Last week I received by post an invitation card from The Spectator office to the Parliamentarian of the Year Awards at the Savoy. My goodness, you should have seen this card. It was handsomely embossed, printed in beautiful copperplate, and so large that the postman couldn’t fit it through the letterbox. The Spectator requested ‘the pleasure of my company’, it said, and underneath there was a brief outline of the beano. From 12.30 p.m. we would be drinking Pol Roger champagne; at 1.15 we would be toddling in for the lunch and the awards ceremony; and at 3.45 ‘carriages’ would be outside to wheel away the fallen.
I was very excited. I hadn’t had a decent drink for about six weeks. I like to wipe the slate clean with a binge about once a month, but circumstances had conspired against it. And then I’d caught a virus which put me out of circulation. Now that I was back in the pink I couldn’t imagine a better way to celebrate. Spectator dos are always everything a person who enjoys a drink could possibly wish for. They don’t stint. They keep it coming. Express an anxiety about the supply situation at an Old Queen Street do and they laugh at you and show you a nearby room piled floor to ceiling with pristine cartons of top-notch gear. Apologise for overdoing things a little at a previous do and they look at you in surprise and say, ‘My dear fellow, we didn’t notice a thing. Have another?’
On the day, bright and early, suited and booted, I drove to the railway station. I didn’t take the invitation card with me as I couldn’t fit it into any of my pockets. It had poured with rain solidly for the previous three days and there were reports on the radio that morning of flooding. However, the grave youth behind the glass in the ticket office assured me that, although there were some minor problems, the train was delayed by only 15 minutes. Then I went to the Sidings café for a cup of tea and a toasted teacake.
I always start a London debauch with a toasted teacake at the Sidings café. I have done for years. A few months ago the café owner, normally a brusque, taciturn type, showed an interest in me for the first time. I try to dress smartly for town and I guess he’d always dismissed me as just another businessman and not worth speaking to. But on this occasion, as he took my order, he casually asked me if I was going up to London and what for.
Surprised by his sudden interest, I said I was going to a book launch in Soho, then a magazine party in Westminster. ‘It’s a free drink — that’s all,’ I quickly added before he could pretend to look impressed with any of this. ‘I’m going to get as drunk as I can,’ I said. ‘And then I’m coming back.’
It turns out that this café owner guy is one of the brethren. He completely understood. He gently folded his hands together over his apron and looked down at them as though humbled and stricken by the word of truth. And so now when I step briskly into his café looking smart, he knows, and he receives my order for toasted teacake, and a mug of his most stewed, with the dignity and reverence of a co-religionist. He approves of me and of my course of action with all of his heart, but he feels no need for fatuous comment. He might flick his head knowingly backwards towards the point on the London-bound tracks where they disappear around the bend. That’s the most I’ll get. And I’ll answer with a determined, triumphant nod, like a man about to die for his country.
But last week, as he ritually stirred my mug of tea with the communal white plastic spoon, he made another rare foray into articulacy. ‘Piss up?’ he said. I nodded. ‘Lunch,’ I said. He thrust out his jaw angrily, as though he would kill to have the kind of opportunities in life that I have for getting plastered for nothing in the middle of the day.
And then, as though on cue, came a sickening station announcement. The woman with that sexy, slightly authoritarian voice said she was sorry to announce that the train was delayed by at least two hours due to flooding.
The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. ‘I won’t make the lunch now,’ I said. ‘I might as well go home again.’ The café owner sagged in disbelief and staggered backwards as though struck by an unspeakable tragedy. And for the first time in all the years of our very slight acquaintance, it occurred to me that the café owner might in fact be something of a comedian.
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