For anyone who missed the last issue of The Mighty Whistler – and really, why would you do that? – there’s a new outdoor gallery in town, The Tat Modern. 

Now whereas most galleries have art as regular, ongoing fixtures, some rather peculiar and fascinating activity has been taking place with art fairies in the night. 

In the last few weeks, I have seen (to name but a few) the arrival and disappearance of a religious cross, a mirrored turtle, an arty toilet seat, a horse portrait, a square of Anchor butter and last but by no means least a chandelier lampshade.  

My initial suspicions were that someone might plonk a street cone on Lieutenant Landfill’s head, but I didn’t expect such a high level of interactive art, wrapped around the mysteries of arriving and disappearing. 

The quickest item to arrive then go, was a found lamp, with above mentioned lampshade, the porcelain vase was taken in the blink of an eye, whereas the upcycled revamped shade was left on the pavement.  

A thought ran through my head. I can’t  even give my art away. At which point an art buyer, who once sacrificed his entire classics art collection, by placing it back into auction, appeared like a pixie, from nowhere. He said when you hit a certain age and you’re surrounded by classics, your living room just feels like a musty museum. So he’s transitioned to contemporary art for a vibrant colour hit and loves auction houses. I gave him a small piece of dotty art from the Tat Modern and after telling me he still buys gold snuff boxes, he scuttled off into the streets of Brighton.  

As this encounter happened on St Patrick’s Day and to celebrate, I had a Guinness or two in the Cresent, while wearing my shiny gold shoes that light up in neon blue on the base. 

All of this, art pokery has been in the lead up to my Tat Modern fashion show, for a camera shoot I’ve been considering, using a cool established technique called hyperlapse, where the finished cut, gives off the feel of you floating along a street.  I decided to do a test run back at TM HQ and gathered all my arty upcycled fashion jackets into a robust mountain climbing zip up case and once again donned my clown shows to head across Montpelier Rd to Temple Gardens.  

I unloaded my collection of Royal Academy and Harper’s BAZAAR magazines for an eclectic backdrop, then proceeded to take photographs of myself walking in a fashion walk manner and after almost falling sideways inbetween two parked cars, I met an Irish chap, who started taking photos of me in various poses, with the aim of showing them to his painting and decorating brother, as he may want to purchase one of my Artist Dotty jackets. 

We concluded the conversation by saying lampshades may really work as fashion hats. So if you see a few shady looking people in Brighton, you know where you heard it first.  

Artist Dotty was talking to Matt Whistler 

You might not be able to teach them new tricks but everyone loves an old dog. Sam Harrington-Lowe looks at
Fat Alice and wonders what’s her secret

I’m under no illusion that the pug is an acquired taste. A taste I acquired about eight years ago with my first rescue, one-eyed Ruby Doo, and then again in 2016 with the current officer, Fat Alice.

Alice waddles towards me where I’m sitting on the sofa, and wants to be hoisted up, so she can sit on her parmesan-fragranced blanket next to me. I’ve long since gone nose-blind to her cheesy smells, although they make the visitor’s eye water. We have a face-off, like High Noon. I know she is more than capable of jumping up on the sofa, but she wants me to lift her up. Guess who gives in. 

Have you seen that famous senior pug, Noodle? If you’re on social media, he’s hard to avoid. The ‘bones or no bones’ prediction each day, as his owner Jon hoists him up to sitting position in his bed. Will he stay sitting up, or slump like a sack of spuds back to slumber, indicating a ‘no bones’ day? It’s wild. 

People love the dog seniors – cats too. Alice is not a senior; she’s middle-aged, but already showing some grey chops. Instead of finding this horrifying, like when I look in the mirror at my own jowls, I adore it. My daughter and I call her ‘elderly’, even though she really isn’t.

Why then, don’t we feel the same way about human seniors? I have a grandmother who just turned 100, and while I’m fond of her in a gosh-you’re-still-alive-please-stop-spending-my-inheritance-on-care sort of way, she’s not endearing like an old dog is. 

I have love for her, but I don’t really want to cuddle her. In fact, the closest I’ve been to her physically in recent years is when I had to emergency-remove insufficiently chewed pork chop from her throat before she choked to death in a restaurant.

But an ageing, smelly old dog, cat, or horse – I’m all over them with cuddles and the not caring about smell and moulting and scabby bits. Is everyone like this? 

Joking aside, we generally have a poor attitude towards ageing. Why are we not warm with our elders? I melt when I see a snoozy old dog gently wagging a tail and chasing the sunlight across the floor all day. But I’m far less enamoured with old people. And we really need to address this, because we are an ageing population. People are not having kids, and everyone is living longer. Hard not to envision the future as a kind of zombie apocalypse, the grey and infirm staggering around looking for blood – or Botox.

I think perhaps we need to reframe our oldies. Embrace their knowledge and wisdom, and give them the time of day. Interestingly, when I was 16, I had a job as a sleeper in an old people’s home, and I loved it. I’d chat to the oldies, look at their photos, fascinated by their pasts. These days I’d recoil. Is it my own advancing years that makes them less palatable? I can see my own mortality looming closer?

I expect one day I’m going to need helping on to the sofa, to my own smelly blanket. I’m going to forget what I’ve said, and tell young people the same thing over and over again. I’m going to dribble, and possibly whiff a bit. Frankly, I expect my daughter would say I’m already there. 

Going forward I’m going to try and apply a bit more patience and give a bit more time to oldies, and encourage everyone to do the same. Maybe we can even learn from them. If we’re lucky, we’ll be old at some point, and it would be nice to feel loved and appreciated, wouldn’t it?

Sam is founder and Editor-in-Chief of Silver Magazine – for the mature maverick

www.silvermagazine.co.uk

Whitehawk might seem an unlikely place for a football revolution, but strange things have been happening down Wilson Avenue.  Andy Davies reports

It’s difficult because those first few that come out will be seized upon and they would be seen as trailblazers for the next generation, and it shouldn’t be the case. They should just be accepted as professional footballers and be known for that rather than for their sexuality.”

Kevin Miller, vice chairman of Whitehawk FC, is talking about the last great taboo in the biggest sport in the world. 

Whitehawk might not seem the obvious place to fight racism, sexism and homophobia, but Whitehawk FC has been confounding preconceptions for quite some time. Founded in 1945, the club has, in recent years, been heavily praised for its attempts to tackle homophobia in football. The steps leading up into the stands are painted “Love”, “Peace”, “No Racism”, “No Sexism”, “No Violence”, “No Homophobia”. Above the coach’s dugouts hangs a huge rainbow flag.  The work done by the club has gained backing from sponsor Utilita Energy, Football Supporters Association and anti-racism organisation Kick it Out amongst many. “I think it’s a testament to the work we’ve done in the past that’s given us the opportunity to call upon the football opportunities and get approval. Some of the work that we’ve been doing over the last three or four years with inclusion, diversity and certainly with the LGBT community, it’s given us a bit more credibility. 

Earlier this year, Whitehawk launched an initiative “Football vs Homophobia” (the inaugural match was due to be played on February 19th but was called off due to Storm Eunice). “One of the key reasons Utilita are sponsoring us is because of the work we were doing with Rainbow Rovers (Whitehawk’s affiliated LGBTQ+ team). 

“Rainbow Rovers side was set up by Sophie Cook and she approached me with Guy Butters, an ex-Brighton and Tottenham player. They wanted to put forward a charity match between an LGBT team and a Premier League all-star team. We said ‘Why don’t we do it at Whitehawk because it’s got the reputation’. We kind of went from there. It went down well with the fans, as they’re inclusive and very welcoming. 

“Utilita noticed what we were doing. Our first Rainbow Rovers game was in 2019 and we played a team of ex-Premier League all-stars and we managed to get Sky Sports to cover the whole game. I think Utilita realised because the city we were in and the free-thinking attitude Brighton has, it gives us the opportunity to be more expressive.

“When we launched it, we thought it would be a great opportunity to highlight LGBT issues in football and what better place to do it than a very progressive place like Brighton.” 

A progressive place like Brighton hasn’t always opened its arms to Whitehawk which has often been perceived as being outside of the “cool, progressive” side of Brighton. “It’s had a reputation in the past. The Whitehawk estate, 15 to 20 years ago, was one of the most deprived in Europe.  There was a disconnect between its local club and the community and we’ve tried really hard to re-establish that connection. “We recognise that those people might not be into football, but they may be into the occasion of being part of Whitehawk fanbase. When they come in, they can pick up a drum, sing ‘Homophobia, We Say No’, have a laugh, drink a beer.”

In October 2021, Australian A-League player Josh Cavallo became the first active professional player to come out as gay. It is surely no secret that there are some gay or bisexual players in the Premier League. Former Manchester United left back Patrice Evra has claimed that there are at least two gay players at every Premier League club. 

With the fight against homophobia in men’s football, did Kevin think it would be long before we see an active Premier League player come out as gay? “If you look at the women’s game, it is accepted. It’s been known for years and no one bats an eyelid. Because of the vastness of the sport across the world, it’s going to be highlighted. 

It should be a day where every gay person at every football club across the world comes out. The press wouldn’t know where to focus their attention and would make a massive global statement. That’s the point we want to get to, where people say ‘So what?’”

I sometimes feel a bit of a fraud, writing for The Whistler, because I don’t live in West Hill any more. And even then I lived on its Western frontier, Dyke Road. I now live about ten minutes’ walk away, off Montpelier Road. It is a testament to the editor’s commitment to free speech that he lets me write for this publication at all. 

Life on the frontier was hard in those days, it’s why I moved. The worst thing was the regular incursions of raiding parties from Hove, who’d turn up in Mad-Max style customised Nissan Leafs and pinch all the best olives from Ricci’s Italian Deli without so much as a by-your-leave. Or should that be Nissan Leaves? 

I campaigned strenuously for armed border guards and tank-proof barriers, but you know what councils are like. They drag their feet until the problem sort of goes away. (The last time I was up that way, the Seven Dials Co-op had been gutted. This completely freaked me out. The Co-op may not have been the loveliest supermarket in town, but it was very much the nearest, and the idea of having to another quarter mile down the road to the next one made me come over all faint. I hope it’s back to normal now.)

Hey, but we’re all still in the BN1 gang, right? Well, I’m not so sure. BN1 is a funny old postal district, extending like a fan (the kind you hold in your hand and flap to look coquettish, not the kind that goes on the ceiling) from its southern border, a strip of land on the seafront that is many, many times smaller than the arc of its northern border. And it goes on for ages. 

You’d think that everyone who lived in the same postcode would have a pretty common identity, but no. I remember looking for a flat when on the run from the maniacs in Hove – I’d crossed one of their warlords in a Nocarello olive deal gone wrong – and going miles up the Dyke Road on foot in awe at how suburban it became, and how quickly, when compared to the image of itself that Brighton likes to portray. A trip to Devil’s Dyke last summer really brought home to me how big, and how various, BN1 is.

I looked on the internet for a bit to see if anyone had anything to say about this unusual situation. I didn’t find anything pertinent, but I did notice on the Zoopla website that it pointed out that Brighton is in the county of Sussex, which is not news to me, and that Sussex has a population of 0, which is. 

I haven’t gone outside today so I can’t check whether this is true, or whether this is a cock-up from the website people at Zoopla. I hope it’s the latter because the editor is taking me to the Regency for lunch. (The Editor also has a commitment to lunch). If it’s the former, at least the pirates of Hove are no longer a worry.

My Policeman by Bethan Roberts

Diallers might remember the disruption last May when Harry Styles (gratuitous pic, below)  came to town and lorries and crews took over the area for filming of the adaptation of My Policeman by Bethan Roberts, which was first published in 2012 and was a Brighton City Reads book choice.  

In Peacehaven in 1999 Marion narrates her story through memoir and flashbacks to Brighton in the early 1950s when as a young teacher at St Luke’s, she falls in love with Tom, her best friend’s handsome older brother. He teaches her to swim in the shadow of the pier, and when he asks her to marry him she is overjoyed, despite hints that he is “not like that” and his close friendship with Patrick, a cultured museum curator.

The clue to the novel is in the word ‘my’ – Marion and Patrick both love Tom, and have to share him. It’s a heartbreaking tale of a threesome obsessed with each other in various ways. Tom needs the safety of his marriage, Patrick is besotted with Tom, and Marion won’t let go. Patrick opens up Tom’s eyes to a glamorous sophisticated new world. At times Marion’s obliviousness seems unbelievable, but her dawning realization of the truth and her reactions feel true to life.

Roberts was inspired to write the novel by EM Forster, who once lived in in Brunswick Place and fell for a married policeman 20 years his junior. Because the story is told through Marion’s and Patrick’s point of view, Tom is strangely less present in the book. Although both sides of the story are completely gripping, Patrick’s narration is the more engrossing. 

We also see two sides of 1950s Brighton, and the era and seaside atmosphere are beautifully conjured up with the underground gay scene – drinkers in The Spotted Dog, drag queens selling sequins on the seafront – and a straight majority who get on with their lives none the wiser. Plus there’s an element of tension with Tom being a policeman and the fact of homosexuality being illegal. 

My Policeman is a moving and sad portrayal of two people obsessed with man. The film is due for release later this year, with Harry Styles as Tom, Emma Corrin as Marion, and Rupert Everett as the older Patrick. 

Dymphna Flynn is development producer at Pier Productions and judge on the Costa Book Awards

1976. Ground Zero. My first year at university, and my first encounter with Brighton’s Seven Dials.

Reader, it was a dump. Not even a glamorous dump. I’d come from an edgy part of north London, but areas in Brighton in the mid 70’s were pretty tasty, as they used to say in The Sweeney.

The site of The Cow (nee The Tin Drum) was a Spa ‘supermarket’. But really, you took your life in your own hands passing over the threshold. Who knew who or what lay within. What you could be sure about was being hustled by a gauntlet of junkies on the way out. As this was way before The Walking Dead, there was no shuffling, snarling zombie precedent on which to assess the level of danger, but you could be pretty sure that things may well end badly if you did not hand over at the very least a fag.

Nonetheless a lack of other options meant this was a regular gauntlet to be run. The chi chi wine shops and innumerable coffee joints which pepper the area now were long
pre-dated by some horrible greasy spoons and a smattering of shops so run down it was difficult to determine whether or not they actually sold anything or were in fact fronts for other nefarious operations. There was for example a faded antique shop opposite The Flour Pot which, in my head, was clearly an elaborate facade for a hive of criminal activity. 

The area was also well known as a red light stop off for punters hopping off the London Victoria trains. A short, gasping march up Gloucester Road and they were in streetwalker nirvana. 

One of my early rental flats in the area was always popular with friends coming down from London. It may have been seedy, but it was seedy and central. And if you were stumbling out of the Zodiac club on West Street at 4am partially deafened by Dexys Midnight Runners’ blasting you insensible, then the relatively brief sway to to Seven Dials was a Godsend.

An old actor buddy of mine, Sean Wood, came down from London for a knees up one icy cold winter’s night, and the familiar three in the morning lock-in at The Good Companions saw us in high spirits.

Being a relative lightweight I passed out pretty much as soon as I stumbled upstairs to bed, but unbeknown to me, my old mate Sean had sensibly decided to remove all his clothes and clean his teeth before hitting the sack.

All fine, except, fatally, he turned right rather than left out of the spare downstairs bedroom, and the door he opened thinking he was nipping into the bathroom was in fact the front door onto Dyke Road. Too late, realising his error, as he turned with horror to scramble back into the warmth, the door had slammed firmly shut.

A stark naked, highly inebriated actor went into full Fred Flintstone mode with increasing panic. It was after all by now 4am on a particularly freezing. February night. And I was out for the count.

It would have been easier to wake the dead, and (when he finally did manage to speak to me again), Sean reported several kerb-crawling drivers slowing to offer him alternative accommodation for what was left of the night. 

As I breezily said when he finally managed to wake me (by screaming through the letter box for 45 minutes), the wandering tribes of the Kalahari would have regarded a single night under a fixed roof protected from the elements as a ridiculous luxury. And anyway, these were the days of the metaphorical short, sharp shock. Sean wasn’t quite so philosophical about it. 

Once described as a town in search of a fight, Brighton has always had its rough underbelly. While the current levels of gentrification belie its impossibly hard heritage, if you dig deep enough you’ll be able to flush out whispering echoes of what over the centuries has made the town so… so different.

Of course we all know of the romantic associations of writers like Greene and the perpetually soused Patrick Hamilton, with other greats such as Malcolm Lowry rarely far from a piss up and a punch up in some Regency bar or other. But Brighton has always been about an inherent otherness. It’s indefinable. 

As Proust said, you have to live it and you have to feel it. For we measure our lives in encounters, in off-grid relationships and a constant desire to make sense of the insensible. And to know Brighton is to know you can never really know it. But you can feel it.

“Get your motor runnin’, Head out on the highway, Looking for adventure in whatever comes our way…” The open road, the wind in your hair… Is life in the fast lane over for Jed Novick? 

“We could make turn it into something interesting” said My Fine Wife. “You know, an objet”. Pause. “Maybe a plant pot. Apparently when the Berlin Wall fell, they sold off Trabants to garden centres, cut off the roofs and filled them with soil. We could do that” she said rather too brightly.

I looked at my stationary soft-top. “We wouldn’t even have to cut off the roof”.  

We’re looking at my very fine Mercedes CLK 200. It’s, of course,  the “Avantgarde” model which isn’t to say it’s experimental, radical, or unorthodox nor is it characterised by aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability (thank you Wikipedia) but it is very lovely. It’s metallic blue with contrasting light leather interior, a top of the range digital sound system. Electric everything. It’s also not well. Really not well. OK, it’s dead. The car is dead. 

“That’ll be your timing chain then”, said the nice garage bloke. “You’ll need to take it to the Mercedes garage. It’s a specialist job.”

He looked at me and we both knew. No one goes to the Mercedes garage. If you can afford to go to the Mercedes garage you can afford to have a car that doesn’t need to go to the Mercedes garage. God knows why there even is a Mercedes garage or even what happens there. 

“You’ll have to take it away”, said the nice garage bloke. “It can’t stay here”. 

There’s something I find unutterably sad about all this. The Mercedes. It was my car. It was everything that “practical” wasn’t. A boy car. A soft top that did about three to the gallon – and that wasn’t great even in the days when we had gallons. It was a soft top and come on, we get about three days of sunshine here. I used to keep a faux fur coat in the boot because as soon as the sun came out, the roof was down. And as anyone who’s been in one of these things, as soon as you take down the roof you let in the cold.“ Cold schmold. It was cool. 

“Roadrunner, roadrunner, 

Going faster miles an hour, 

With the radio on

I’m in love with Massachusetts

And the neon when it’s cold outside

And the highway when it’s late at night

Got the radio on

I’m like the roadrunner”

Jonathan Richman’s not ever going to be writing a song about a Nissan Leaf. Chris Martin might. 

My Fine Wife feels no sorrow really. Her favourite words are “the planet” and a car that moves from one petrol station to the next, it’s not her idea of fun. I can see her point. Having a car, it almost feels a little last century. We live in the centre of town. We walk everywhere and if even we got cabs everywhere… we could get cabs every day and it still wouldn’t cover the cost of insuring the Merc. Then there’s petrol, nearly £1.50 a litre and rising. And, as My Fine Wife reminds me, the planet. Simon Kofe, that Polynesian politician who gave a speech about the impact of climate change standing in the sea, is probably up to his waist by now.   

So, yes. I can see her point, but what a joyless, soulless, heartless, miserable point. Have you ever had sugar-free cake? Where’s the joy? Cars are extraordinary, iconic, beautiful. American Graffiti. Alvis. Bristol. Triumph. 

My first car was a Morris 1100 my father bought off Mr Trupp, who lived next door and sold cars on the side. I’ve no idea what he did on the other side. Who cares? Increasingly I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I remember the day Truppy – everyone called him Truppy – turned up with the Morris. £100. Deal. 

It had clearly been owned by some boy racer type because – and Truppy made a deal about this – it had two Webber carbs. No, me neither, but it went. Really, it went. We could beat almost anything off the lights. But then it stopped, got to about 30mph and stopped. Lost interest. Remembered it was a Morris 100. “Perfect, you’ll never break the speed limit” Truppy probably said. 

The other thing, the thing he didn’t mention, was that while there was a handbrake, it wasn’t actually attached to the floor of the car. You pulled it up, it just came up. The handbrake, the plate it was bolted to, some mechanism thing and… And we lived on quite a steep hill and, well that’s how my dark green Morris 1100 came to have a white boot. Do they even have breaker’s yards now? 

You think about your cars and they’re like photo albums, each one a rush of memory, each one with more stories than miles. But that was then and this is now. And now is different. Now is “the planet”. 

Maybe it’s time to just accept that the future’s now and proper cars aren’t now. Maybe everything else is a little bit King Canute. 

But you know… A couple of weeks ago I got Covid. What can you do? Just rest up and… Did you know that on Sky Dave Gold or somesuch channel at 4pm every day they’re showing old episodes of The Sweeney. Now the Ford Granada Mk 1, that’s a car.  And as chance would have it, there’s one on the net for £4,750…

The secret of the programme’s success, of course, is that castaways choose not the eight best records but the eight records that mean most to them. And they tell the stories that go with them.

And so it is with wines. My choice of wines that have meant most to me in life is dictated by the situation in which I drank them, even more than their excellence. 

Take my first choice: Clos de Vougeot 1965. A friend and I, both aged 21, won a scholarship to spend six weeks in France studying the wine trade. (Don’t ask how such a thing is possible; this was the 1960’s – it probably isn’t any more). It gave us a little money but, much more important, it gave us introductions to key winemakers in Burgundy. We were working our way down the Côte d’Or, visiting cellars and tasting wine. One lunchtime we’d reached the little village of Vougeot, home of some of the most famous vineyards in the world, where there was a little bistro, packed with men (as was the way then). 

We ordered the cheapest possible meal and asked for water – it was all our money would run to. ‘Ce n’est pas possible’ shouted a man two tables away. ‘When in Vougeot we drink Vougeot!’. The waitress was called, a half bottle ordered, and the whole bistro nodded with approval, of course this was how they do things here. The wine was exceptional – elegant, fragrant, almost perfumed. And it went on our neighbour’s bill. I’ve never forgotten that man’s generosity and whenever someone complains about the arrogance and disdain that the French can show to foreigners I think, no, it’s not necessarily arrogance. Sometimes it’s a justified pride.

My next choice was also first tasted in a restaurant, but we were paying this time. Alghero is the loveliest old town in Sardinia, and the best spot in Alghero is a restaurant on the sea wall where you dine outside at tables with white linen tablecloths, watching the sun go down across the Mediterranean. I was there with my wife. Our first night we had a wine from the largest co-operative on the island, called Santadi. It was so good the next night I ordered the best Santadi they had. The waiter, previously polite, became suddenly interested. “Perfetto” he said and headed off to the other waiters to tell them this foreigner had ordered a bottle of Terre Brune. They nodded their approval, outrageously big wine glasses were brought and the Manager appeared with the bottle. Activity stopped across the restaurant while the bottle was opened. A little was poured; I tasted. I don’t usually cry when asked to taste a wine but I wasn’t far off that evening. It was divine. It was a Carignano del Sulcis – pure Carignan grapes on old vines, matured in oak barrels. It was an impossible combination of power and elegance. I don’t think I said anything, just nodded helplessly in a way the waiter seemed to understand. I’ve had it since, and it wasn’t just the setting; it really is that good.

I

 was 19 and living alone in Rheims, working all summer in a department store to learn French. In those easygoing days all the great Champagne houses opened their cellars to visitors, with the tour of the cellars, refreshingly cool in that hot summer, followed by a dégustation gratuite. I did so many of these tours that I really could tell one champagne from another. Pommery was my favourite tour. They changed the guides so often I could always get in without being recognised as a repeat visitor; and they had acres of caves packed with champagne bottles, each one being turned every few months by hand, deep in the limestone under the city. 

But my favourite champagne was Veuve Clicquot, with its distinctive orange label. I liked its rich, full, biscuity flavour. Some years later, driving to the south of France, my wife and I stopped in Rheims to visit the now elderly couple who had found that job for me and tried to keep an eye on me. In the conversation I mentioned my liking for Veuve Clicquot and, without a word, Pierre got up, put away the bottle of something else he already had on ice, went down to his cellar and came back with a 10 year old bottle of Veuve Clicquot. The aging had changed it from the luscious full bodied fresh bubbly I remembered to a more complex wine, but unmistakeably Clicquot. Nothing brings back a memory as powerfully as does taste and smell.

W

hen Gordon Ramsay opened his restaurant at Claridge’s he offered an extraordinarily cheap lunch deal; so I booked for the two of us. The hotel was as opulent as we had expected, the food was good though not great, and the wine list was very, very long and expensive. We headed for the area of France we know best – the Languedoc – and chose the cheapest, called, intriguingly, ‘No.7’ from a domaine called La Croix Belle. It was splendid: full, fruity, complex, totally honest and well made. I asked the French wine waiter what the grapes were and, without a pause he said ‘grenache, syrah, mourvedre’ which was no surprise because they are typical grapes for that area. Next time we were down there we called in at La Croix Belle and spoke to Mme Françoise Boyer who runs the sales side of the family business. The waiter had just been guessing. It’s called No.7 because it’s made from seven grape varieties, including the three the wine waiter had guessed. A Frenchman doesn’t admit he doesn’t know.

Françoise had merely placed her wines in the hands of a broker and had no idea they were on such prestigious wine lists. I think that was the end of the broker as far as she was concerned. We still drink a lot of No.7. It sums up for us what Languedoc red wines are all about. They get a lot of sun and the stony soil drains well; so the wine is naturally concentrated, rich, and fruity. Knowing the people and their vineyards brings a whole new dimension to enjoying their wine.

l This is Andrew Polmear’s final wine column for The Mighty Whistler. But he can’t get away that easily. We organised a 38 Degrees Petition  – to say how many votes it got would embarrass Andrew – but suffice to say you’ve not seen the last of his byline 

You have to go a long way to eat by the light of a roaring fire on a winter’s evening these days, but find it we did at Brighton’s favourite out of town pub half an hour down the A27, The Ram Inn at Firle. 

For the walkers heading back down the Beacon, there’s no need to wait for nightfall for the fires to be lit and the pints to be poured in this quaint old country pub. Dusk falls early here as locals join walkers in a Covid?WhatCovid? huddle around the proper old bar, and fires are set in all three dining areas. No wonder The Ram is pulling in more than 300 covers a day at the weekends. No mean feat as the pandemic has paralysed so many of its competitors.

Everything is quaint in Firle; the 11th century village dates back to Edward the Confessor, and backs into the Beacon itself, stalling any possibility of through traffic and herding cars into the central car park to give its single road over to the walkers. Owned by Lord Gage and his ancestors since the 15th century,  the village and everything in it is picture book pretty and packed with artists and writers whose rent lines his pockets in a feudal system that hasn’t noticed the passing of time. 

No matter for the hordes of visitors who can’t quite believe that a place like this still exists. Suspending reality, as the village itself seems to have done, is rather a pleasant pastime, it seems. 

Happily, the menu has managed to straddle Firle’s old-fashioned values and Instagram’s core requirements with beautiful dishes sourced locally and seasonally from some of the best farms in Sussex. The pan roast venison loin from nearby Heathfield is just about the most sustainable of meats you can eat – unless you fancy squirrel – and perched on dauphinoise potato with braised red cabbage and a red wine jus is a wintery dish just made to be snapped in Portrait mode by a roaring fire.  The twice cooked confit duck leg with smoked pancetta, braised puy lentils and red wine jus or the grilled cod fillet with celeriac puree, roast hispi cabbage, caper, lemon and parsley oil are a picture of country gastro pub 2022. But it’s the Stout Cake, deep, dark malt and chocolatey with a rich Guinness sauce that brings Old England to the table in this timeless hostelry. 

Prices are unsurprisingly modern, and with a good wine list, it’s an easy £100 for two. But if you gaze long enough into the flames licking the ancient chimney as you sip your digestif, you might just see the ghosts of former villagers Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Katherine Mansfield who were known to pen a few lines over a half on a winter’s night. Priceless.