Two Chaps Talking

Dear Boy,

You'll remember when I visited you in Manhattan, how delighted I was by your study. It seems that, pace our own eponymous column, the most essential piece of kit a chap could wish for is a quiet room where he can have his books and things around him. In these dark days, the smoking jacket on the back of the door, the tantalus and the pipe-rack are perhaps supplanted by the quiet hum of a powerful computer with a screaming broadband connection but, nonetheless the essential calm spirit of the place is still there.

Imagine, therefore, my delight on finding a house with a beautifully proportioned room overlooking the garden, equipped with floor to ceiling shelves and (be still my heart) a ladder.

My books were installed within hours: though I'm allowing myself months to develop the perfect cataloguing system. Objets and arcana have been retrieved from storage and engravings and photographs enliven the tiny remaining spaces of naked wall.

I think the enormous throbbing PC, which contains the entirety of the Two Chaps' Empire, will be sent to do its work out of earshot in a cupboard under the stairs while I compile my immortal missives on a totally silent Mac G4 cube kept under a bell-jar like the Batphone. Through many concealed speakers the subsequent eremitic silence can be adorned with choral music or opera at will. I have never felt more content.

Away from the desk is the other desideratum of civilised existence. Though I know you favour the fauteuil or fainting couch, I have rescued a thoroughly disreputable 1930s red velvet sofa of sufficient length for full indolent supinity by a 6'1" reader. It looks as if a dog has slept on it since the War; a difficult effect to achieve for a man with no particular love of domestic animals but worth, I think, the added effort. The reading light of choice is an early 1950s focussable, supplementary operating-theatre lamp upgraded with a daylight-balanced bulb, minutely adjustable by a rheostat.

With all set out to perfection I stood in the centre of the room poll-axed by choice. Should I spend my first moments in the contemplation of the bronze head of Hypnos? Should I take my place at the keyboard and give birth to the opening paragraph of some great work. Perhaps I could leaf idly through a first edition or toy with the Leica on the shelf of vintage cameras.

There was only one choice when it finally came down to it. Reaching for the knackered, grubby paperback of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, I turned to chapter forty-six.

Were I permitted but a single piece of prose to take to a desert island it would be a Solomonic choice between the Llanabba School games in Decline and Fall and Lawrence's description of a desert feast in a Howeitat encampment.

As they were nomads, Howeitat feasting was defined by what they could carry. Their herds moved with them and provided the protein. Sacks of rice, dry and light, and an enormous ceremonial bowl - 'a shallow bath, five feet across, set like a great brazier on a foot' - would be carried on a pack camel. This elephantine receptacle was ringed with a foot-deep breastwork of boiled rice surrounding the roasted carcasses of at least three sheep: their heads facing upwards with jaws open to provide a central focus.

There is a strain of sheep that spreads from the Western Sahara, across the Fertile Crescent and from Manchuria down to India which is remarkable for its ability to store fat around its hindquarters and tail. Herodotus had much to say on the subject of the Arabian sheep remarking that, in some cases, the fat tail was no less than four and a half feet long and would have to be supported on a little wooden cart pulled by the sheep itself. This 'mutton-butter' would render out as the sheep roasted yielding gallons of valuable fat that was collected in copper cauldrons.

The guests reclined on camel saddles on three sides of a carpet and after conversation, handwashing and coffee the main dish was brought in. Once the mutton and surrounding rampart of rice were placed before the guests, servants ladled the fat and cooking juices into the central depression, to the point - crucial in Howeitat hospitality - where they flowed over the edges of the bowl and onto the floor. Finally, as a triumphal flourish, the fat-poached livers were placed in the yawning maws of the sheepheads.

The guests set to, bunching the rice and meat into managable lumps with the permissible right hand and deftly flicking the fat and juice bound morsel into the mouth with the thumb. As the feast progressed, jewelled daggers were drawn and men vied to slice off more toothsome pieces to offer to their companions. Finally, once everyone had gorged to satiety, the host bade everyone rise and walk outside to contemplate the desert night and converse. As the guests, hosts and first rank of the tribe left, the next sitting of Howeitat fell upon the food. Finally, once all the men had eaten, the dish was taken out of the tent and the remains fed to the women, children and hounds.

I'm trying to find an excuse to do that at a dinner party in Camden Town.

Finally, I must leave you with a quote I heard this week from Hilaire Belloc's poem 'The Modern Traveller' (1898).

'Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not'.

How redolent of the arrogant self-assuredness of the world's greatest empire and supreme confidence in the superiority of her military technology.

How far we have come in the last century.

Toodle Pip

T