LIFE
lain: he must be judged harshly, for he
sank well below the level of events.
Even so, he displays attractive
qualities, not least an enthusiasm for
Chateau Margaux. Once, as the but-
ler pours it, he declares: ‘The dark-
est hour is just before the lunch.’
Anticipating the PM’s return from
Munich with the piece of paper, his
wife Annie had urged him to imitate
Disraeli after the Congress of Ber-
lin and declare ‘peace with honour’
from a window in No. 10. Initially,
he demurred: ‘I’ll do nothing of the
sort. I’m not the least like Dizzy.’ That
was true. Chamberlain was the better
man. But he succumbed to excitement,
rolled up a window, said the fatal
words, and lived to see them bound
into the scorpion-whips of mockery.
There is another parallel with
Dizzy. Berlin was the highest point of
his premiership; Munich was Cham-
berlain’s most popular hour. Yet within
two years, both men were out of office
and dying. But Disraeli also enjoyed
the consolation of Margaux. Dur-
ing the 1880 election, Lord Salisbury
entertained him at Hatfield. Salisbury
decreed that at dinner, the 1870 Mar-
gaux should be served to his guest,
though not to his teenage sons. Dis-‘T
he Lord God walking in
the garden in the cool of
the day.’ Is there a more
charming passage in the Bible? It
makes God sound like an English
gentleman, vastly superior to Baal or
Ashtoreth or any other rival. But at
the end of his stroll, Jehovah would
condemn Adam and his descendants
to the penalties of original sin. Gods
are kittle cattle.
In the heat of the day, there is much
to be said for gardens, as long as one
has shade, a book and cold wine plus,
perhaps, the temptation of a pool. I can
unstintingly recommend one book. It
might seem paradoxical to describe
Tim Bouverie’s Appeasing Hitler as
enjoyable, for he is dealing with anoth-
er fell episode in the history of origi-
nal sin. But there is a sure command
of narrative and judgment in faultless-
ly lucid prose, with subtexts of pathos.
As late as August 1939, Neville Cham-
berlain fishes for salmon with the
Duke of Westminster and still hopes
to help the Duke of Buccleuch cull his
grouse. Yet we are marching inexora-
bly towards tragedy. Poor Chamber-
raeli decided that the taste made up
for any sympathy with thirsty youths.
Chums who have just arrived back
from the South Seas swear that Dorset
is hotter than Tahiti. So this is not the
weather for red first growths, although
Ben Stokes’s apotheosis merited a
glorious libation. Thank goodness the
law courts — and cricketing authori-
ties — did not punish his unoriginal
sins with lifelong banishment from
Eden. For my last column, I hesitated
before writing that the first Test had
been a very great match. A banker
friend once told me never to use ‘very’
unless ‘bloody’ could be substituted.
Did you go for a bloody long walk, or
just a long walk? Well, I decided it had
been a bloody great match. So how
can one find superlatives for the lat-
est one? On one point, we can be cer-
tain. This will be a bloody great series,
which should have a resplendent
consequence. All the Twenty20 non-
sense can be put back in the toy box.
To drink to that, I have been mak-
ing do with whites — lots of Assyrtiko
— and rosés. I once wrote that rosé
should only be drunk south of Lyon.
But Provençal heat means Provençal
standards, especially as there are good
reasons to be cheerful. This August will
end better than the August of 80 years
ago. Yet that gives rise to a melancholy
reflection. We can enjoy the weather
and the cricket, not because original
sin has become less potent but because
India and Pakistan both possess nucle-
ar weapons. Without mutually assured
destruction, the Indians would long
since have struck at Pakistan, inflict-
ing devastation and turning the coun-
try into al Qaeda-stan. Time to count a
few blessings, and pour another drink.Drink
Reasons to be cheerful
Bruce Anderson
In the heat
of the day,
there is much
to be said for
gardens, as
long as one
has cold wineI’ve noticed a tendency among
townies like me to call all cattle
cows (which they feel they must
mention in discussing Brexit).
You’d think that a cow was
an obviously female creature.
(Didn’t Alf Garnett in Till Death
Us Do Part, shown from 1965, call
his wife Else a ‘silly old moo’?)
But that doesn’t stop them.
Indeed the main character in an
American cartoon film called
Barnyard (2006) was a cow by the
name of Otis with a milk-giving
udder. He was reckoned male
and wooed a (female) cow called
Daisy. This was not presented
as any daring exercise in genderfluidity. One critic recommended
that parents should take their
children to it if they wanted to
‘depress them while making sure
they fail biology’.
But what do you call the
animal represented by bulls
and cows? Once it could have
been ox, with oxen standing for
‘cattle’. What was the creature
in the stable at Bethlehem, of
which Isaiah spoke: ‘The ox
knoweth his owner, and the asshis master’s crib’? The Vulgate
called it a bos, a bovine of the
species that the zoologists later
labelled Bos taurus. But oxen
came to be limited to castrated
male cattle, as did bullock, which
originally meant a young bull.
Steer also came to mean a young
castrated ox.
Farmers speak of one of their
herd as a beast, though for the
rest of us beast is a variant of
animal. Chaucer, in his translation
of Boethius, referred to man
(homo in Latin) as ‘a reasonable
beast’ — a rational animal. When
the Oxford English Dictionary
reached the letter B in 1887,it remarked: ‘In some parts of
England, beast in the singular
means spec “horse”, while the
plural beasts, beastès, beass means
“oxen”.’ I don’t know whether
that is still true in those parts.
As for cattle, its history is so
intertwined with chattels that the
OED treats them as the same
word. Cattle originated in the
Latin adjective capitale, ‘capital’.
So Karl Marx’s book might
almost have been called Cattle.
Though lawyers speak of a chattel,
even they can’t refer to ‘a cattle’.
If we do not want to specify sex,
we all have to talk of ‘one of the
cattle’. — Dot WordsworthMIND YOUR LANGUAGE
Cow‘I have some good news and some bad news...’