Two buses a week leave from the bus stop at the lonely crossroads on Thursday and Saturday. I’d caught the Thursday one as the first leg of a journey up to Westminster, to attend The Spectator’s summer party. Dressed in a dark suit and party tie, and attended by a herd of heavily pregnant cows browsing for herbs at the roadside, I was an object of curiosity not only for the other passengers, but also for the driver, a genial Geordie, who had assumed the mantle of expedition spokesman as well as pilot. ‘Getting married?’ he said, as I stepped aboard.
I’d got myself into a party mood by spending an hour in the National Portrait Gallery, looking at eminent Victorians. Gladstone, Disraeli, Salisbury, Joseph Chamberlain, Randolph Churchill, T.H. Huxley, Charles Darwin: I moved from one gilt-framed oil painting to another, wondering at the dignity and moral purpose which the various artists had cleverly captured or concocted. Then I wandered down Whitehall and went to the party, where almost immediately I was introduced to our current Prime Minister. With one eye shut, I could see him on the wall alongside his predecessors: his shirt and jacket collars a perfect fit for his neck, his scissored haircut, and that attractive glint of personal modesty in his eyes. I was about to observe that he had a big job on his hands, when he adroitly sidestepped the possibility of political small talk by saying that he reads The Spectator, and likes to start at the back, where he particularly enjoys the Dear Mary problem page.
I must have then blinked, because the next time I looked the Prime Minister was ten feet away talking to someone else, and I was speaking to Taki. Taki had already been introduced, he laughed, and had inadvertently bowed. No, he had no illegal drugs on him. Nor did he want any. He and I were dining later with his daughter, and if she so much as suspected him of being high, he said, he’d never hear the end of it.
I’d hugged Rod Liddle, who advised me that he was quite drunk, only he put the statement in the more robust, south London vernacular. I’d hugged Mary Wakefield passionately to me and told her how well her new, brutal, short back and sides suited her, to which she responded with unaffected relief. Lloyd Evans’s legs had unfortunately given out and were no longer serviceable, and he was propped in a sitting position against a wall, so hugging him would have been difficult. But it was fantastic to see Lloyd as always, and happily his speech was relatively unimpaired, and he was able to invite me to another party.
As usual at The Spectator summer party, time telescoped; two and a half crowded hours seemed like ten minutes; and very soon a bald chap with a busted hooter was asking us to leave. I hailed a cab, went to completely the wrong part of London, drank a pint of lager in a cavernous pub about to close, then hailed another cab, which managed to find the address of the restaurant Taki had given me, which, alas, by now was also about to close.
Taki, Taki’s daughter and half a dozen of Taki’s friends were lingering at their table. A row of affable, cheerful, forgiving faces tilted towards me, each one pleasantly suffused with a vinous glow. From here we went by taxi to someone’s home for more drinks. Then we trooped a few doors down the street to a very spacious and luxurious home for yet more drinks. The last thing I remember is being shown into a huge guest room with a four-poster bed. The chap who lived there had only one practical suggestion to make: that I should make myself known to the butler in the morning. Which seemed to me a fitting end to a night out with our esteemed High life correspondent.
And now all this behind me, and I was on the Saturday bus, the last leg of my return journey, and we were chugging up the funicular gradient, the temperature dropping noticeably by the minute. After the cattle grid there were cows and ponies all over the road.
The friendly Geordie driver was again at the helm. As I’d proffered my pound coin, he’d eyed me sardonically, noticing immediately my sticking-up hair, my stubble, my slept-in suit, my weakened constitution. ‘Did you pull, man?’ he said. On the outward journey I’d told him I was off to a party. He must have been the uncomplicated sort of man who naturally associates parties with casual sex. So it was a genuine inquiry, possibly posed partly on behalf of any of his passengers who also might be interested. ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I shook hands with the Prime Minister.’ He didn’t know what to make of this extravagant claim. For a moment, he was lost for words. Then he said, ‘Ha-way, man! Ha-way!’
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