cut down on my drinking. The thought of total abstinence was too bleak, so my plan was to limit myself to 100 bottles of wine in 2024. Not quite the NHS’s recommended limit of 14 units of alcohol a week – roughly one-and-a-half bottles – but not a million miles away. I envisaged taking Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays off and then confining myself to half a bottle a day for the remainder of the week. Although I also intended to do Dry January, thereby building up an eight-bottle credit. So 100 bottles in 11 months was my aim. Surely that was achievable?

What goes best with a broken rib? The answer, I think, is any drink you enjoy that will not make you laugh. I was strolling along to Richmond station after spending the night with old friends. (Very Jorrocksian: ‘Where I dines, I sleeps.’) I was carrying a scruffy overnight bag containing one shirt, one pair of socks, ditto underpants and sundry toiletries. Phone rings: put down bag – and suddenly a toerag appears from nowhere, grabs the luggage and scoots off. I yell ‘Stop thief’, run a few paces and trip. Passers-by prop me up and ask if I want an ambulance: would have saved a lot of trouble if I’d said yes. Instead, I went home hurting, then managed to fall over and could not get up. Unable to raise anyone on the phone, I contacted 111, and was told to ring 999.

Most Tory MPs enjoy leadership elections. There may be an element of what the trick-cyclists call ‘displacement activity’. Equally, it is tempting to employ the cliché about rearranging the furniture on the Titanic. The Brane-Cantenac 2000 was everything that a claret lover could wish for Until 1990, the process was brief. It took only four days to elect John Major, whose team used an underground ‘bunker’ in Alan Duncan’s house as their HQ. By 1997, when the party had been grievously wounded and the election procedure extended, there were lots of gatherings which required more spacious premises – including Jonathan Aitken’s garden.

Age. At the Spectator party last week, the editor asked me how long I had been attending the festivity. I could not remember whether it had been since the late 1970s or not until the early 1980s. But change is not always for the worse. During the 1980s, dearly beloved Bron Waugh was in charge of the wine. Talk about plonk. I do not know whether cats or horses were responsible, but there should have been no question of calling in a vet. The beasts ought to have been sent straight to a laboratory, to hunt down the toxicity. The Blairites had no shame about drinking champagne in public These days, we are graced by supplies from Pol Roger. They not only make splendid champagne, they are also devoted Anglophiles.

An old friend phoned. Normally cheerful, he was fed up. One of his business partners was being more than usually incompetent. ‘I told him that I’d describe him as a halfwit, if I could find the half.’ We went on to discuss another couple of friends, both good men and true, who seem doomed to imminent parliamentary defenestration. By the end of lunch, we were thoroughly benign. I was persuaded I could endure a Labour government Then there was hunting: a passion. It survived for several years under the Blair government and it seemed clear Tony had no stomach for the ban, which was half-hearted. That witty and cynical fellow Charlie Falconer said he could not understand why anyone was complaining. The antis wanted a ban and got one. The hunters wanted to go on hunting and did.

Things could have been worse. My host was determined to lunch al fresco, and after all it was late June. Yet this is England and as everyone knows, even D-Day had to be postponed for 24 hours. In the event, we were fine. The elements were kindly. The temperature did not fall below 60, the rain held off, we more or less managed to forget about politics and it would have been hard to improve on the setting. Saint Jacques, a restaurant which I have often praised, always deservedly, has a courtyard and is next to Berry Bros: so this is a sophisticatedly bacchanalian quartier. The rain held off, we forgot about politics and it would have been hard to improve on the setting The sophistication may be recent.