Durham University is a hot-house for lifelong friendships and (not always lifelong) marriages. A conspicuous success is John and Katie who live on their farm in Northumberland. Their daughter, Lucy, was brought up on good plain cooking and shoot lunches. Now she has spread her wings.
I’ve not met her but she has masses of self-confidence, I mean you’d have to, to call your business Tart London. She and her business partner, Jemima Jones, are all over the media – cookery column in the Evening Standard even an interview on Saturday in The Irish News, wow. Ironically, as a nod to her childhood, she started out doing shoot lunches – for fashion shoots. Now they are opening a restaurant in the Gobi Desert of the restaurant world – the border of Victoria and Belgravia. It will be a hipsters’ hang-out for sure but I hope she doesn’t forget her roots and offers a real shoot lunch. How about some grouse rissoles in August?
Meanwhile, I am confused. EJ Murgatroyd is insistent that I must drink less. It is annoying to hear advice that I am already aware of and pay him £200 to boot. However, the Chairman of the Wine Committee at my club writes to congratulate me. We drank more than 20,000 bottles last year, up 5%. He notes that we drink almost exactly half red, including port, and half white, including champagne. Almost 80% of the red wine drunk is claret which may reflect members’ preference or that claret is better represented. For example there are no red wines from the Loire, a pity but they don’t age well.
134 books were added to the club library. The two most borrowed books were Cabinet’s Finest Hour: The Hidden Agenda of May 1940 by David Owen and Between the Wars: 1919-1939 by Philip Ziegler. Joint second were: The Enigma of Mr Kidson, The Portrait of an Eton Schoolmaster by Jamie Blackett, Get on With It by Algy Cluff, Fault Lines by David Pryce-Jones and A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. I was recently given the last named and will read it when I have finished Dance to the Music of Time ( I am on volume ten).
Don’t expect to drink this claret at my club.
A nonagenarian friend recently paid a visit to his Physician. The Doctor remarked on his sprightly deportment, and inquired if he managed to get his ‘five-a-day’? Billy swiftly replied: ‘absolutely Doc: two glasses of Semillon with lunch, two claret at dinner, and a good vintage port before bed’!
A friend of mine went for his annual check-up. The doctor told him that he had the blood pressure and pulse rate of a trained athlete, so he upgraded him from Obese to Over-Weight.