LIFE
would have taken a very wild guess to iden-
tify them as the Spectator Wine Club, but
if told the guess was correct, our observer
mightn’t have been too surprised.
If our observer made up in emotional
intelligence for what he or she lacked in
aesthetic sensibility, he or she might have
perceived that although it was almost noon,
none of them had yet had a drink. Noth-
ing you could quite put your finger on —
an anxious rub of the chin here, a furtive
glance at the watch there, and perhaps pro-
portionately more of them given over to
silent, pensive contemplation than would
be seen, say, among an equivalent boatload
of Chinese tourists.
And if our observer had kept looking,
he would have seen a rope finally secure
the barge to the buoy and the Spectator
Wine Club break out guns and ammuni-
tion, including over and under shotguns, a
pump-action shotgun and a blunderbuss.
Was this England’s Fort Sumter moment,
he or she might have wondered? Certainly,
if the first shots of the second English civil
war were shortly to be loosed off by the
Spectator Wine Club, there was a poignant
yet apt poetry in their choice of transport,
weapons, target and date — Demosthenes’
birthday. And as the Spectator Wine Club
stood to arms, then presented, and the
old Thames barge’s stern fairly bristled
with enormous-calibre gun barrels, these
thoughts might have caused our observer
to feel anxious for his person and hideous
property.
But if our observer had courageously
stayed to witness the first volley, he would
have laughed. It was clay pigeons and yel-
low balloons we were firing at, and we
couldn’t have hit Diane Abbott’s backside
at five paces, not even with the blunderbuss.
I would say in mitigation, however, that
some of us were gagging for a drink so badly
that we couldn’t concentrate.
At last a head appeared through a hatch
in the deck and called us down into the hold
for lunch. The lunch, I now learned, was in
my honour, and everyone present had paid
£250 to be there. Incredible. Now I really
needed a drink. Happily, the moment our
feet touched the planking in the wood-pan-
elled dining room, the boar was released.
Gin and tonics and French 75s were rapidly
handed out and downed in two, three at the
most, as we took our places at two long din-
ing tables. And from that point on, glasses
of wine came at me from all directions. The
glasses were numbered. The numbers could
be matched to a wine list next to my plate
and there was a pencil and a sheet of paper
for tasting notes. At Greenwich, just before
boarding, I had lost my mind on the tele-
phone and had metaphorically slammed it
down, as I thought, on the last three years
of my life. After a glass or two, a piss-up on
an old Thames sailing barge, with a brand
new pencil and a blank sheet of paper in
front of me, and this sudden undreamed-
of popularity, seemed a marvellous start to
the rest of it.
‘I like this number four.’ ‘Has anyone not
got a number five yet?’ ‘What do you think
of number three?’ ‘Not bad but I prefer
number six. Excuse me, can we have anoth-
er number six?’
Of course after number six the tables
were in uproar and I didn’t much care what
flaming number it was I had in my hand.Auto-Analysis
Spurs shirt, slouching up to White Hart Lane,
Gunners scarf around the throat,
You do not fit easily into the world.
It is an English thing, this fitting in –
Being a Royal Academician,
Faber poet, party politician.Your portrait looks uneasy in its frame.
Your verses favour enjambment.
Sentences outlast their stanzas.
Keeping a foot in both camps
Disqualifies affiliation when it comes
To either. A fox-hunting socialistProves impossible to identify with.
Happy to adapt, you want to be both
Vampire and stake-holder at the same time.
You cannot be a Sunni and a Shia
Or a Zionophobic Jew. That’s not going
To get you into the enclosure.Such quick-change artistry
Constitutes a crime against conformity
That is enormous, Anthony.
Hop from track to track
And the guardians will inform you that
A shift in shape defeats the aim of packagery.— Anthony Howell
Nor did I ever fully grasp whether it was the
north bank of the Thames or the left that
was passing by through the porthole, not
even when we passed beneath Tower Bridge,
which, I was told, had opened especially for
us. And this feeling of privilege, popularity
and marvellousness expanded, and kept on
expanding, throughout the afternoon and
later ashore in the city cellar wine bar, where
the wine was awful but at least it was preten-
tious. And in the bright party pub after that,
where I lost my wallet, and in the darkness
of the Laylow club after that, and even at the
house party after that, which, I think, was in
Notting Hill, the feeling of marvellousness
was expanding still.The lunch, I now learned, was in
my honour, and everyone present
had paid £250 to be there