Drink

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.

The heatwave no sooner ended than it was replaced by the Mandywave. Over the next few days, it may be hard to remember that there are other issues in British politics, including interventions by Tony Blair and Alan Milburn, plus a couple of important by-elections. When Lord Mandelson was forced out, Keir Starmer seemed to relish the defenestration. Mandy has now had an unexpected revenge. His comments on Sir Stumbler’s methods of running a government were meant to be sealed in the archives, and it will be amusing to watch Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting squirm when they are asked whether they agree with his comments on their leader.

You don’t go to a strip club expecting to put something in your mouth unless you’re an incorrigible roué. So it came as something of a surprise to find myself doing just that in the new Spearmint Rhino club. The club recently launched in Soho’s old Windmill Theatre, famous for staying open throughout the Blitz, when girls appeared naked in static tableaux to get around the era’s indecency laws. Now the venue offers both flesh and – more shockingly – food. A restaurant in a strip club has both bacchanalian promise and the risk of comic disaster. Degustation sounds so like a combination of delicious and disgusting, it suggests there is a fine line between food and sex.

We are, according to Marks & Spencer, in ‘picky bits’ season. I cannot bear the tweeness of it all. M&S is surely mere days away from launching a ‘Paddington Bear picky bits picnic range’. In search for an antidote to such horrors, I go on my annual pilgrimage to Bouchon Racine, which starts on Westbourne Park Road at midday, sipping Beamish Irish stout in The Cow. It is reputed to be David Beckham’s favourite London pub and is one of an increasing number of English pubs piggybacking on the phenomenal appetite for Guinness by serving alternatives to the Black Stuff. Beamish and Murphy’s are popping up on taps across the capital and we are the better for it.

As I spent much of January in dry dock in Tommy’s hospital (‘dry’ being doubly appropriate), other avocations were needed. One friend said that it sounded as if I had spent much of the time gazing at the glories of Barry and Pugin, reading poetry or teasing pretty nurses: all pleasant activities. But there was one disappointment. Geoffrey Elton helped to introduce the civilisation of the Rhineland to East Anglia Assuming that hospital wards were good stalking grounds for chaplains, I would have been happy to discuss the Trinity, the meaning of the first verse of St John’s Gospel, or whatever. But only one clergy creature appeared. There is a good old Scots word, ‘mouthless’ (pronounce ‘oo’); that poor fellow fitted the description.

‘Earth has not anything to show more fair.’ I have always believed that the notion of a Dry January must have been launched on the world by von Sacher-Masoch: one of his more obscene fantasies. I would no more subject myself to it than to any of the other 11 months. They all deserve better. This year, however, malign fate intervened. On 3 January I was strolling along (as it happens, stone-cold sober) when I suddenly felt rotten. I sat on a fence to work out what was wrong and promptly passed out, falling a few feet while bumping and bashing on the way. A neighbour spotted the fall and dialled 999 virtually before I landed. A few days later, on the phone, he told me: ‘When I first saw you, mate, I thought you was fucking dead.

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.

My eight-year-old son’s eyes widened when I unwrapped a Christmas present I got from my parents: a bottle of cherry brandy from the Lyme Bay winery in Axminster. ‘Can I have some?’ Humphrey asked, for he had been hitting the cherry brandy hard over the summer. Not the alcoholic kind, of course, but the cherry brandy-flavoured lollies sold by the ice-cream van that parks outside his school on a hot afternoon. How could I refuse? Ashley Dalton would be scandalised. The junior health minister said this month that the government is looking into banning the sale of non-alcoholic versions of booze to teenagers in case it ‘normalises drinking’ and becomes a ‘gateway’ to the real thing. Children will be allowed to vote at 16 under this government, but not drink a Lucky Saint.