Dinner parties

Drinking during pregnancy just isn’t the same

There are many cruel ironies in life. One of them is getting pregnant (and intending to keep it) at just the age at which you begin to understand how and where to drink good booze and feel justified in spending money to do so. So, finding myself with a bun in the oven just after my forty-first birthday this summer, I had to bring to a screeching halt the habits of the last few years: drinking really good wine, sometimes quite a lot of it, fairly regularly. Indeed, I spent the first week of pregnancy in the Languedoc drinking a bottle a night, plus the odd gin and tonic, because of course I didn’t know. Just last year I made a special journey to an industrial park outside Brussels to collect six bottles of 2013 white Bordeaux — it was that good.

pregnancy

Dinner with Judy

How better to lift a torch against late-winter gloom than by conjuring an evening from a time when our country was still a confident going concern, when its culture and ideas bestrode the free world? What with our plague-driven mania for virtual living, it’s hard to get anyone to come to dinner these days. And since she died in 1969, our virtual guest of honor won’t be coming either. But from an era full of entertainment giants, we pick one, the star of stars: Miss Judy Garland. If only in our minds, we invite Judy to cocktails and dinner and then, just maybe if we get lucky, to linger late into the evening around the piano and sing a few of the old songs. This is not a formal affair, just two couples on a Friday evening after work.

judy