How to sample your own urine

Seven round the table for dinner. Wild mushroom risotto. I was told to sit next to Michael. Good.

Michael makes Palissey ware, which is to say ceramics made in the style of the 16th-century French potter Bernard Palissey. A typical piece of Palissey ware is a platter decorated with three-dimensional casts of snails, snakes, frogs, lizards and fish forming a glazed aquatic or reptilian menagerie. The casts are made by placing a mould around the freshly killed or expired creature. The realism achieved is startling, even slightly shocking. Michael is always on the lookout for undamaged reptile corpses.

He also collects 18th-century champagne bottles and probably knows more about old glass than any living person. His knowledge is so comprehensive that I would say he probably needs help. Also, years of living in attentive isolation in the French countryside have given him a profound knowledge and appreciation of nature, which never ceases to surprise or delight him.

Dinner table talk is so often merely a comparison of consumer taste. (‘Oh, I simply love this actor/writer/restaurant/kitchen-appliance manufacturer.’ ‘Oh, do you? I prefer that one.’) Worse still, everyone with a smartphone knows everything. But under examination this omniscience invariably turns out to be as transparently superficial as the glaze on one of Michael’s china snakes.

As a protest I’ve pressed my factory reset button and I’m beginning again as a tabula rasa. I venture no opinions. I make no presumptions. I have no preconceptions. I know nothing. I only listen. Michael, however, with his thinning hair and pony tail, knows the few subjects that interest him inside out. I could listen to him speak about them all day long.

His favourite subject, perhaps, is food and drink. (My lack of interest in what goes in my mouth normally verges on hostility.)