Bruce Anderson

Foolish me. I could have been writing this by the shore of Lake Trasimene, with only one problem: how to transmit it to London. Last time I stayed in the delightful house there, the technology was still in the era of Hannibal’s victory. There was no wifi, only spasmodic mobile-phone reception, and the nearest English newspapers were 50 miles away. ‘Where ignorance is bliss…’ Instead, I stayed in London to work out what was happening. As I say, folly. After two fruitless weeks, I have not even identified the questions, let alone the answers. There have been compensations: one great Test match, and very likely more to follow. Steve Smith — the Australians are fortunate that his extraordinary stance was not coached out of him.

My host twinkled sardonically. ‘We’re bound to be discussing Boris. So what’s the right wine?’ I suggested a bunker-busting Australian Shiraz, preceded by an alluring, minxy champagne: cuvée Madame Claude. ‘No, we need something intellectual, to bring perspective.’ ‘That sounds like Graves, perhaps a Pessac-Leognan.’ ‘Got it in one. Came across a couple of bottles the other day. La Mission Haut-Brion ’64 — the year Boris was born.’ In personality, the bottles were everything that a mature claret ought to be, with no resemblance to Boris.

England. On a glorious summer afternoon in the Sussex countryside, I had been invited to watch polo at Cowdray Park, the game’s equivalent of Lord’s. A beautiful lawn, overlooked by the ruins of a great Elizabethan house burnt down in the 1790s; a sky with gentle, Constable clouds; classically English trees — this is Glyndebourne with ponies instead of music. There is a gracious, aesthetic harmony between rider and pony. As Churchill put it, ‘the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man’. Equally, a pretty girl rarely looks more handsome than when mounted in the saddle. That is the easy bit. The first point that always strikes me about the game is the combination of beauty and danger. During the match, everything moves extraordinarily fast.

We were in a club, discussing Norman Stone, recently departed, over a meal that he would have enjoyed. Norman divided opinions. This manifested itself in his obituaries. Professor Sir Richard Evans summed up for the prosecution. He cited Norman’s failure to build on his early scholarly promise and his chronic neglect of academic duties. He concluded by quoting an old adversary of Norman’s, who described him as ‘amoral’. This is a difficult verdict to refute. Yet it is only part of the picture. He won the enduring affection of most of his best pupils, despite — or because of — his unorthodox methods. In Norman’s Cambridge days, an earnest young man turned up for his first supervision. No Stone. Next week, ditto.

Cricket is the most gracious of games. County grounds in the lee of cathedrals, village greens in the perfect setting of trees and a pub, and not far from the parish church: even if the match will not be over in time for evensong, there is more than a hint of Dearly Beloved, a phrase which captures so much of English civilisation. Cricket is an intellectual game. It baffles Americans. Try explaining that a Test can last for five days and then end in a draw — which may well be the right outcome, morally and aesthetically. Think of Gavaskar’s immortal match in 1979. Any other ending would have been much less satisfying. Cricket engenders humour. At his best, Cardus is up there with Wodehouse, MacDonald Fraser (in the McAuslan books) and even Waugh.

We had all said everything there was to say about Brexit a hundred times over. So the conversation took different routes. We discussed D-Day, Philip Hammond, clichés and President Trump. D-Day: what an awesome concentration of men and materiel — what a magnificent expression of military, national and moral resolve. A youngster made the sort of point beloved of smartass youngsters down the ages. What about the Eastern Front; what about the Kursk salient? Should all that not put D-Day in a diminished perspective? No, he was told, for two reasons. Without D-Day, the Soviet empire would have extended a lot further west, reaching the Rhine if not indeed the Channel.

A book, a bottle, a bower set in an ancient garden: you think that if you walked round the right corner, there would be England, putting manure on the roses. Kipling reminds us that gardening is hard work and that beauty depends on bent backs. True enough, but they also serve who only sit and admire. There was a further contrast between hard work and sedentary admiration, for the book was the first volume of Kenneth Rose’s journals: the easiest of reads, yet the product of hard labour. Kenneth was an exemplar of his craft. There has never been a more meticulous journalist. If only the same were true of those who edited the volume.

There is no new thing under the sun. Over the weekend, I read a book which was alarmingly relevant to our present discontents: The Neophiliacs, by Christopher Booker, written at the end of the 1960s. That decade began well. The country had recovered from the austerities of wartime. It seemed to be an era of social stability. Most couples who married expected to stay married and bring up their children in stable families. Living standards were rising. National service was about to end. The public schools, whose oppressive regimes had created many left-wing dissidents, were liberalising. Politics was also stable. Less than three years after the Suez debacle, Harold Macmillan had won a majority of 100.

During the Middle Ages, some of the monastic halls which evolved into Oxbridge colleges allowed their younger inmates to indulge in jocundus honestus after the evening meal. There is nothing monastic about the clubs around St James’s, least of all at their dining tables. But there is still plenty of jocund. Honestus? That is another matter. The other evening, in a gathering well-equipped with bottles and glasses, someone remarked that we were still in the last lap of Lent and then asked an improbable and unexpected question: ‘So what have you given up, Anderson?’ I was pleased with my reply: ‘Hope.

There was a shrewd old Tory MP called John Stokes. He was not on the left of the party. Indeed, I once told him that he was the right pole. He chuckled at the compliment. Others — including some Conservatives — would not have regarded that as a favourable assessment, and often found his views dismaying. He enjoyed that and, to encourage it, would play the role of caricature reactionary. This rarely failed to get a rise. There is a comparison with that consummate ironist Jacob Rees-Mogg, though Jacob is also a serious Tory philosopher. John’s many friends could not have alleged that of him. He once aroused derision in the House by saying that things had come to a pretty pass: people were talking about politics in the pubs.

Three tribal Tories had gathered for a convivial glass, and also a consolatory one. One quoted Huskisson’s verdict after Goderich’s brief and worthless premiership. ‘Never surely was there a man at the head of affairs so weak, undecided and utterly helpless.’ Well, the female sex has now caught up. I said that at least she had refuted Hopkins. ‘No worst, there is none.’ As long as Theresa May is in charge, there could always be a worst. The terrible premier has out-gloomed the Terrible Sonnets. We were hiding away in a club, hoping not to meet any foreigners. Not that any of us is in the least xenophobic. One chap has a house in France; another regularly takes a place in Italy. Our affection for abroad goes well beyond its food and its bottles.

Life is far too important to be taken seriously. At least, that was the conclusion which we meandered towards as a Sunday lunch party eased into a symposium. Chaps had opinions to draft, articles to write, books to review. But no one was minded to defer to conscientiousness — especially as we had all made a solemn pledge not to discuss Brexit. Our host had consulted me about the bill of fare. Should it be lamb and Burgundy or beef and claret? I declared myself ready to settle for either, though both might be inadvisable. Beef it was, and grass-fed Aberdeen Angus at that. As I often remind vegetarians (too damned numerous these days, even if they are cheap to feed), in view of the vegan diet and intelligence level, grass-fed cattle should be regarded as mooing vegetables.

We were discussing beer. It is a cheerful subject so I made an appropriate point. In recent years, the quality of civic life in Britain has steadily deteriorated. Change has become synonymous with decay. But there is one delightful exception. In southern England these days, it is almost impossible to find a bad pint of beer. Matters may be different in other parts of the United Kingdom. From my limited experience, we Scots are not good at beer. It is something that is only drunk to eke out the whisky. North of the Tweed, bitter is known as ‘heavy’, which is a fair description and not an encouraging one. In the north of England, too, beer is often excessively sweet.