“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like “What about lunch?”
I have had a varied lunch programme this week. On Monday to The Royal Opera House for a lunchtime recital and then late lunch with the mother of my goddaughter at The Delaunay. At a table near us a chap was wearing court bands, ruffled cuffs and sported a wig. He also, in my opinion, had availed himself of the wine list and why not? He had just taken Silk. Sir Percy would have sneered at the paucity of his ruffles but his horsehair wig was rather fine. I don’t know if QCs have different wigs to common or garden barristers but I think it is probable. Perhaps some sort of halfway house to a judge’s longer wig? I had beef stroganoff with pickled cucumber and my guest had kedgeree – the latter what I usually choose at The Delaunay.
On Tuesday I met up with a colleague from my broking days who still has to spin and toil. I went to his office because I wanted to meet one of his colleagues – Moldovan – to discuss the election last month. I was mighty surprised to be taken into a bar in his office. It had four glass shelves of bottles of spirits that wouldn’t have disgraced a five star hotel. At least one reader will recall a similar bar in our office on Water Street in New York forty years ago. So I watched the Attorney General’s evasive statement in the House of Commons on TV drinking a Bombay Sapphire G&T before we went to lunch in a basement wine bar; the one I had lunch in on 9/11 as it happens.
We had an agreeable lunch but when I passed out into the gloaming I had trouble finding my Uber. Verily it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a man who has lunched to connect with his Uber. It costs £6 if you cannot find the fella and then I took a black cab.
Yesterday I wasn’t expecting lunch. It was Stuffing Day at the chairman’s residence in Maida Vale. She and her consort had already stuck labels on envelopes so it only remained for six of us to affix stamps and then stuff the envelopes with the March edition of Wooster Sauce and the By The Way supplement. Hitherto I had never stayed for lunch but nor had the chairman’s husband been present. He proposed some New Zealand sauvignon blanc and when the chairman added she had made kedgeree I saw a perfect lunch ahead and was not disappointed.
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