I was at a social event at my boys’ secondary school on Saturday evening. As every writer will tell you, somewhere very near the top of Questions To Ask Your Friend Who Writes Books is ‘What are you working on at the moment?’. It’s an entirely reasonable question and I’m always happy to yack on about me and what I do at the drop of a hat. But there are a couple of problems with it.
Firstly, I’m always slightly wary of telling people what I’m working on in case they pinch my idea. I realise this is extreme paranoia (unless the person who’s asking me is a writer, and even then it’s extremely unlikely they’re going to run off into the sunset shouting' ‘Yippee, I’m going to make millions!’ on the basis of a 30 second elevator pitch for a book about the history of the semi-colon). The other possibility is that they might simply laugh at what I’m touting. This has happened, though in the case of the friend who asked in disbelief who on earth would buy a book about bookcase designs, I do take the slightest opportunity to mention to them that Bookshelf has sold well over 50,000 copies and been translated into half a dozen foreign languages.
A more substantial problem is that I don’t want to bore the socks off the person who’s asking, because the answer is that I’m constantly fiddling around with ideas or pitching to various publishers. At a quick count, I have a dozen ideas that have gone beyond the stage of me sitting in the garden and thinking ‘I wonder if there’s a book in XYZ’. Some haven’t gone very much further, others will have their fate decided this month (probably). But they want a pithy answer, not an in-depth blow-by-blow account.
So on Saturday I simply told my friend that I was working on various things, including a couple of food and drink ideas. And without giving you too many details (in case you nick the idea), here’s a little sample, about 600 words on the picnic in Brideshead Revisited.
“I’ve got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey – which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend. It’s heaven with strawberries.” Lord Sebastian Flyte to Charles Ryder, Brideshead Revisited
As well as lashings of Catholic guilt, Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 portrayal of the English aristocracy between the wars also features plenty of food and gallons of drink. Indeed, in the 1959 revised edition of the novel, he admitted that as he was writing at a bleak period of hardship and soya beans “the book is infused with a kind of gluttony for food and wine”. These over the top descriptions of food are vicarious delights, to be savoured and longed for by the reader. And none more so than the picnic which cements the two lead characters’ friendship. It’s such an iconic scene in the book that Quentin Blake put it on the front cover he drew for the 1962 Penguin edition, and it reappears on the more psychodelic 1970 cover put together by Peter Bentley, Michael Farrell and Stewart Burnett, and in the 2018 Folio Society edition by Harry Brockway.
The picnic takes place right at the start of the book as Charles remembers how his friendship with Sebastian began. One morning in June just before 9am, His Lordship appears in Charles’s room in college (wearing Charles’s Charvet tie from Paris with a postage stamp pattern) and drags him away from the hustle and bustle of the annual Eights Week college rowing races. Off they pop in a borrowed two-seater Morris Cowley – which mysteriously becomes large enough to accommodate six people later in the book – with Sebastian’s teddy bear Aloysius sitting between them. They drive through the middle of Oxford, down the Botley Road into the open country, and turn off somewhere past Swindon (quite a drive in such a classic car), stopping two hours later when Sebastian heads down a cart track to a grassy knoll covered with elm trees.
Here they enjoy their strawberries and French wine – “as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together” – and lie on their backs smoking Turkish cigarettes as Sebastian looks up at the leaves and Charles gazes across longingly at Sebastian’s profile. In the background there is pleasant birdsong. Meals frequently serve as battlegrounds in the book (Charles vs his father, Sebastian vs his family) but not here. It’s as idyllic, and intimate, as picnics get.
In some ways it’s also a very simple picnic, no rugs, no chairs, just a bite to eat and a glass of something nice to wash it down. The food-drink combination was inspired by a letter from Waugh’s former lover and the main inspiration for Sebastian, Alastair Graham. Graham wrote that he had devised a new recipe for drinking Burgundy, pouring it first over a peeled peach in a finger bowl. “The flavour” he said, “is exquisite.”
It’s also a nonchalantly elegant picnic, a contrast to the first time food is mentioned earlier in the book when Waugh uses the increasing popularity of fish and chips as an indicator of all that he feels is going wrong in a world where refined aristocracy symbolised by fine wines is fading gently away.
As for that wine, Château Peyraguey is a sweet sauterne (too sweet to go with strawberries perhaps?). Waugh was knowledgeable about wine, but developed a particular taste for dessert wines while a student at Oxford so the choice reflects his own interest when a perhaps more conventional champagne might have been expected. At the time he was writing, a Château Peyraguey wine would have been several decades old, another hint at his yearning for the Good Old Days. Ideally, it should be served cold but Waugh preferred his dessert wines at room temperature. So, it appears, does Sebastian.
What I’m reading this week: Just embarking on Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher by John Davis and it’s great, a really intelligent appraisal of modern London.
What I read last week: The Continuity Girl by Patrick Kincaid. Currently out of print, but having had a word with the author, it appears it may be coming back which would be a good thing.
What I’m planning to read next week: Waterloo Sunrise is going to keep me going for a bit, so between chapters I’ll dip into Simon Armitage’s poetry collection Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems.
At the risk of sounding more uncouth than I am (and having wondered whether this state was possible) I have not read this book, and you have stirred me so to do, so (unless it's rubbish) thank you.