Society

Q. I meet a very old and dear friend for lunch on a regular basis. We meet at a lovely family-run Italian restaurant in Charlotte Place in Fitzrovia because it is exactly halfway between where we both live. Over the years it has become rather beyond our means but we don’t like to break with tradition. We have always taken it in turns to pay the bill, but my friend has become somewhat forgetful, and for the last three lunches has said: ‘How lovely that it’s your turn to pay.’ I realise she isn’t purposely making me pay each time, but I can ill afford the extra expense. How can I

Où sont les bouteilles d’antan? For that matter, où sont les amis with whom one consumed them? These autumnally melancholic musings arose because a young friend asked me about Alan Clark. He had been reading the Diaries. Were they truthful? Was Alan really such a remarkable character? The answer was simple. An emphatic yes, on both counts. I suspect that I speak for most of his muckers when I declare that I have never met anyone who was more fun. The 1967 Yquem tasted like a Greek temple melted down in honey. Alan served it as a house wine If Alan was of the company, the conversation might well have a

Towards the end of the 1980s, Jeffrey Bernard, late of this magazine, sometimes used to wear grey shoes with jeans and a blazer. Those grey shoes, if ever fashionable, were out of fashion by then, like referring to young women as birds. But his writerly disposition once encouraged him to call an intimate acquaintance who had a Candida infection ‘a black bird with thrush’. In A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Orwell describes a ruffianly retailer of trousers who ‘kept a sharp eye open for the “birds”, as he called them’, with ‘lecherous’ intent. But a Brisbane newspaper reported from London in 1964: ‘You haven’t really been given top-of-the-pops praise by your boyfriend