Eat, drink and be worried

We were surpassing Sydney Smith. His idea of heaven was pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets. Our version was an un pâtéd foie: even more delicious. Though no one had laid on Jeremiah Clarke, there was music: a bottle of Doisy Daëne ’75. In most of the Bordeaux area, 1975 was an austere year, and the fear was that the wines would live and die as sleeping beauties. Well, the Dozy Dean had awakened, to a harmony of structure and sweetness. There seems only one sensible response to such pleasures: ‘God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.’

Instead, however, the conversation took a melancholy tone. We started with that unendingly paradoxical figure, W.B. Yeats. In the Hammersmith of the 1890s, old women of both senses often met to talk nonsense. Phrenology, ouija boards, séances: these suburban Owen Glendowers tried to call spirits from the vasty deep, and were lucky that no one called for the men in white coats. But no such gathering, however absurd, was complete until Yeats had joined it. Nor was he ever fully cured, as some of his later mystical effusions testify. Much of it is reminiscent of that most undozy — and tragic — of deans, Jonathan Swift, as he descended into lunacy. ‘Why do they call him Aristophanes? Because he had such airy stoff an he’s head.’ So, often, did Yeats.

Yet he was also one of the major political intelligences of all time. ‘Easter, 1916’: has there ever been a more profound political poem? Then there is the definitive four word history of Ireland, and of Israel/Palestine: ‘Great hatred, little room.’ Or what about that call to arms which should inspire anyone of a Conservative disposition: ‘The fascination of what’s difficult’.