Well now, with Putin seeking more of Ukraine, and Trump not believing in climate change but very much believing in murderers of journalists, and with Britain trying to leave the EU for reasons it can no longer remember, and with bastards waxing and good buggers waning, and sea level rising and whales stranding and forests burning and post offices closing and little places dying and big places swelling and kids illiterate and lies abounding, my subject for today, as you have no doubt already guessed, is wine glasses.
Some 40 years ago in England a friend's step-father bought a tanker of Australian red wine. By tanker I don't mean a truck. I mean a ship. It had sailed from Australia to Europe full of wine but then the importers went bust. In stepped step-dad. He bought the lot and bottled it and made a killing. His masterstroke was the branding. He called it Kangarouge.
Or so the story goes that I was told and it rings true to me and so I tell it to anyone who'll listen. But my point is that 40 years ago Australian wines were viewed, if viewed at all, as comical. Not so today. Today they boom. I buy them by the dozen myself, or rather by the 36, because if I buy three cases they deliver them for nothing. (I live on a hill and wine is heavy, especially shiraz.)
When I last placed an order the wine company promised me a gift. "We're sending two free glasses," said the woman on the phone.
"Don't," I said. "Call me an over-prepared boy scout but I already have wine glasses, as perhaps you might have guessed from having sold me wine these last 10 years or so. And a wine glass is a wine glass is a wine glass. So keep them, please, or give them to the poor at Christmas."