Bruce Anderson

My friend Mitch Feierstein is a jolly, cheerful, life-enhancing fellow. He is emphatically not one of those economists whose purse-lipped response to any new phenomenon is ‘no good will come of this’ and who have predicted six of the past two recessions. But he is a profound pessimist. In a book he published last year, Planet Ponzi, he devotes page after relentless page to the troubles of the world economy. He depicts the West as a ship without engine or rudder, adrift on a sea of bad debt, worse paper and wholly unrealistic expectations. It is even gloomier than the voyage of the Ancient Mariner. He at least found redemption. There may be only one way out.

Although I promise to move on to drink, forgive me for beginning with a less interesting but even more complex subject: government. It is easy to patronise the Italians. The Risorgimento was a failure (See David Gilmour’s superb The Pursuit of Italy). Since the days of Cavour’s Machiavellianism and Garibaldi’s Cav and Pag bravura, the Italian political system has suffered a steady haemorrhage of authority and prestige, with the partial exception of the Mussolini era. By the 1950s, the serious people in Italy had come to one of three conclusions. The first lot decided that the Italians were not fit to govern themselves.

Spain: an easy country to enjoy; very hard, even for Spaniards, to understand. I remember a dinner party, sitting next to a girl who seemed to want to talk about what had been on television the previous night. She was pretty enough, but I feared that I was in for a long evening and a complete unmeeting of minds. Spanish, she was also dark-complexioned, so in desperation I asked for further and better particulars. She was from Andalusia, which helped to explain the duskiness, and she was the cousin of a duke, who bred fighting bulls. Oh good: something to discuss, a long way from trash TV. In 1936, the reigning Duque was only 14, but had reached manhood in courage. He set off on a horse, at the head of his tenantry, carrying an ancestral war banner, to fight for Franco and Spain and God.

My last column discussed Lady Thatcher and drink. It is now time to move on to sex. But there is little to say. Hard as it may be for moderns to contemplate, she was uxorious. A million years ago, in her days in opposition, I was in the House having  a drink with an elderly Tory MP when she swept past. His already rheumy voice thickened with sentiment. ‘Ishn’t she a lovely little thing,’ he mused (not quite how I would have described the leader of our party). ‘But you should have sheen her when she first arrived. Oh, she was sho beautiful. We all tried to [have our wicked way with] her. None of us got anywhere.’ Back in 1959, when the competition was Bessie Braddock and Dame Irene Ward, she must indeed have looked like a film star.

There was a splendid old fellow called Ian Winterbottom, successively a Yorkshire businessman, a Labour MP and a junior defence minister in the Lords (he later joined the SDP). He was the sort of Labour supporter who dismays Tories, because his politics were based on social generosity. It would have been impossible to dismiss him as an extremist. He was universally popular in the Lords, though sometimes his private office could have crowned him. When he was due to answer questions, the office staff always gave him a full briefing; they were good at predicting awkward questions and supplying emollient answers. All the minister had to do was read out his crib. But dear old Ian often decided to strike out on his own.

There ought to be a wise adage: ‘If invited to do good works, always procrastinate. A better offer is bound to turn up.’ About a month ago, the phone rang. Would I attend the Oxford vs Cambridge wine tasting, sponsored by Pol Roger, which would also include a wine hacks vs wine trade contest? Festivities were to continue over lunch. The likelihood of a wooden spoon did not deter me. I was joyously accepting, when a horrible thought occurred. I checked the diary. My forebodings were justified. I was already engaged, to speak at the King’s School, Bruton. There was one possible solution: do both. Get thee behind me, Satan. There could be worse embarrassments than finishing last in a tasting.

My reference to Taylor’s ’55 elicited a number of communications about the glories of old port — and one on a less glorious veteran: old Edward Heath. When the Tory Conference was in Bournemouth, Le Grand Epicier would always bid a group of admirers to dine in the Close at Salisbury. In those days, Ted had an unofficial PPS, whose job was to humour him into being slightly less curmudgeonly. In the late Eighties, that thankless post was held by my old friend Rob Hughes. To enliven the dinner and mitigate the sycophancy, he invited me. I am sure that Ted was as surprised by my arrival as I was by the summons. I had often been rude about him in print, and once in person. It was at a drinks party when I was not dieting.

Like half of London, I gave the new year a surly greeting. It was time to diet. There are two sorts of diets. First, the ones that may work for girls. Breakfast, part of a lettuce leaf. Lunch, the leftovers from breakfast. Supper, some cottage cheese with watercress. Second, boys’ diets, which all concentrate on avoiding carbohydrate. That is not easy. We all enjoy sinking our gnashers in a warm bread roll, liberally buttered, and good pasta is a culinary glory. That said, il faut souffrir pour être beau — and at least with a high-protein diet you can have something to eat. There is a downside. The boys’ regimes all involve cutting out grog, at least for a penitential mini-Lent.

Even though they efface the landscape, the snows of midwinter make the deeper symbolism more apparent. The psychic differences between the Northern and the Southern Kingdoms, which long predate Alex Salmond, are most explicit in this season. When I was a child, Christmas Day was not a bank holiday in Scotland. It was celebrated, but only as a trial match for the major event: Hogmanay. No one has satisfactorily explained its etymology, but the word is so appropriate. It has a moral onomatopeia. Christmas: despite the best efforts of commerce, it has not lost contact with its origins as the greatest festival of all.

There is mixed news. It must be a long time since the nightingales sang in Berkeley Square. The traffic drowned them out long ago. There are still relics of grace and piquancy, most notably in Maggs Bros bookshop. But the old Mayfair, where the nouveaux riches learned to wear the fauns’ garlands of refinement, had been driven deeper into Georgian houses in quieter streets — until now. There has been a counter-attack. -Earlier this week, even though there were still no nightingales, I heard the music of the spheres. There was talk of a new wine merchants called Hedonism with an interesting Russian owner; I had meant to obtain further and better particulars. Strolling down Davies Street, I gave an idle sideways glance — and there it was.

The wines change, and we change with them. It is 1980, in Washington, and a girl gives me a bottle of 1974 Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon reserve as a birthday present. It would have been churlish not to drink it together, though I feared it would be too young. It was; much too young: too young, even, for Jimmy Savile. It was like eating green strawberries. Not that I admitted this to my companion. Knowing nothing about wine, she thought six years was old. If it lacked immediate appeal, she blamed her own lack of sophistication. Anyway, it was a pleasant evening. Last week, an oenophile gathering, and a merchant produces a bottle of the same wine which he had picked up in a cheap mixed-case purchase. 1974 had been an excellent year in California.

Like many soldiers, my old friend is a life-enhancing character. Whenever he phones up and says ‘Need your help’, one’s spirits rise. The help always seems to involve pleasure. This time was no exception. He was long on some young-ish wine, and wondered whether a few cases ought to be redeployed via the sale-room. In his comfortably stocked cellar, I reminded him that Andrew Lloyd Webber used to say ‘Goodnight, boys’ as he switched out the lights on his magnificent collection of Rhône. This had aroused ridicule — perhaps even a mention in Pseud’s Corner — but I could see the point. A great cellar is an epiphany. It almost invites a salutation. My companion agreed, though insisting that he had no plans to speak to his more modest array.