7 January 2026

I dream and smell of festive roast goose

It turns out that fatty food does not make my gallstones howl in agony

Three weeks holiday. Me forget how write. Me forget how turn computer on for half hour this morning. Me think can ChatGPT help. Me then remember wise saying: “Using ChatGPT is like believing the bus is genuinely sorry that it is not in service.” And… that’s it. Normal service has been resumed. It just took me a while to warm up the old frontal lobes. Like a vintage car, I am difficult to start on a cold morning after long disuse. Does anyone under 50 now know what an engine choke is, or what it does? It is perishing here in Brighton as I write, and I am not getting any younger.

Anyway, I bet you’re all dying to know what has happened to me during the three weeks this magazine has been off air. I am afraid in a life as rich in incident as mine, I’m going to have to leave out an awful lot. Also, having to play my own Watson to my own Sherlock Holmes, there are stories, like the Giant Rat of Sumatra, for which the world is not ready.

The most poignant event was in the week before Christmas, when my old friend Razors flew back from Los Angeles to see family and friends, but first, to buy me dinner. We decided not on a fancy restaurant – Rules had been booked for months – but the Duke of Wellington in Crawford Street, central London, after a quick livener at the Groucho, where he is a member. The Duke has survived closure, miraculously, and does pretty decent grub – and was, of course, our former local. The Guvnor back then would lend me money if I was on the bones of my arse, and I was very careful to pay him back, for there were times when he operated – how to put this delicately – at the far margins of the legal.

Have you ever been in the very heart of London on a Saturday evening just before Christmas? Don’t. I got out at Leicester Square and the crowds were so dense that what is normally a three-minute walk took about 15. Also, most of these people were clearly tourists, so they just stood around gawping like idiots even as I tried to thrash my way through them, bellowing imprecations and foul curses they did not understand.

“I’m not walking through this,” said Razors after our drink, so he got a black cab to take us the two miles or so from Dean Street to Crawford Street. He’s so rich. It cost him £21. We went into the Duke. Our seats were still free, but the whole pub was packed to record-breaking capacity, as if they were trying to make an entry in 2026’s Guinness Book of Records. We ate elsewhere. (A nice Thai restaurant, Two Point, on the same street, which has been there for at least 20 years and is very good; good enough for me to have taken ladies I was courting there.)

I shook the dust of London from my feet but arrived the next week to cook, as is traditional, the Christmas lunch for the ex-wife and our children, plus any partners/waifs and strays who wanted to come. Beforehand, I had been worrying whether my gallstones would mean that I would have to cook a separate, low-fat version of the meal for myself. You try finding a low-fat goose.

In the end, I threw caution to the wind and decided that the suffering would be worth it; cooking Christmas dinner is enough of a faff as it is. On the Eve, I went with Someone Who Does Not Like Being Mentioned in This Column. I know, anyone who doesn’t want to be mentioned here must be mental, but I respect their wishes, however puzzling. I will give no clue as to his or her identity but you might work it out if you’re brainy. I will call them “Dave”.

We had to go to the butchers, to pick up the goose, to Majestic, to pick up the wine, to Hammersmith, to drop off some presents to our old friend C—, whom “Dave” and I first met when we worked at the Folio Society in the 1980s. Christ. Then to a garage somewhere so we could get some smokeless coal for the fireplace. This involved a bit of complex route-planning. As we proceeded to each successive destination, “Dave”, despite having lived in the area for more than 30 years, kept making a wrong turn at almost every opportunity. But I said nothing, except, gently, “I think we might be going the wrong way,” from time to time.

“Thank you for not shouting at me,” said “Dave”, but “Dave” has a difficult and demanding job and needs no extra grief. “Dave” and I used to be in the kind of relationship where we shouted at each other a lot. Have you worked it out yet?

And the meal went off without a hitch. I didn’t even forget to cook anything, or any key ingredient of the stuffing. “Dave” gave me a couple of containers with the stuffing and the leftover goose to take away with me on Boxing Day. For it turns out that fatty food does not make my gallstones howl in agony: it simply means I fart more, and not with the usual foul miasma of the latrine, but, somewhat disconcertingly, but not unpleasingly, of the meal I had just eaten. So, for a couple of days, I awoke to find myself in a room smelling of roast goose. It could have been so much worse.

[Further reading: Dry January won’t save you]