Alcohol

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.

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.

There was a wonderful old boy called John – Sir John – Wordie, who was a quintessential member of the establishment. A barrister, he spent much of his time defusing controversies before they had boiled over. In that enterprise, he never sought publicity, finding it much easier to dispense wise advice if no one knew who he was. An accomplished sailor from his RNVR days during the war, he was always a stalwart of nautical good and goodery – and he knew a very great deal about wine, especially port. A Texan can extract five syllables from Goddam: Go-o-o-day-um. John could do as well with port. Po-o-o-o-rt. It was a deeply reassuring sound. Whatever was going wrong with the world, as long as John was in his place, saluting the port, nothing could be as bad as it seemed.

One needs wine more than ever, yet when imbibing, it can be hard to concentrate. So much is going on. We were at table and the news came through about Slovakia. Was this an obscure incident, regrettable but below the level of geopolitics? Or would it become a second Sarajevo? Fortunately, that seems unlikely. In Mitteleuropa, there are always ancestral voices prophesying war and there is usually plenty of dry timber. But it does not seem that this assassination attempt will be the spark. The Barruols have a reputation for delightful eccentricity but they are committed to their bottles When we had come to that conclusion, there was an obvious next step. Gavrilo Princip nearly missed his chance to murder the Archduke. If he had failed to do so, would there still have been a war?

Drink and longevity: there seems to have been a successful counter-attack against the puritans, prohibitionists and other health faddists. Indeed, there is virtually a consensus that red wine has almost medicinal properties. That said, a confusion about so-called units remains. When the measurement was explained to me, I said that it sounded adequate. ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, that ought to be more or less enough.’ Then the cross-purposes were unscrambled. The 98 units or whatever – a figure clearly designed to give a bogus authority to the calculation – was a weekly total, not a daily one.

It’s been 30 years this month since I last touched alcohol and I still can’t face the prospect of a social event without drinking. Other people drinking, that is. I’m terrified by the thought of going back on the sauce again, but that doesn’t mean I want to hang around with teetotallers who’ve never had to apologise after a party or suffered an apocalyptic hangover. That’s what keeps me away from the drink: the biological penalty One of the leitmotifs of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time is that you can’t trust teetotallers. They’re control freaks who love seeing other people make fools of themselves. They spend the whole evening gathering ammunition. The slimy Kenneth Widmerpool barely drinks, of course. Or they’re sex-obsessed.

Churchill. No disrespect to Andrew Roberts’s more recent work, but I set out to look up a point about drink in Roy Jenkins’s biography and ended up rereading it. I think that it is Roy’s best book and extremely well written. There are also passages where he slips in points from his own experience of high office: never excessive, always illuminating. Although Churchill was rarely drunk, he was equally rarely sober I did not need to be reminded what an extraordinary figure Churchill was: the drama was so vivid. After the ‘fight on the beaches’ oration, Josiah Wedgwood, a Labour MP, said that it was the speech of a thousand years. Britain was menaced as never before; France was about to surrender.

I have had three recent conversations, all lively if unrelated – and all well lubricated. The first concerned Anglo-Saxon England around ad 700. Recent discoveries of coin hoards suggested that economic activity during that period of the Dark Ages was more extensive than had been supposed. Without damaging the coins, it had been possible to establish that some of their silver content had come from Byzantium. Every timeI drink a German wine I am convinced that one should do so more often The main discussants were a couple of academics who had been disciples and friends of Philip Grierson, one of the greatest numismatists of all time: a scholar, collector and major benefactor of the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. That reminded me of an embarrassing meeting.

Holy Week, but not everywhere. After reading that the diocese of Birmingham wanted to hire staff to help with deconstructing whiteness, only one conclusion is possible. Large parts of the C of E have become a theological and liturgical wilderness. The Devil is in charge and it is unholy week, 52 weeks a year. Anglican friends assure me that this is overdoing the pessimism. There are sound clerics – even the occasional sound bishop – and in some areas, traditions survive. Certainly Sherborne Abbey has just put on a superb Palm Sunday, and the procession included a donkey, the sweetest-natured of animals and a perpetual outlet for sentimentality.

My New Year’s resolution is to cut down on my drinking. I’m not talking about bringing it within the NHS’s recommended limit, obviously. I’ve never met anyone who confines their alcohol intake to 14 units a week, which amounts to a bottle and a half of wine, ideally spread over many days. I’m thinking of something more in the region of two bottles a week. Why not simply stop altogether? Partly because I’ve tried that before and don’t have the willpower. The longest stretch I’ve gone without a drink was in the two years leading up to my marriage in 2001, because I didn’t think Caroline would go through with it if I didn’t take the pledge.