Author: Oliver Nicholson

I like starting novels in the middle. By skipping all those establishing shots, which exclude as much as they reveal, you’re able to catch the author and the characters off their guard. Also, once you have finished, you can start again at the beginning and have the paradoxical pleasure of reading the book for the first time twice.

My father did the same. When I was about ten years old, he left on the chair next to the bath the ideal book for those who read like we do. It has color, and some of the most memorable comic characters in English fiction, but, as the author proudly proclaims, nothing much by way of a plot.

Like many Victorian novels, Robert Smith Surtees’s Handley Cross was issued originally as a serial in separate monthly parts. The hero is a relatively rough diamond, a prosperous London grocer called John Jorrocks. Oddly for a Londoner, his principal passion is foxhunting, though he is not above mixing business with pleasure. He was known to have cantered after a fresh acquaintance in the hunting field, calling out, “Did you say two chests of black tea and one of green?” The man leapt a fence to get away from him.

Second only to Jorrocks’s passion for foxhunting was his passion for port. Claret he despised—“I can make you some, if you like,” he told a guest, “with water, vinegar, a lemon and a little drop of port.” Brandy and water was less a pleasure than a form of central heating. But port “wot leaves a mark on the side of the glass” gave ample opportunity to mull over (and magnify) the triumphs of a day’s sport.

By Jorrocks’s time, port had been the favorite wine of Englishmen for over a hundred years. Jorrocks’s racier contemporary Jack Mytton drank eight bottles a day, the first while he was shaving in the morning. He died young—of trying to cure his hiccups by setting fire to his nightshirt.

Port is in fact a by-product of the wars fought by Britain all through the eighteenth century—wars that prevented the France of Louis XIV and Napo-leon from dominating Europe. Fighting France meant less claret coming across the English Channel from Bordeaux and led to closer links between England and Portugal.

The alliance encouraged the wine trade. Soon after the Methuen Treaty of 1703, merchants discovered that vintages from Portugal crossed the stormy Bay of Biscay better if they had first been spiked with brandy. The same methods they developed are used to make the wine we enjoy today. Early during fermentation, the process by which natural sugars would normally become alcohol is arrested by the addition of brandy. The result is both sweet and intoxicating, ideal for drinking slowly after dinner with apples, nuts, Stilton cheese, or a biscuit.

Port comes in various styles: Ruby port is drunk young, having spent most of its life in cask; tawny port is generally older and sometimes has a dryish tinge to the taste. The greatest of all, vintage port, is the wine of a season considered sufficiently remarkable by an individual maker for him to risk his reputation by declaring it a vintage year. In some years only a few houses will declare a vintage. Vintage port spends only a couple of years in cask, so it grows old in bottle. This can be a lengthy process—the wines of 1963 and 1977 still have time on their side, and 1997 won’t be at its best for years yet. And maturing in bottle means that crud accumulates; if vintage port isn’t stored carefully the wine becomes clouded with sediment.

Vintage port is the enemy of instant gratification (which might be why California has so far failed to produce a convincing port, though there is a pleasing drink made there, wittily called Starboard). Long years in bottle must end with sensitive decanting. But it is absolutely worth the effort. There is nothing like the slow, deep sweetness of vintage port. This is a pleasure for people with patience.

Of all the places I have ever lived, Minneapolis is the most confusing. One might have thought it would be otherwise. It was meant to be laid out, after all, on a Jeffersonian grid. Yet one cycles down the street, blithely confident that the 3800 block of Sheridan Avenue South will lead ineluctably into the 3700 block, only to find that an unkind providence has interposed a lake, a railroad, or a freeway. Reason, one feels, has been defeated by Nature, or at least by Life.
Occasionally, it is true, Minneapolis gives inklings of the organic process of its growth to the hard-pressed cyclist trying to find the house where he has been invited to dinner. If he bumps and rattles his way over the monstrous potholes in the southeast quadrant of Lake Calhoun Parkway, he will come to Richfield Road, originally the wagon route from the infant Minneapolis to the neighboring township of Richfield (which originally included modern Edina). On a good day, the remains of the streetcar rails can be made out beneath the asphalt of broad old thoroughfares such as Portland Avenue. But in Edina the farms that defined the landscape in the late nineteenth century are gone. Only their names survive in Grimes and Browndale avenues.

After trying to get the Minnesota landscape into larger perspective, I went to see the Jeffers Petroglyphs down beyond Mankato. These lively scribings are etched (by who knows what anonymous hand) onto rocks that slope and tilt like the bed of a prehistoric ocean. The wind passes through the prairie grass like cat’s-paws at sea. Here at last I found a sense of the size of the state.

If these waves of prairie have the breadth of an ocean, Mont Ventoux in the South of France has the height of a tsunami. From its summit you can see for miles (all right, kilometers). The fourteenth-century poet Petrarch discovered this when he climbed it—possibly the earliest example of mountaineering, or at least hill walking, done for no other reason than the fun of it. Not that Petrarch was capable of anything so innocent as fun. He took with him a copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, which he duly opened on the summit (at random, he claims), and conveniently found a passage that assured him that landscape is less important than the soul: “Men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean, and the revolutions of the stars—and desert themselves.”
The modern climber will descry on the southern slopes of Mont Ventoux gravel terraces planted with vineyards sheltered from northerly winds by the mountainous bulk behind them. One of the Côtes de Ventoux wineries that has had a remarkable run of good years recently is Château Pesquié. The red wine made here by the Chaudière family called Ch. Pesquié les Terrasses is a round fruity Rhône. It is composed of slightly less syrah, the grape variety most often associated with Rhône reds, and slightly more grenache, the variety familiar from the wines of Châteauneuf du Pape, about twenty miles to the west. One can confidently commend it for consumption with cheese and meat (including turkey).

Claret, they say, is wine for the head; Burgundy and Rhône, wine for the heart. Even a poet as sententious and self-absorbed as Petrarch would, one feels, have been able to allow a wine as appealing as this one to penetrate the formidable defenses of his self-consciousness. Perhaps, too, it could have inspired him to appreciate the pleasures of landscape without his having to decide in advance what he was going to think about it.

One would have thought it was impossible to pay too much for food. Life, after all, is not the same without it. Yet all over the developed world, farmers are hard up. The English newspapers made hay some weeks ago with a story about farmers’ wives in the Hardy Country, one of the most picture-postcard parts of Britain, who are obliged to advertise their charms on the Internet for the enjoyment of foreign tourists (“Come and Pluck an English Rose”) in order—if you will permit the expression—to make ends meet.

Government subsidies, meant to solve the conundrum of keeping food cheap without making farmers impossibly poorer than their fellow countrymen, do nothing for Third World farmers, who are thus excluded from markets. Farm subsidies are not, in the final analysis, for the long-suffering farmer; they are for eaters who would rather spend money on something else. God alone knows the solution to this—how many economists does it take to change a lightbulb?

But one can hardly hold up for admiration the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union (or whatever the Common Market is being called this week), even though more than forty-six percent of the official expenditure of the European Union goes toward agriculture. The Common Market started as a deal by which German industry paid for the picturesque traditions of French farming. They put the European Parliament at Strasbourg in Alsace to symbolize this concord. Whatever the symbolism, the practicalities are truly remarkable. For one week each month, the 626 members, their staff (who otherwise work in Brussels), their secretariat (based in Luxembourg), and their translators (into and out of eleven official languages) decamp to Alsace. Imagine moving the Minnesota Legislature up to Duluth one week in four, all the year round.

Strasbourg is certainly central to Old Europe. Caught between the river Rhine in Germany and the Vosges Mountains in France, it enjoys a relatively dry and continental climate. It has been fought over by armies from East and West at least since the neo-pagan Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate defeated a Germanic confederation there in 357. After the war of 1870, Alsace became German (Elsass); in 1918 it became French once again. Hence the old joke about Alsace wine being made of German grapes using French methods—which means they do, or do not, wash their feet (adjust joke according to prejudice).

It is true that many of the Alsace grape varieties, such as riesling and sylvaner, are also widely grown in Germany. Alsace is in fact the only part of France producing first-rate wine where the grape variety rather than the region is the most prominent item on a wine label. The grape most readily associated with Alsace is the gewürztraminer, a variety actually related to muscat grapes and made into wine with a strong smell of elderflowers, melons, or lychees (pick your own comparison), tasting remarkably like its own fresh grapes.

As in Germany, some growers leave the best grapes on the vines until they grow the “noble rot” and are made into sweeter wines labeled “Vendange Tardive” (German Spätlese). But most Alsace gewürztraminer is made into table wine, clean, dry and spicy, fermented in steel rather than in oak, until all the residual sugar has been absorbed and the wine has a fresh bright finish. This is perhaps the only wine that can stand up to curry.

It is certainly good with turkey. As it costs a fraction of what you would pay for the fine wines of Burgundy, the wine region closest to the southwest of Alsace, you might want to stock up on it in anticipation of Thanksgiving. I would not answer for its compatibility with marshmallow dip or lime jelly. So buy a bottle now and practice.

I hope you are enjoying the new Harry Potter. Such a wealth of invention. And so witty. No profound psychological penetration, I suppose, but who ever expected that in a school story or a murder mystery? J.K. Rowling may not be Jane Austen, but then neither is Dorothy Sayers (who made the error of falling in love with her detective) or P.D. James (so much blood, such clever use of the Book of Common Prayer), Edmund Crispin (the thinking man’s Dorothy Sayers), or Agatha Christie (of whom to say that she has cardboard characters is to attribute to cardboard an excess of sensation).

Even without psychological subtlety, Rowling has conjured up wonderful characters. Anyone employed in education will recognize Professor Umbridge, an administrator from the Ministry of Magic who cannot herself teach her way out of a paper bag but is sent in to reform Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. “She drafted a bit of anti-werewolf legislation two years ago that makes it almost impossible for him to get a job,” says one professor about a brilliant colleague. The enemy of the Umbridges of this world is imagination.

And that is what Rowling has in superabundance. This is not teenybopper novelty-shop witchcraft. Still less is it the nasty world of black masses and witches’ sabbaths. I have never heard anyone miss a point so comprehensively as the earnest, amiable, and literal-minded evangelist on NPR who objected to the Harry Potter tales as promoters of the black arts by quoting sentences out of context, treating the novels in fact in the way that some people treat their Bibles—as if they were instruction manuals for lawn mowers. The bishop of London caught the spirit of the thing when he said he would happily appoint a chaplain for Hogwarts any day Professor Dumbledore requested one.

Of course, not every exercise of the imagination is good. Films like The Patriot propagate a view of the American Revolution that fails to acknowledge it as a civil war between two sets of American colonists, and so perpetuates hostility toward foreigners (and lobsters) that the world might be better off without. Braveheart irresponsibly fomented political hatred within the United Kingdom (think how well it did at the box office).

Yet Harry Potter generates sheer eutrapelia (handy word, that). It recalls the playful Roman poet Ovid. Scarcely surprising, seeing that Rowling (like The Rake himself) was a Latin major in college. Now she is the richest woman in England, richer than the Queen, God bless her (both of them).

Which just shows that imagination has practical consequences. In dreams begin responsibilities. Byron dreamed that Greece might yet be free. His dream formed part of the Grand Design or Big Idea that made Greece, in 1829, the first independent nation to be carved out of the old Ottoman Empire. The consequences of the long, slow disintegration of that Empire we are still living with, not least in Iraq.

Half a century after Greek independence, in Thessaloniki, then an Ottoman city, Yiannis Boutari founded the wine concern that still bears his name. Of course, Greeks have been making wine ever since Homer’s heroes sailed the wine-dark sea. But only recently did it become commercially available in glass bottles like Boutari’s.

There is something of the smell of a wooded Greek hillside about the red wine they make in the Naoussa in northern Greece, fifty miles from Thessaloniki. The grape is called xinomauro, which is Greek for acid black. Ancient and modern Greeks alike call red wine black—after all, it only looks red in a glass. Sure enough Boutari Naoussa is a good dark-ruby color. The taste is robust, not unlike cabernet, and the price, about $12, is a good value.

No need to clutter your appreciation by recalling that this comes from the same area as Alexander the Great—the man with the grandest designs in all the ancient world. Taste is its own idea. The taste buds are, after all, the swiftest messengers on the royal road from reality to the imagination.

Though it is nearly 20 years ago now, some of us are old enough to remember the Official Preppy Handbook. It told girls called Muffy how to adjust their pearls, push pennies into their penny loafers and pursue men in tartan trousers (which they called plaid pants).

The other day I came across the British equivalent, the Sloane Ranger Handbook (Sloane Square is a smart part of London, near Harrod’s grand emporium). From it, Caroline and Henry Sloane discover how to get green Wellington boots, where to study Cordon Bleu cookery, and which pack of hounds to hunt foxes with. For Americans, it offers a rare chance to consider whether our two great nations are divided by more than a common language.

They are. What the great Augustine would call the “loves” of Sloanes and Preppies are quite distinct. Consider attitudes to the land; in England rural is smart, in America it means hick. Or think of smell. Caroline and Henry think it sad that Americans do not smell of anything. All those showers kill smell dead; far better to wallow in a steamy bath. Caroline married Henry largely on account of his smell, a delicious amalgam of pipe smoke, Labradors, and old leather.

The English simmer (where I write) is ripe with aromas. I do not refer to the overpowering stench of prevarication emerging from a government that persuaded many Members of Parliament to vote for its war in Iraq by announcing we could all be blown up at 45 minutes notice by Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. The public has a strong sense that if Her Majesty’s ministers were so sure these large but elusive weapons existed, they ought at least to be able to say where they are. This is a smell that will not go away anytime soon.

Thank God there are pleasanter airs abroad. Freshness rises from the pale green grass of the aftermath, where the crows are pecking among the bales of new-mown hay. The sweet peas are flowering, as powerful as brandy, as honeyed as Sauternes. But perhaps the most characteristic smell comes from the black currants—not blackberries, the autumn fruit that looks like raspberries dipped in ink, but black currants, Ribes nigrum, like small cranberries, growing on thornless bushes with leaves like vines.

In the sunshine, they are as pungent as skunks but a whole pile pleasanter, slightly oily (reminiscent, in fact, of the oil boys used to drip onto their electric trains), sweet, sour, and fruity all at the same time. Wine made from the sauvignon blanc grape, especially Pouilly-Fumé from the Loire in western France, is often said to smell of black currants.

The black currant is the most widely grown fruit in Europe. John Tradescant the Elder brought it to England from Central Europe in the early 17th century, in time for it to be transported to the American colonies. It has never been widely grown in America.

Forestedge Winery in Laporte, Minnesota, however, is said to be adding black currant to its range of wines made from local soft fruit and berries. Look out for it.

In the meantime, try a summer aperitif called Kir. Quarter-fill a wine glass with crème de cassis, the liqueur made in Burgundy from black currants and far too sticky to drink on its own. Top it with dry white wine. In Burgundy, they use aligoti (the name of a grape), but you could try anything white, dry, and light. With champagne it becomes Kir Royale. Watch the pretty pink swirls, like marble in motion, then sip judiciously as the sun sinks, the loon calls, and the dog falls into the lake for the nth time (where n is a large whole number).

Kir is named after a priest from Burgundy, Canon Kir, a hero of the resistance and then for many years, in the Fourth Republic, mayor of Dijon. The good canon’s name may be seen on the bottles of the premixed version of Kir, but if you cannot find them, it is easy to mix your own. There are few fruitier ways of keeping down the bill for preprandial libation. Besides, it stretches a hand of friendship across the Atlantic, and that cannot be bad.

Imperialists come in all shapes and sizes. Some claim their god gave them the right to take away other people’s land and market the produce of their orange groves. Others never visit the places or people whose lives they dominate through the sale of brown sticky drinks and their cinematic equivalent.

And then there are the unlikely ones, such as the poet Catullus. In the middle of the first century B.C. Rome was taking on territory at a greater rate than ever before. It was the custom for young men who aspired to a political career (or whose fathers aspired to one for them) to spend a year or more in a province as an honorary attaché on the governor’s staff, picking up tips, both informative and financial. Catullus did not find the wide plains of what is now northwestern Turkey at all to his liking. He was clearly happier in a sleazy pub off the Forum in Rome (“salax taberna,” as in “salacious tavern”), even if he did accuse its regulars of rogering his lady love Lesbia, “than whom no woman will ever be more greatly loved.” He was especially bitter about a Spaniard called Egnatius who favored as a dentifrice (so Catullus claimed) a fluid for the production of which he held, shall we say, an unassailable monopoly. [Uh, his own urine.—Editors]

Perhaps Catullus could have learned to like living abroad for his country. One thinks of that remarkable generation of British Arabists who tried to put the Near East back on its feet after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Hamilton, who engineered the Hamilton Road through the Zagros Mountains, the first road to link Persia with northern Iraq, was perhaps a natural for strenuous service. Lawrence, too, of course. But less so Canon Wigram who spent years living in the remote mountain villages of the Assyrian Christians, not proselytizing but providing every kind of help—medical, liturgical, typographical, political.

Still less, one might have thought, Gertrude Bell. When that formidable lady first came to the East it was to fall in love with a young diplomat under the plane trees of the British Legation in Teheran and to translate the wine-and-roses poems of Hafiz, the Persian national poet. Yet she learned to travel rough, to do astounding amounts of pioneer work in Byzantine and early Islamic archaeology (she was the power behind the Baghdad Museum, the one recently looted) and to become the trusted political counselor of the first King of independent Iraq (while remaining resolutely against Votes for Women at home).

The memoirs written by this generation shine with love of the Levant, the land, its languages, its people. Try Sir Arnold Wilson’s S.W. Persia or Hamilton’s Road through Kurdistan (and if it’s you that has my copy of the latter, please could I have it back). Alas, it will have been papers precisely of this period that were lost in the holocaust of the Iraqi National Archives horrifyingly described by Robert Fisk in the last week of the recent war.

Gertrude Bell died in Baghdad. Catullus sailed a yacht back from Asia Minor, down the Bosporus, past Byzantium, through the Greek islands, up the Adriatic. He made his homecoming not to Rome, but to northern Italy, where his family lived. The yacht was allowed a serene retirement on the limpid waters of Lake Garda. No serene retirement for young Catullus. He went on writing, riling other poets, especially Julius Caesar’s Chief Engineer, a multifutuent but incompetent versifier whom Catullus liked to call Mentula, (crudely translated by the late Professor Swanson as Mantool and by the witty James Michie as John Thomas). Catullus’s father invited Caesar to dinner when the great man was in northern Italy and made his son apologize.

One does not know what they drank, but the enterprising firm of Bitari has invented a pleasant red wine grown in the hills near Verona, the poet’s home, and named it after him. Catullo is 60 percent Cabernet (not a grape one associates with this part of the world) and 40 percent Corvino (which one does—it is the main variety in Valpolicella). The blend is mighty successful; my friend the wine merchant, with whom I discussed a bottle of this one sunny evening, thought it tasted rather like Pinot Noir, which is to say that it slipped down all too quickly, promoting pleasure more than thought and pastime with good company. Order it at your salax taberna, or take it to the lake and listen to the water chuckling up against the dock sharing your pleasure at being home.

Freud and Strauss offer contrasting impressions of the nightlife of old Vienna. Hitler painted a verbal picture of the same city as it was seen by those who could not afford Sacher Torte and waltzes, let alone dream therapy with the good doctor, those for whom the opera (the solemnities of Wagner, one gathers, rather than the gaiety of the Gipsy Baron) could be only a very occasional indulgence. Mein Kampf is a book more reviled than read. It certainly earns the revulsion. Like most emetics that really deliver, the effect is gradual. The reader is invited to pity the poor painter, scraping a living as a builder’s laborer, excluded from art school by the shortcomings of the education system. Slowly it emerges that it is all someone else’s fault, the Jews, the unions, the Hapsburg monarchy, parliamentary procedure, you name it. Cringing self-pity metamorphoses effortlessly into snarling resentment and contempt. This is as unhappy a study in the mental genesis of tyranny as you are likely to find. One doubts if Hitler could ever have painted bold bright landscapes like those of Churchill.

Hitler, as is well known, was not keen on wine (though his ambassador to London, von Ribbentrop, had an earlier career as a champagne salesman). Other tyrants have been less teetotal. Saddam Hussein, despite being a Muslim, had a favorite wine. It is a liquid which many of us remember from those anxious years between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, when bepimpled youth wished to do the right thing by the lady they were entertaining, but did not know if the right thing was red or white. Yes, Mateus Rosé, sweetish, pink, faintly fizzy, to look at not unlike the colored carbonated water some dentists give you to disguise the blood when you “wash out now please.” Maybe you still have one of the dumpy bottles, stoppered with a light bulb, caked in oodles of candle grease.

One ought not to suggest guilt by association. Some of my best friends have moustaches. The taste of Mateus Rosé is at least consistent, even if I am not an admirer. But it is a pity that it is by far the best known table wine from Portugal, a land of many interesting grape varieties and vintages. There is Vinho Verde, a white wine which is indeed green and fresh in taste and color, as the name suggests. And recently I enjoyed a really heartening bottle of Portugese red, Quinta do Crasto 2000, named after the vineyard which clings to the vertiginous slopes of the valley of the River Douro in the north of the country and conveniently available in the valley of the upper Mississippi for substantially less than $20.

The Douro valley is, of course, the area from which port comes, and this red table wine is made from some of the same grapes as port, Tinta Roriz, Tinta Barocca, Touriga Francesa, and Touriga Nacional (the names are as evocative as those of old English apple varieties—listen to Bramley Seedling and Worcester Pearmain, James Greave and Ribstone Pippin). Port, though, stays sweet because its fermentation is arrested. The yeasts get busy in the barrel turning the sugars into alcohol only to have their activities curtailed by the fortifying addition of substantial quantities of brandy. The sugars sit back and let the resulting blend mature into the noblest of all dessert wines.

Quinta do Crasto table wine lacks the sweetness of port, but has much of its nobility. The wonderful dark color is matched by a magnificent dark taste, which not only fills the mouth but swells up into the soft palate and the sinus, making you puff out your moustache (if any) like a walrus. There is soft tannin, enough to give good road-holding qualities, and a slight tang of fresh apples, enough to induce salivation but no sharpness. This is well-balanced wine.

Take it this summer if you are asked to the better sort of barbecue. With the help of a small steak, a baked potato and Savoy cabbage (you know, the crinkly kind) lightly steamed with a knob of butter, it lifted me out of the miry slough of Hitler’s prose. “Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace.” The answer to tyranny must, I suppose, be hope.

Our first spring in Minnesota came late. It had not been much of a winter, in fact we felt fairly blasé about our capacity to survive Minnesota’s fabled frigidity. (But oh, how we have learned since!) The torrents pouring over St. Antony Falls inspired no particular shock nor awe, unlike the ceaseless roar of Spring 2001. There was road-grit, weak sunshine, and windblown tulips. Surprising then to hear accordion music outside, and the clash of small bells. But it was true—this music came by me on the waters. Rounding a corner we saw a white sleeve rhythmically waving a handkerchief, and were promptly transported from the shore of the Mississippi to the banks of the Thames at Oxford.

England, God knows, is full of odd customs. The unwise think they are vestiges of primeval paganism, but most of them seem to have started in the High Middle Ages, the most Christian era of English history. If you don’t believe me, read a book called The Stations of the Sun by a learned bloke called Hutton. These calendar customs began not as gnarled substitutes for child sacrifice but as the secular entertainments of Christian civilization.

Whatever the history, every May 1, thousands of Oxford people creep out of bed in the wee small hours of the morning. The crowds converge on Magdalen Bridge, where the main London road crosses the river. There they hear, generally in silence, the choir of Magdalen College, grouped on top of the college tower, sing a Latin hymn and a few madrigals, no louder at ground level than birdsong. Then the crowds head back into the city where the purveyors of greasy breakfasts do land-office business and “sides” of Morris dancers, dressed in white shirts and trousers, with colored cross-belts, bells strapped to their legs, and substantial boots perform with a vigor remarkable for the earliness of the hour.

It was Morris dancers we ran into that evening in Minneapolis, one of four sides in the city (two men’s, one women’s, one—from the village of Uptown-on-Calhoun—mixed). They say they are often asked if their art is Irish, but no, it is firmly in the tradition of Thames Valley Morris dancing. This art form was “discovered” in 1899 just in time to prevent its disappearance by a remarkable musicologist named Cecil Sharp (did anyone dare to call him D Flat, one wonders), and it’s now more popular than ever before. Like their Oxford fellows, the Minneapolis dancers also take May Morning exercise early, clashing batons, fiddling, leaping, whirling hankies, but they also meet at a more sociable hour in the evening and come together from the four points of the compass to dance in front of the IDS Tower. (Isn’t there something a bit Freudian about that name?)

So much leaping and clashing (even watching it) naturally works up a thirst, and it is indeed as much with Saturday evenings at Cotswold country pubs as with May Morning in the city that one associates the Morris. How good those white outfits look seen through a pint of Hook Norton Best Bitter, pulled by a shapely forearm from a proper draught-beer engine. Hook Norton promise an on-line shop for their bottled products, but who knows if they will be able to ship to the United States.

Until they do, I recommend a refreshing summer beverage called “ginger beer shandy,” described as “new-fangled” in 1888. One simply adds one of the ordinary bitters (Bass, say, or McEwans Export) to an equal quantity of ginger beer. Not ginger ale, a clear brown cisatlantic drink, but ginger beer as my mother used to make it—with live yeast in the family’s heated linen cupboard (until it exploded), a sweet cloudy non-alcoholic drink now conveniently available from superior Minnesota grocers. The mixture brings out a healthy sweat. Let’s hope the summer is hot enough to warrant drinking plenty of it.

The early monks of the Egyptian desert often faced their demons head on. Abba Antony in the hot sandy silence of the wilderness found himself attacked by several wild beasts at once. They roared and hissed, they buffeted his makeshift cell until it shook. He stared them down. They gnashed their teeth and left.

Often, though, subtle means were needed. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers is full of stories which show how simplicity and discernment (and often humor) learnt from long consideration of the human condition can outwit violence, distraction, and despair. There are plenty of later analogs: Sherlock Holmes caught his murderers by identifying myriad varieties of tobacco ash. Miss Marple and Father Brown recognized killers by applying to the motives of their fellow men the results of a lengthy and patient observation.

Maybe it was something like this that the French Foreign Minister meant when he said France is an old country. He could scarcely have meant it literally. The present French constitution, that of the Fifth Republic, is substantially younger than the present President. Its ultimate ancestor, the constitution of the First Republic, emerged more than a century after the first constitution of Connecticut (supposedly the world’s oldest written constitution).

In fact, France was drawn together as a single state only after the 16th century Wars of Religion. In the Middle Ages what is now French territory was home to two distinct Romance languages, the langue d’oc and the langue d’oui, named from their words for “yes,” the former derived from Latin hoc (“this thing”), the latter from hic ille (“this is it”). Large parts of it were ruled for centuries by the Kings of England.

Wisdom, however, does not arise simply from the passage of time. It can grow out of reflection on shared suffering. As boys we were taught that French cooking might be good but it had evolved as an act of self-defense; the sauces and sausages had to be tasty because they needed to disguise dodgy meat cooked while French cities were being besieged by the armies of Henry V, the Duke of Marlborough, and other heroes. Our teacher had a point. As recently as the Prussian siege of 1870, the inhabitants of Paris were obliged to consume the inhabitants of their zoo, including the baby elephants Castor and Pollux.

But French country cooking, like that which Elizabeth David taught us to love, grows from the judicious use of hard-won ingredients by sapient peasants making the best of a hard-scrabble life. Cassoulet is one of the splendid achievements of the southern region named (after its old language) the Languedoc. It consists of pork and duck, goose and beans (good for your heart) cooked together over several days. It is the foster-child of silence and leisure. An invitation from my friend the Philolog to her annual Cassoulet Dinner was therefore an act of kindness and one which deserved the offering of an appropriate libation.

The wine would clearly need to come from the Languedoc, the hot Mediterranean coastal area across which Hannibal and his pachyderms passed on their way from Spain to the Alps. Languedoc produces lots of wine, but not all of it slips down easily. I recall a Corbières some years ago which was the color of red ink and tasted a lot like sucking the nib of a fountain pen. (No, I don’t. Not often anyway.)

This time, though, Fortune smiled. The 2001 vintage of Domaine de la Brune, a property in the Coteaux de Languedoc, is a heartening dark red (and about $10 a bottle). Only a tenth of it comes from the Carignan grape, until recently the most commonly grown grape in the Languedoc. But that’s enough to give it an edge. It is mostly Syrah, the grape of great Rhones such as Hermitage, sweetened and softened by some Grenache. The whole is pleasantly rounded, redolent of sunshine and alcohol.

Redolent too of craft and patience on the part of the winemaker who produced this pleasing balance. One should be suspicious of a wine that seems to make one wise (or, for that matter, a superior driver). This one encourages the drinker to recognize something better: the wisdom of the man who made it. Soyez sage.

Those few of us who spend our working lives in the Roman Empire find current events depressingly familiar. The superpowers of Late Antiquity, Rome and Persia, spent much of the half-millennium before the rise of Islam at war. The Persian Empire incorporated not only modern Iran, but also Iraq. The cockpit of imperial confrontation was precisely where modern Turkey, Iraq, and Syria come together.

The Persians were generally the aggressors. During the invasion of 359 AD, a Roman staff officer was taken by a friendly highland chieftain into the foothills of the Kurdish Alps to look down into the Mesopotamian plain. This is one of the great vistas of the world. Through the heat haze, you can sense the curvature of the earth as you look out from the escarpment across the plain below (even if you have drunk nothing stronger than Turkish beer—a refreshing beverage called Efes Pilsen). The staff officer counted the Persian troops, their knights, their archers, their siege engines, and other weapons of mass destruction as they crossed the Great Zab River. The traverse took over three days.

Romans never enjoyed any success following the Persian invasion route in reverse, i.e. south through modern Iraq along the valley of the Tigris. Once or twice they invaded successfully down the Euphrates (a route which cuts off a substantial corner of what is now Syria) and were able to besiege and burn the Persian capital, near where Baghdad is now. But such expeditions often ended in tears or worse; one emperor died from a thunderbolt during a desert storm.

Despite being the aggressors, the Persians seem more sympathetic than the stuffy Romans. Persian courtiers hunted and played chess, which they called euphonically chatrang. Their silver drinking vessels display reliefs of dancing girls with bellies beautiful to behold. The genial king Khusro II liked to have his financial statements submitted on sheets scented with rosewater. Wine was certainly one of the pleasures of his court, as it was of the Persian poets who told stories about him and his wife Shirin (“Sweety”) well into the Islamic period. What the wine was like is anybody’s guess. Attempts to associate ancient or medieval Persia with the excellent modern grape called Shiraz seem pretty tenuous.

The drink I associate with Persia is, oddly enough, Cointreau. It’s purely a matter of atmosphere. Cointreau is an after-dinner drink made out of oranges, and the orange is not recorded in Persia until later. Cointreau is distilled at Angers, in northwest France, from fruit grown in the West Indies, Brazil, and Spain. In its early days, in the mid-19th century, it had rather anti-clerical, rationalist overtones, in contrast to the sticky liquids made by monks—Benedictine, Chartreuse, and the elixir of Père Gaucher.

But for me Cointreau means Persia. Thirty years ago, I was over there sorting pottery shards for an archaeologist. I came to drink rather a lot of it, courtesy of a friend who was house-sitting in North Teheran for a British diplomat with (thanks to the diplomatic bag) a well-stocked drinks cupboard. Foreign alcohol was available but was fiercely expensive; polite people in the suburbs seemed caught up in a dust-devil of conspicuous consumption. Western goods, such as good drink, were conspicuously consumed (it all came crashing down when the Shah fell). Anyway, my friend knew she could afford to replace only one bottle. So it was the Cointreau we polished off, looking out over the fruit tree blossoms, the melting snow from the mountain behind us pouring audibly down the nearby streams.

The liqueur is clearer than a trout stream, sweet but not oppressive, a relief from the rosewater omnipresent in Persian sweetmeats. The oranges, in fact, make Cointreau somewhat astringent, like the coarser cuts of Tiptree marmalade (manufactured, of course, from bitter Seville oranges and not the watery things which go into inferior brands). One senses springtime and contentment, but not at the expense of rationality (and at the expense hereabouts of only about $10 for a little “pony” bottle), the Merry Monarch might have approved. I don’t know if the diplomat did, or if he ever knew. But then such folk are sent to lie abroad for their country.