Bruce Anderson

Rivers are the cradles of civilisation and the Loire is an outstanding example. It is one of the head-waters of modern France. By the 7th century, the region had emerged from the Dark Ages and was building on Roman traditions to lay foundations that would endure. St Martin, Clovis: we are at the beginning of a recognisably French history. War is both an expression of civilisation and its curse — but also, occasionally, its saviour. In 732, that nascent French history was in danger of eradication until one of the most important battles in European history took place at Tours, near the Loire. Charles Martel defeated a powerful invading force from Muslim Spain. If he had lost, there would have been little else to impede a Muslim advance.

The Honourable Society of Odd Bottles has been mentioned in this column before. I can report that the membership is growing. We are now comfortably into low single figures. The other night, the Bottles assembled. At present, we have no lady members, although there is no rule to prevent it. That is hardly surprising. At present, there are no rules. Nor do we usually have a Toast to the Lassies. But despite their absence, we began by discussing women. We decided that for certain purposes, females could be divided into two groups. There is the voice of duty, and of diet, constantly monitoring their menfolk’s intake. Many years ago, when I was a skinny research student, one of my chums had a wife who was a seriously good cook. She also believed in watching his weight.

A stint in dry dock — the ‘dry’ literally — has one advantage. There is time for lots of long reading. After many decades since the last opening of Middlemarch, I had forgotten how good it is. I had completely forgotten a delicious minor character, Mrs Cadwallader, who is a blend of Aunt Dahlia and Lady Circumference. A Marxist heedless of his safety might describe her as declining gentry. She would have rejected both words with scorn. In those days, many Church of England livings were bestowed on parsons such as Mr Cadwallader, who needed the money to preserve their social status. ‘The C of E was always better at ministering to the deserving ex-rich than to the indifferent poor’: discuss.

There have been some splendid rumours about my health. According to the most exotic, I was cas-evacked from a hill in Scotland, flown to St Thomas’s by private plane and then tested positive for Chateau Lafite. The truth is more banal — and much more reprehensible. I had neglected an infected foot: what an idiot. Finally, it came out in revolt. By the time I did turn myself in to Tommy’s, I was not far from being seriously ill. That has had one advantage. I think that it put me off the booze. The medics were pumping me full of antibiotics and I was determined to co-operate. One or two rakes have offered to smuggle in a bottle of hooch; I adamantly declined. Nothing would come between me and the cure. More-over, I did not feel like a drink.

‘Don’t you think you’re drinking too much?’ said the nurse, contemplating the array of bottles. ‘But I feel so thirsty,’ I replied. A doctor arrived and concluded that powerful intravenous antibiotics did require a lot of liquid, so that the orange juice was acceptable as well as the water. The trouble had started at Boisdale. We were having a modest lunch, to taste some new Spanish wines while working out which sherries would accompany haggis. A Palo Cortado from Gonzalez Byass won that prize. We then moved to Ranald’s cigar terrace to reaffirm the partnership between Speyside and Havana. Only problem: I was feeling increasingly wretched and it was showing. For weeks, my leg had been growing sorer.

This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 26 July 2014 The civilised world felt as if its heart had been touched by an icicle. Photographs of murdered children. Biogs of people like us; we could have been on that plane. We will be on similar ones, now reminded of our vulnerability to frivolous barbarians in possession of terrifying weapons. Grief and fear lead rapidly to anger: to the demand that something must be done to punish the evildoers and rescue us from insecurity. That might seem a comforting thought. It is also false comfort, for there is a basic problem. What can we do? When in doubt, think hard, in a long historical perspective. Paradoxically, that apparently arid discipline may bring real comfort.

Where two or three British males are gathered together, the agenda often includes a glass or two. One thing can lead on to another. To facilitate the supply of glasses, clubs are sometimes formed. These can vary in size and splendour, from the palaces of Pall Mall to the working men’s clubs where the young William Hague delivered beer and sampled the deliveries. (He was unwise to quantify his efforts. It would have been better if he had merely said that from time to time, it was not just the barrels which were rolling.) There are also clubs within clubs. A couple of us have stumbled into irregular sessions which we have called ‘the odd bottles’.

Glenmorangie is the most accessible of malt whiskies. It is a gentle, almost feminine creature, with hints of spring flowers, chardonnay, eine kleine nachtmusik, wholly different from the lowering malts of the Outer Isles. With them, there is no question of hints, let alone Mozart. A blast of peat and iodine arrives to the skirl of the pipes: a mighty dram worthy of the sea-girt rocks among which it was cradled. Both have their place. I recently helped a friend polish off his last bottle of ’63 Glenmorangie. It had gained in depth, strength and subtlety. Should you possess any, our bottle was showing no scintilla of senescence. Its owner is a Scotsman who has grown rich in the colonies and was resolutely uninterested in his treasure’s value (no doubt eye-watering).

Port, or Hermitage? This does not refer to personal consumption. I was trying to remember Meredith’s Egoist, in which one of the principal characters seeks to coerce his daughter into marriage, in order to have unlimited access to his putative son-in-law’s ancient wines. That could give rise to an interesting moral speculation. I raised the question in a club, one of the few surviving places in Britain where free speech is possible. There was a desire for further and better particulars: which wine were we talking about, and what about the daughter? Was she an easy-on-the-eye, generally obedient creature, a pleasure to have about the place, or.... Someone quoted Lord Tottering, from one of those splendid cartoons in Country Life.

Alas, the ’63 ports are beginning to fade. I came to that conclusion the last time I tasted a Warre’s, and the other night I was at the drinking of a Graham’s, an exemplar of that magnificent year. It was still delicious, and from the summit of a mountain there is a long descent. But the journey had begun. The passing of a great vintage deserves a grand obsequy: tolling bells, slow marches, a gun-carriage. How appropriate, therefore, that our host was not only a Grenadier but perhaps the most famous member of that illustrious regiment in recent decades. There are so many stories about Valentine Cecil, and most of them are true.

There ought to be a new literary award: the antisocial book of the year. A dozen years ago, Claire Tomalin’s Pepys would have won the laurels by a country mile. That Christmas, everyone seemed to have been given a copy, and normally healthy eaters would arise from the lunch table after only three hours, desperate to return to Pepys. It was impossible to raise a four for bridge. Although John Campbell’s biography of Roy Jenkins is not quite so compulsive, it would take this year’s prize. Inter alia, Mr Campbell solves one of the small historical mysteries of our time. Denis Healey has always insisted that Roy was a closet homosexual. Despite his record as Chancellor, Denis has some grasp on reality. So what is going on?

The en primeur tastings have been taking place in Bordeaux, and the mood has oscillated from despair to defiance. It is like Boxer’s trip to the knackers’ in Animal Farm: one would need a heart of stone not to laugh. The greediest winemakers in the world had a terrible 2013, and there was a degree of hostility towards the British press, some of whom were accused of gloating. Surely not. The house of Pontet-Canet was said to be especially thin-skinned. Thirty years ago, it was a modest little fifth growth; I remember using it as a table wine in a Washington hotel. Now, it has soared in reputation and in self-esteem. We are used to super seconds. Pontet-Canet regards itself as a super fifth. That is unlikely to be true of its 2013s.

Western Sicily has been a crucible of aspiration and grandeur: the human condition at its most exalted: unsurpassable art and architecture. It started in the Greek era. Sicilian agriculture produced abundance. Trade with north Africa turned Demeter’s bounty into gold. With this wealth, Greek colonists built the temple cities of Selinunte and Agrigento, plus other glories such as the temple at Segesta. The modern traveller, seeing only harmony, might assume that the ancient inhabitants must have been uniquely blessed. In earlier generations, the best preserved temple in Agrigento was known as the Temple of Concord. This was an error. That was not its name and there never was much concord. Empedocles of Agrigento claimed that mankind was governed by the twin forces of love and strife.

Chefs have a problem. Think of much of the best food you have ever eaten. Caviar, English native oysters, sashimi, foie gras, truffles, jamon iberico, grouse, golden plover, properly hung Scotch beef; Stilton, the great soft cheeses: all have one point in common. They require minimal intervention from the kitchen. With the assistance of one female sous-chef, even I could roast a grouse. The chef would come into his own over pudding, and indeed with Welsh rarebit, but one can understand why this does not provide enough outlet for creativity. There are always the great French bourgeois dishes, which few of us eat often enough. Navarin of lamb, blanquette de veau, suprêmes de volaille, daube de boeuf: all splendid. But they are not a new challenge to a cook.

It is impossible not to sympathise with Armenia. It has spent much of its history between the hammer and the anvil, trying to fend off imperial predators and usually failing. What if the Armenians had inhabited the British Isles? Apart from the savage Irish in their bogs and cabins, the main enemy would have been the French, whose malevolence could be drowned in the English Channel. With such a happy geography, Armenians would be as numerous and prosperous as we are. But neither geography nor history was benign, with one paradoxical exception. Because the Russians rescued them from the Turks, the Armenians were rarely disloyal to the Soviet Union. Even so, their grog-makers suffered. The Soviet system drove more and more people to drink, of worse and worse quality.