Alcohol
How to drown your sorrows
Age. At the Spectator party last week, the editor asked me how long I had been attending the festivity. I…
The key to dealing with this election? Wine
An old friend phoned. Normally cheerful, he was fed up. One of his business partners was being more than usually…
A lunch good enough to lift Tory spirits
Things could have been worse. My host was determined to lunch al fresco, and after all it was late June.…
The joy of Portuguese wines
There was a wonderful old boy called John – Sir John – Wordie, who was a quintessential member of the…
The best bottle to come from the Gigondas
One needs wine more than ever, yet when imbibing, it can be hard to concentrate. So much is going on.…
How to become an old soak
Drink and longevity: there seems to have been a successful counter-attack against the puritans, prohibitionists and other health faddists. Indeed,…
The real reason I don’t drink
It’s been 30 years this month since I last touched alcohol and I still can’t face the prospect of a…
The case for Churchillian drinking
Churchill. No disrespect to Andrew Roberts’s more recent work, but I set out to look up a point about drink…
The glory of German wines
I have had three recent conversations, all lively if unrelated – and all well lubricated. The first concerned Anglo-Saxon England…
They call me the ‘problem teetotaller’
My guts went on strike last July. I was staying in a hotel and I spent several days sprawled on…
Another tragic case involving medical incompetence and cover-up
John Niven had to fight hard to discover why his suicidal brother was left alone and unmonitored in an Ayrshire hospital, with fatal consequences
In defence of drunken freshers’ weeks
Students need a drunken freshers’ week
Going for broke
The founding member of the Small Faces was playing an instrument from the age of six, but was forever haunted by the fear of MS, the inherited disease which eventually killed him
A farewell to alcohol
Laikipia Some are saved by Jesus and they are sober. For others, drunkenness is as natural as love-making, roasted meat…
Our nanny state holds back Britain’s young
Clever people often believe that their cleverness gives them the right to control other people. Nowhere is this more manifest than…
Smoking is more hassle than it’s worth
I gave up smoking one year ago this week, as part of a series of pitiful capitulations to the forces…
Japan's cult of safetyism
The Japanese government has launched an initiative to encourage young people to drink more alcohol. Yes, really. The national tax…
Why we drink
‘I like to have a martini,/ Two at the very most./ After three I’m under the table,/ After four I’m…
The blind spot in the SNP's 'war on drink'
Scotland’s grim reputation for abnormally high drug fatalities has become embedded in the public consciousness over the past year. The…
A taste inquisition on Stink Street
Walking up through the Stink Street medieval arch with a bag of shopping, I spotted Michael between the oleander branches…
In defence of gambling
Doing good doesn’t always work out as expected. A regular entering his local pub takes pity on an old lady…
My neighbour’s dinner party was a near-death experience
At dawn, starving, I drove to a commercial laboratory in the town centre where five phials of blood were taken…
The joy of drinking alone
Thanks to a combination of night-time curfews, social-distancing rules, pubs closing, restaurants failing, the ‘rule of six’ and compulsory mask-wearing,…
