Consider the paradox of lemons. In Italy, one associates them with scented groves. A few years ago, Helena Attlee wrote the book The Land Where Lemons Grow, in which citrus fruits become a golden thread running through the history of Italian agriculture. Yet though the lemon is arguably the most beautiful of fruits, its tart taste is bracing. A spremuta di limone finds a swift route to any shaving nicks.

Most limoncello is produced on the Amalfi coast but there is an outlier from Godalming

But the lemon can be sweetened, in the form of limoncello, an after-dinner drink of no great subtlety, good for pouring over puddings but hardly a match for the fortified wines of the Iberian peninsula. That said, there is an exception. Most limoncello is produced on the Amalfi coast, that enchanting region south of Naples. But there is an outlier, which comes from Godalming.

A friend of mine, Andrea Cali, has political opinions so extraordinary that only an Italian could hold them. He is a disciple of an Italian economist and sometime cabinet minister, Antonio Martino, who claimed that he would be in favour of a united Europe as long as it did not have a government. Antonio was a committed anarcho-libertarian, as is Andrea, though he also holds a torch for the Bourbon monarchs of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

They were indeed maligned rulers,libelled by both Verdi – in Tosca – and Gladstone, who described their realm as ‘the negation of God erected into a system of government’. That would have been true of the pre-Risorgimento Papal States, but the Two Sicilies muddled along in a perfectly acceptable fashion, no worse governed than they have been since.

Anyway, Andrea, who holds a chair at the University of Naples, founded 800 years ago by Frederick II, stupor mundi, makes limoncello, which he calls lemon cello. The lemons are imported from Amalfi, and they look glorious. Most limoncello is around 30 per cent proof, whereas Andrea’s is 41.3, and power adds weight and depth. It is easily the best of the breed that I have ever tasted. His website is introduced by a Haydn cello concerto: how appropriate. His lemon cello is entitled to graduate away from the women and children’s post-prandials to the serious end of the drinks tray.

Seriousness leads on to religion. The other day, a friend said: ‘Your column is a curious blend of grog and God.’ Unused as I am to compliments, I took that as one. Recently, I argued that the appeal of religion depends on meaning and death. Christianity deals with both. But those of us who cannot believe must accept that we are lost in the meaninglessness of an implacably infinite universe, and that although some biophysical accident has endowed us with reason, this is a mere sparrow’s flight. We are doomed to death like all other animals.

In last week’s letters, the Rt Revd Tom Wright sought to rescue me from stoicism and gloom by taking his stand on the Gospel of St John. Bishop Tom is one of the most distinguished intellectuals in the C of E. He could explain to us what the first verse of John means. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Tom tried to entice me with the first miracle, also in John: the marriage at Cana, when the water was turned into wine. Hmm: as for miracles, I am with Lytton Strachey. ‘When Newman was a child he “wished he could believe the Arabian Nights were true”. When he came to be a man, his wish seems to have been granted.’

The miracle by which lesser ingredients are transmuted into magnificent drinks is as far as I can go. God is entitled to respect. But grog, such as Andrea’s, inspires belief.