The Patrician Trough

Mrs O and I went to an old members' garden party at her former college in Oxford on Saturday.  The weather was a bit hit-and-miss: wan sunshine and stairrods.  But no biggie - Oxford colleges, apart from the shitty modern ones, come equipped with handy cloisters for days such as these.

The quality of the booze and nibblage available at these shindigs is beyond compare.  It all takes place in the middle of the day, so it's only tiny sangers and cake, sluiced down with champagne and/or Pimms.  But you never tasted food like this.  It's living proof of the old adage "shit in equals shit out".  When the stuff going into the sandwich is as good as this, it cannot fail.  Like great art, every thing about the food and drink was better than it needed to be.  And when combined, the ingredients formed something far far greater than the sum of their parts.  Take the humble cucumber sandwich for example.  I don't even like cucumber, which is a bad start, but one was seduced into adoring it by the haute qualité of the bread and the butter it was hiding betwixt.

So, needless to say then, the missus and yours truly did stering work in the dining hall.  We then retired to the gardens to hook up with a few old friends.  And that was that.  There's no real purpose to these old member events it seems to me, other than for successful people to gather together somewhere beautiful and give thanks for God's bounty. 

Afterwards we jumped on the bus back to London.  It became apparent that the young lady in the seat in front of us had also been at the beanfeast.  She was extremely well-spoken.  I mean "What does your father do?"  "He's a viscount." well-spoken.  You'd have to suppose, then, that she'd seen a few fifty pound notes in her time, and yet even she was on the blower to her friends, outlining how much Veuve Clicquot she'd managed to bank before last orders.

I do worry about the upper orders sometimes.