Bruce Anderson

Three of us, old friends, were meeting to arrange a marriage. The young couple have never actually met. Indeed, they are still unaware of one other’s existence. But it is so obviously a union endorsed by the heavens. Young Florence King has already been heralded in this column. At least since the infancy — did she have one? — of Diana, Huntress and Goddess, no four-year-old girl has ever shown so much interest in field sports. In Ireland, Florence is a bisexual name. One feels that our Florry must be a kinswoman of the immortal Flurry Knox. The bridegroom will be Charlie. At the age of seven, he climbed a tree and killed a pigeon with his bare hands. When his father regaled a club table with the story, there was general scepticism.

The ostensible subject matter is misleading, as is any conflation with his lesser relatives’ wassailing peasants and roistering village squares. But Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s work is profoundly serious. It has a formidable intellectual content, a Shakespearian emotional range: a sardonic and stoical view of the human condition. There are paintings — ‘The Triumph of Death’, ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’ — which descend from Hieronymus Bosch. There is also the marvellous ‘Fall of Icarus’. According to recent scholarship, the version we have is not a Bruegel, but a later copy. That is plausible; it looks later. Yet the composition is classic Bruegel. He would be drawn to any legend expressing the vanity of human wishes.

Give us this day our daily bread: those are also words of great culinary significance. Even if the ‘bread’ takes different forms — rice, pasta, potatoes — billions of people all over the world are following in that prayer’s footsteps. ‘Staple diet’: throughout history, most people have lived off staples, or died when they ran out. Staples stimulated cookery. Over time, though it would be fun to try, even daily caviar might pall: daily bread, somewhat sooner. So those who prepared the basics tried to spice them up. If meat or fish were available, there would be no problem, but they are expensive ingredients. Most of those at subsistence level had to make do with herbs and vegetables, plus a little meat or fish for special occasions.

As a life, it was a scintillating spectrum of the human condition. There was hardship and suffering, as well as laughter and fun, plus a great deal of sex, mostly extra-canonical. There were large, even universal perspectives, but also a fey and complex personality which did not sit easily with coherence. That may explain why no biographer has come close to doing him justice. This was a great man, always overshadowed by a weakened constitution and by social insecurity. His high talent was recognised as soon as he was published. Had he been a less restless, more accommodating personality, he could have settled down in the library of an aristocratic house, funded by some patron happy to secure his own immortality by serving as a grub in amber.

Apologies may be in order. A few weeks ago, I was advocating aid for Australia. As we had set the place up, we had a duty when this once-proud daughter house was sliding into decline. We used criminals to get the country going, which worked well. Hard, amoral characters, they built a nation in their own image. That was Australia for two centuries: hard, amoral - and good at cricket. Then everything seemed to be going wrong. Perhaps it was the southern sun's fault: melting down toughness and leaving a vacuum for decadence. It was time for the mother country to come to the rescue with fresh supplies of convicts (we have plenty). With their restorative blood-lines, the hardness might return and the Aussies should be capable of playing proper cricket again, in fifty years or so.

We agreed that it was the gravest crisis facing mankind. It has led to dashed hopes, widespread grief and a universal loss of confidence in the future. As the scientists seem powerless, the world is thrown back on superstition. If the learned have no answers, one may as well listen to old Jacques, who remembers his great uncle’s advice about coping with phylloxera. I refer, of course, to oxidisation and white Burgundy. The 1996 was supposed to be superb and long-lasting. Friends of mine finally decided that the moment had come to begin enjoying their Chassagnes, Pulignys and Chablis grands crus. Aargh.

Our sweet enemy, France, is not always that sweet. It is tempting to respond to France’s current degringolade with cynicism and indeed schadenfreude. For a start, it should keep down prices: even claret prices. There are reports that £80 million worth of serious claret is on the high seas, returning from China. Ordered, it was never paid for. The négociants of Bordeaux were already coping with two disappointing vintages — 2011 and 2012 — plus one unspeakable one. 2013 is by all accounts the worst year since at least 1973. Various houses will not declare a vintage. Only the boldest or most foolhardy will be buying en primeur. That said, a few years ago I drank a ’73 Latour en magnum.

The Speaker was in trouble. I do not refer to Michael Martin or John Bercow, the two worst Speakers in living memory, who have fallen well beneath mere trouble, into contempt. This was Jack Weatherill, a decent man and a decent Speaker, if not a great one. Even so, his toenail clippings would have made a better Speaker than either of the afore-mentioned. But Speaker Weatherill had committed an offence of which we have all been guilty at some time or another. He had rewritten history; he had retold an anecdote to put himself in a better light. Unfortunately for him, this involved putting Norman Tebbit in a worse light. There had been a dis-agreement: I forget about what, and it is no longer relevant.

The fall: one of the few instances where American English is superior to English English. ‘Autumn’ has a comfortable charm, but ‘fall’ captures the pathos of evanescence. This might seem curious, for in New England the fall is grandiloquent. Nature is rarely so glorious, so defiant. In Glen Lyon last week, there was more of a sense of fall. When the sun shone, the greens and yellows and browns still danced: mid-autumn spring. Outside my bedroom window there was a rowan tree, with an exuberance of blood-red berries. Yet there was an aura of transience — the natural world falling gently into winter’s grasp — and the hills were swathed in mist. In a few weeks, the Glen will be ice and bleak midwinter. Our party had come to shoot stags.

René Engel must have been a wonderful man. He studied wine-making before fighting in the trenches during the first world war, and spending some time in German captivity. He then went home to run — and improve — the family domaine in Vosne-Romanée. In those days, most Burgundian growers still thought of themselves as farmers who made wine. Few aspired to the glamour enjoyed by their counterparts in Bordeaux. Their viniculture was instinctive, traditional — and sometimes improvised. Pinot Noir is not an easy grape. Left to itself, especially if there is a poor summer, it can produce a thin liquid. So the Burgundians occasionally helped it along.

I was praying for a miracle, but it seemed unlikely. There had been one already: the bottle’s very survival. A second would qualify it for sainthood. It was an extraordinary story, almost on the scale of The Hare with Amber Eyes. Towards the end of the Napoleonic wars, a barrel of Imperial Tokay was dispatched from Trieste to St James’s St, where it was bottled by Berry Bros, in 1811. From there, a bottle went to St Petersburg, where it rested for more than a century in a well-appointed cellar. In 1917, it ought to have been delicious. Imperial Tokay is an immensely long-lived wine, well capable of making a century. But its possessors forgot the Russian grand duke’s dictum: between the revolution and the firing squad, there is always time for a bottle of champagne.

Until a few years ago, I knew nothing about rum. There was the dark stuff, coveted by the pirates of Treasure Island, used by the Navy for grog on board warships and abused by Churchill in his sarcastic account of naval traditions: rum, sodomy and the lash. At least rum would be preferable to the other two. There was also white rum, usually the preserve of those too young to appreciate a decent drink, who often mixed it with Coca-Cola. Even as a child, I did not like the taste of Coke. I last drank it about 40 years ago. I was travelling by bus across Anatolia and we stopped at a village for refreshment. I would have killed for a beer, but the choice was the local water or warm Coke.

Marcher country, the Jura lies to the east of Burgundy and the contrast is marked. Burgundy: the very name is redolent of opulence. The architecture, the courtliness, the great wines: the aristocratic civilisation of Burgundy is a dance to the cornucopia of nature. Among the rocks and hills and gorges of the Jura, nature is less generous: livelihoods harder wrought. But as so often in European history, adversity has been the nursery of triumph. The Jura produces a famous wine, vin jaune. Until this week, I had hardly tasted it. That has now been rectified, in a spectacular manner. Those who try to write about wine often talk of terroir, minerality and tradition. With vin jaune, those are understatements.