Drink

The English language has immense resources, but the odd weakness. What, for instance, is the translation for ‘Auld lang syne’? We were discussing that profound topic while telling stories about absent friends, recalling the occasional bottle and thinking about Britain. Nick Elliott’s response to grim news was to open a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’82 A fascinating fellow called Tim Spicer, who commanded a battalion of the Scots Guards, has written a book about an even more remarkable chap called Biffy Dunderdale. Biffy was the sort of man who helped to win our nation’s wars, including the (first) Cold War. In these pages a couple of weeks ago, Charles Moore

Conservatives used to be good at inspiring a mass membership, underpinned by organisations. Before the first world war, the Primrose League had a million members. Shortly after the second war, the party’s membership, including the Young Conservatives, reached three million. This is partly explained by the social mores of the day. The range of available leisure activities was much smaller, there was no television, and parents were happy for their daughters to join the YCs, the assumption being that the girl would meet a nice type of young man. It is easy to understand why German oenophiles insist Riesling is the greatest grape of all All that is redolent of

What goes best with a broken rib? The answer, I think, is any drink you enjoy that will not make you laugh. I was strolling along to Richmond station after spending the night with old friends. (Very Jorrocksian: ‘Where I dines, I sleeps.’) I was carrying a scruffy overnight bag containing one shirt, one pair of socks, ditto underpants and sundry toiletries. Phone rings: put down bag – and suddenly a toerag appears from nowhere, grabs the luggage and scoots off. I yell ‘Stop thief’, run a few paces and trip. Passers-by prop me up and ask if I want an ambulance: would have saved a lot of trouble if I’d

Most Tory MPs enjoy leadership elections. There may be an element of what the trick-cyclists call ‘displacement activity’. Equally, it is tempting to employ the cliché about rearranging the furniture on the Titanic. The Brane-Cantenac 2000 was everything that a claret lover could wish for Until 1990, the process was brief. It took only four days to elect John Major, whose team used an underground ‘bunker’ in Alan Duncan’s house as their HQ. By 1997, when the party had been grievously wounded and the election procedure extended, there were lots of gatherings which required more spacious premises – including Jonathan Aitken’s garden. Now, even more stricken, the Tories will need

Age. At the Spectator party last week, the editor asked me how long I had been attending the festivity. I could not remember whether it had been since the late 1970s or not until the early 1980s. But change is not always for the worse. During the 1980s, dearly beloved Bron Waugh was in charge of the wine. Talk about plonk. I do not know whether cats or horses were responsible, but there should have been no question of calling in a vet. The beasts ought to have been sent straight to a laboratory, to hunt down the toxicity. The Blairites had no shame about drinking champagne in public These

An old friend phoned. Normally cheerful, he was fed up. One of his business partners was being more than usually incompetent. ‘I told him that I’d describe him as a halfwit, if I could find the half.’ We went on to discuss another couple of friends, both good men and true, who seem doomed to imminent parliamentary defenestration. By the end of lunch, we were thoroughly benign. I was persuaded I could endure a Labour government Then there was hunting: a passion. It survived for several years under the Blair government and it seemed clear Tony had no stomach for the ban, which was half-hearted. That witty and cynical fellow

Things could have been worse. My host was determined to lunch al fresco, and after all it was late June. Yet this is England and as everyone knows, even D-Day had to be postponed for 24 hours. In the event, we were fine. The elements were kindly. The temperature did not fall below 60, the rain held off, we more or less managed to forget about politics and it would have been hard to improve on the setting. Saint Jacques, a restaurant which I have often praised, always deservedly, has a courtyard and is next to Berry Bros: so this is a sophisticatedly bacchanalian quartier. The rain held off, we

There was a wonderful old boy called John – Sir John – Wordie, who was a quintessential member of the establishment. A barrister, he spent much of his time defusing controversies before they had boiled over. In that enterprise, he never sought publicity, finding it much easier to dispense wise advice if no one knew who he was. An accomplished sailor from his RNVR days during the war, he was always a stalwart of nautical good and goodery – and he knew a very great deal about wine, especially port. A Texan can extract five syllables from Goddam: Go-o-o-day-um. John could do as well with port. Po-o-o-o-rt. It was a

One needs wine more than ever, yet when imbibing, it can be hard to concentrate. So much is going on. We were at table and the news came through about Slovakia. Was this an obscure incident, regrettable but below the level of geopolitics? Or would it become a second Sarajevo? Fortunately, that seems unlikely. In Mitteleuropa, there are always ancestral voices prophesying war and there is usually plenty of dry timber. But it does not seem that this assassination attempt will be the spark. The Barruols have a reputation for delightful eccentricity but they are committed to their bottles When we had come to that conclusion, there was an obvious

Drink and longevity: there seems to have been a successful counter-attack against the puritans, prohibitionists and other health faddists. Indeed, there is virtually a consensus that red wine has almost medicinal properties. That said, a confusion about so-called units remains. When the measurement was explained to me, I said that it sounded adequate. ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, that ought to be more or less enough.’ Then the cross-purposes were unscrambled. The 98 units or whatever – a figure clearly designed to give a bogus authority to the calculation – was a weekly total, not a daily one. There’s no reason whya normal wine-drinker should not live to be an old soak  There

Churchill. No disrespect to Andrew Roberts’s more recent work, but I set out to look up a point about drink in Roy Jenkins’s biography and ended up rereading it. I think that it is Roy’s best book and extremely well written. There are also passages where he slips in points from his own experience of high office: never excessive, always illuminating. Although Churchill was rarely drunk, he was equally rarely sober I did not need to be reminded what an extraordinary figure Churchill was: the drama was so vivid. After the ‘fight on the beaches’ oration, Josiah Wedgwood, a Labour MP, said that it was the speech of a thousand

I have had three recent conversations, all lively if unrelated – and all well lubricated. The first concerned Anglo-Saxon England around ad 700. Recent discoveries of coin hoards suggested that economic activity during that period of the Dark Ages was more extensive than had been supposed. Without damaging the coins, it had been possible to establish that some of their silver content had come from Byzantium. Every timeI drink a German wine I am convinced that one should do so more often The main discussants were a couple of academics who had been disciples and friends of Philip Grierson, one of the greatest numismatists of all time: a scholar, collector

Holy Week, but not everywhere. After reading that the diocese of Birmingham wanted to hire staff to help with deconstructing whiteness, only one conclusion is possible. Large parts of the C of E have become a theological and liturgical wilderness. The Devil is in charge and it is unholy week, 52 weeks a year. Anglican friends assure me that this is overdoing the pessimism. There are sound clerics – even the occasional sound bishop – and in some areas, traditions survive. Certainly Sherborne Abbey has just put on a superb Palm Sunday, and the procession included a donkey, the sweetest-natured of animals and a perpetual outlet for sentimentality. It is a delight to

My last piece began with a one-word sentence: ‘Gloom.’ A dear friend reproached me. ‘In a world already abundant with gloom, surely you can find a way of cheering us up. After all, you’re not writing about politics – or at least you’re not supposed to be.’ I promised to try harder to propagate good news. When it comes to wine, that is not impossible. Twenty years ago, in Lisbon, I was treated to a bottle of Barca Velha. I was told that the Portuguese regarded it as their Château Latour. Needless to say, it was not that good but I remember thinking that it was a jolly decent drop

Gloom. Relentless rain out of a sullen sky enhanced an already pessimistic mood. We were talking geopolitics and agreeing that the West ought to brace itself for a hard landing. Try as we might, we could find no good news, anywhere. Where is the self-belief of the Reagan/Thatcher years? Instead, a culture war is taking place Some of us were veterans, one or two of whom had spent time in Washington in 1980, the build-up to the Reagan era and the prelude to the most successful decade in modern peacetime history, in which Margaret Thatcher played a crucial role. By the end, the West had won the Cold War, the

Paris is more than a city. It is a state of mind, an aspiration. Though it glorifies the military, it remains feminine and beguiling. Its heroes moved effortlessly from triumphs on the battlefield to triumphs in the boudoir. The very stones of Paris seem redolent of the dreams and ecstasies of past lovers, and of their frustrations, follies and pains. Heloise and Abelard loved and suffered here. We had come to perform two simple tasks: sitting in judgment over wine and food In many respects, alas, contemporary Paris has fallen a long way from romance. Everyone has stories of rubbish, dirt and rats. The days when bon chic, bon genre

Consider the paradox of lemons. In Italy, one associates them with scented groves. A few years ago, Helena Attlee wrote the book The Land Where Lemons Grow, in which citrus fruits become a golden thread running through the history of Italian agriculture. Yet though the lemon is arguably the most beautiful of fruits, its tart taste is bracing. A spremuta di limone finds a swift route to any shaving nicks. Most limoncello is produced on the Amalfi coast but there is an outlier from Godalming But the lemon can be sweetened, in the form of limoncello, an after-dinner drink of no great subtlety, good for pouring over puddings but hardly a

Wine stimulates the wits, emboldens debate, and inspires the mind. Judicious quantities, abetted by judicious quality, encourage the participants to attack the important questions. Thus it has been over the past few days, discussing God and the Universe. I was talking to an astronomer, whose day is spent contemplating the vastness of interstellar space. Consider one single light year, and how far that would take us from our own celestial neighbourhood. Then let your mind give way before the unimaginable distances. Already daunted, move onwards to the queen of the sciences, theology, and the question posed by that outstanding 20th-century theologian, Mr Prendergast in Decline and Fall. He could not

During the festive season, I usually spend far too much time thinking and talking about politics. But the latest was an exception. One hostess fixed me with a gimlet eye and announced that she had forbidden any discussion of Israel/Palestine. At a recent dinner party, the table had been repeatedly banged, someone had stormed out and others were now on non-speaks. I quoted the late Clarissa Eden. During the Suez crisis, she felt that the Canal was running through her drawing-room. This girl gave a hearty nod in agreement. I was happy to agree with the ban, but declared my surprise. How could anyone be so sure of the solution?

A couple of years ago, I saw a charming cartoon. A boy and a girl aged about seven were in an earnest conversation. ‘Of course I don’t believe in Father Christmas,’ said the boy. ‘But we’ve got to keep up the pretence for the sake of the parents.’ This Christmas, all over the world, many parents will be especially keen to dwell on the great festival’s innocent joys. Innocence: in many places the fear is that the glory of birth will give way to the massacre of the innocents. Like the shepherds, a large number of people are sore afraid. Unlike the shepherds, their fear has no relief at hand