Low life | 27 October 2016

There were six of us round the table to celebrate Trafalgar Day. We ate the same dinner served to Her Majesty the Queen aboard HMS Victory for the bicentennial: smoked salmon with two sauces (lumpfish caviar and dill); roast beef on a bed of cabbage with Dauphinoise spuds; and plums poached in red wine. We drank gin, home-made red wine, white Burgundy, Madeira and Marsala. Our host, chef and chief inspiration wore the HMS Jupiter T-shirt presented to him on his voyage from England to the first Gulf war. Our hostess wore an unprecedentedly slinky black cocktail dress. Catriona’s hair was in plaits. Tom and Tessa, whom I had not met before, were dressed casually and youthfully. I wore a Regency-buck tail coat with gold and silver curlicues, a jolly Jack Tar stripy T-shirt under a yellow moleskin waistcoat, blue neckerchief densely patterned with skulls, pillar-box red canvas trousers, a broad cowhide belt with a toy cutlass shoved through it, and fake blood smeared copiously about my visage. I’d come as Villeneuve, I told them.

We careered into the bottles and decanters on the table, which were as thickly clustered as masts at a Spithead review. Besides toasting ‘the Immortal Memory’, we lifted our glasses with the traditional navy toasts of ‘a Bloody War or a Sickly Season’ and ‘a Willing Foe and Plenty of Sea Room’. After that we descended into the only kind of dinner party I like: everyone tipping it back like there’s no tomorrow and shouting across one another.

The traditional Trump discussion didn’t rear its ugly head until the plums. Peripheral roaring died away and a measured conversation coalesced piously around the Donald. With the exception of Villeneuve, with his toy cutlass and fake blood coming out of his ears, the crew were united in their contempt and loathing for the man.