Writing about the Jersey-based thriller writer who dined (dines perhaps, it may be that the author in question still lives) on eggs, bacon and champagne daily brought to mind another gourmand hero, Viscount Castlerosse, who in the thirties and forties of the last century wrote a celebrated gossip column for the Sunday Express.
Castlerosse and austerity were not bedfellows, but my excuse in writing about him is that his most famous regular lunch (or it was reported to be so) is the antithesis of the joyless fare and attitude becoming so prevalent today. Pleasure has to be a part of eating for me, or it is just re-fuelling and only machines run on fuel.
The lunch for which he gained notoriety was a magnificent statement about enjoying life, and about how some things are so good they need no adornment. He would eat a whole York ham, washed down with half-a-dozen bottles of good claret. Superb. I spent 20 years in a previous career travelling the globe on expenses, but would never have got away with that, which is what he in fact did - his caviar and foie gras predilections were paid for by his paper, such was the pull of the 'Londoner's Log' society guff he churned out (and it cannot have hurt that he was a friend of the proprietor).
The alcohol in that single lunch by my reckoning comes to 54 units, so almost exactly double the upper recommended weekly limit set forth (with good reason of course) by doctors now. And if we are to be limited to one rasher of bacon a day or the equivalent in other preserved meats, I hate to think what a whole York ham works out at - several months' worth surely?
It is hard not to admire the man.
Such tales usually end with something along the lines of 'and he lived to a ripe old age.' Not this: he died in his early fifties, extremely fat. But I bet he crammed more pleasure into his curtailed span than an entire conference hall of mirthless brown-rice-and-sandals advocates.
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