How a garden party can be embarrassing - for me
One of the greatest broadcasters and journalists of our age turned 70 this week. My mind went back to my days as a correspondent on BBC Newsnight in the early 2010s and a wonderful afternoon spent in Jeremy’s back garden in Oxfordshire. Of course when I say back garden, some might envisage a 3m x 8m plot of green at the back of a suburban 3 bed house. This garden was more of a handful of acres of rolling garden on an incline with a tennis court and beautiful features which had been afforded plenty of time and attention.
It was my first time at the famous Newsnight garden party in Paxo’s ‘garden’. He graciously opened up his home every year to a collection of 30-40 Newsnight past and present alumni and literally served them enough barbecued meat and chilled white wine to sate an army. His teenage twins poured the drinks to colleagues who became slowly and beautifully sozzoled in the July sunshine. JP held court as previously sober staff tucked into the vin blanc.
And before you ask or even reprimand, no money came from the BBC licence fee for this event. We all chipped in from our own pockets to pay for a coach to take us from TV Centre out to rural England and back again. Jeremy paid for the rest.
The weather was stunning and it was Wimbledon Finals Day. And No, it wasn't the day that Andy Murray won the most famous tennis tournament in the world. It was the year before that when he lost to a dreadfully dressed, rude, talentless and ugly Swiss guy called Roger.
It was Andy’s first Wimbledon final and he had already won a grand slam title before it, so expectation was high.
As I sat in the conservatory of Jeremy’s wonderfully converted farmhouse watching the match with an assortment of producers, graphics editors and correspondents, I couldn't help but notice the books on the shelves surrounding the 50 inch TV that we were shouting at. John Grisham, Maeve Binchey, Dan Brown, James Patterson etc.
Mentally my jaw dropped. Here was inquisitor-in-chief, brain of Britain, bane of all obfuscating politicians reading the same trash and low brow novels as all the rest of us poor mortals. I was shocked. I ran out in my stupor to confront the great man himself - steeled by half a bucket of Sauvignon Blanc.
I barged straight in front of our host and laughingly said that judging from his bookcase, he must read the same pulp fiction as all the rest of us.
Jeremy’s eyes barely budged. If anything the famed lids tightened slightly just as Captain Mainwaring would have said to Corporal Pike, ‘You stupid boy’.
‘They are not my books,’ he whispered as if not to embarrass me further. ‘They belong to my 15 year old twins.’
And as my smile leaked away from my numb face, he leaned forward with a calm gesticulation toward another building - adjacent to but very distinct from -the TV room I had been in, issued the coup de grace:
‘My library is over there’
I have never since judged a man by his bookcase.
FIN
