A lament for the foreign correspondent’s house – and his hospitality

Until January the foreign correspondent lived in a late-18th-century house with a vineyard, olive grove and vegetable garden close to the village centre. You’d go through a gate, then another gate, and find yourself suddenly in the countryside and being yapped at by Mary, the most spoilt and spherical spaniel in Christendom, and then the foreign correspondent himself would appear in front of his lovely old house with arms open to welcome you. Usually the first thing he would say was that he was thinking about having a drink and why didn’t he go and fetch a bottle and glasses.

Each year his vineyard produced about 400 bottles of very dark red wine, just enough to provide him with a fairly potent staple yet not quite enough to stimulate the interest of the French state. Some years were better than others. Others were best avoided altogether, frankly, especially by those of a less than robust constitution. His annual grape harvest took him and a dozen of his friends about two hours to pick. The two hours’ picking would be followed by an eight-hour lunch, at the end of which, although seeing double, I believed I had achieved the omniscient mental clarity of Nietzsche in Turin. The foreign correspondent had one of his kidneys shot away by a Serb marksman and could reach that sublime state in a fraction of the time. You knew he was there when he started trying to subvert the laws of nature by fitting more wine into your already full glass, and all he had to say on any subject under discussion was ‘Isn’t this just great!’ or ‘Let’s fly to Mars!’

He adored his house, garden and vineyard with a childlike passion.