It is a strange thing, this membership of the Anglophone world. Fevers and passions which bear no relation to Ireland, to its peoples, its habit, its culture or its history are transmitted to us from the banality-factories in California, university campuses in Iowa or from the the AfroLesbian Collective of Limbless Veterans of the Falklands War in Hackney and absorbed with the same effortless ease of a fresh additive to our water.
Admittedly, not all of these might be quite as foreign as they seemed. Political correctness slipped in easily to take over from where the Mother Superior left off. Today's terminological prissiness is the successor to a deep linguistic authoritarianism.
Who controls language controls thought. Self-styled liberals inherited that mantle of illiberalism. It was hardly surprising that "liberal" Irish journalists limply started calling American Indians "Native Americans" with barely a moment's hesitation, nor that we have tied ourselves up in hopeless knots talking about our own native nomads - "travellers" - who, according to the language police of the National Union of Journalists, are not knackers, dealers and tinkers (actually fine old words denoting honest livelihoods).
Linguistic flourish
In such circumstances it is hardly astonishing that that odious little reptile, Ms, should have been officially incorporated into Irish usage merely because feminists said it should be. It has simplified nothing. Does anybody really know whether Mary O'Rourke is Mrs or Ms? Certainly RTE journalists declare the Mzzzzz with a great linguistic flourish of political correctness: but is it also correct?
We are embracing equality laws which merely define inequality, the one abiding feature of the human condition; so we call the folks who put out fires "firefighters", to get rid of that nasty "man" word and to show that all is equal in this egalitarian paradise, but then we introduce lower standards for women - but of course not men - in order to get more female recruits into the service. As firewomen step over those of us weighing 10 stones or more hunting for a conveniently light person to rescue, and we sizzle with frightful inegalitarianism, we might indeed have mixed feelings about the edicts of the equality committee.
But in one respect we have remained splendidly, gloriously and defiantly aloof from the Anglophone world: in alcohol. In the past decade, alcoholrelated health scares have washed over the Anglophone world, changing not merely habits but also conversations. Instead of those abominable property-price heart-to-hearts Londoners used to have about 10 years ago, escape from which was possible only by drawing a sword and slaying all in view, they now talk about units of booze.
Unit of alcohol
I am proud to say, I haven't a clue what a unit of alcohol is. In Ireland, unit is what you to do to gloves and scarves for nephews. (Usew is how you get buttons on shirts.) It's that simple. Alcohol has nothing to do with it and it seems highly undesirable and irresponsible to mix the two. Needles. Booze. Tut tut. Stand in the corner for half-an-hour.
I know nobody in Ireland who counts units of alcohol. It is an unworthy and slightly neurotic way of passing the time and expending brain cells. Nobody says, "Ooops, I've had three-and-a-half orgasms this week, time to call a halt." Nobody declares that he's had three lovely walks in the past three days: time to give fresh air and exercise a bit of a break. Not a bit of it.
So why do it for wine, especially now? Never in the history of our love affair with alcohol has so much of the human race had so much opportunity to taste so many forms of alcohol from so many cultures. The freeing of trade, the death of douanes and the end of tariffs means that we are now faced with a mesmerising choice of wines, beers and spirits in our off-licences and our supermarkets.
Le vieux reliable plonque est mort.
We do not live in a wine lake so much as in a Himalaya of choice, with foothills, tors, mountains, crevasses, peaks and slopes to flounder through. When all is lost, and you are stranded on a glacier of vinous indecision, let Jancis Robinson be your Sherpa Tensing. She is the guide and the mentor, the encyclopaedist and the laureate of the noble art of drinking and enjoying wine. She will be present tonight at 7.30 at Hodges Figgis for a launch of her latest oenotome, Confessions of a Wine Lover, and will be giving a tutored wine-tasting to mark the occasion.
Wine tastings
I have said on a previous occasion, my days of wine-tastings are over. Say finee. I love Jancis dearly, and I envy her success even more so, but I draw the line at wine-tastings: les puckerings, les gurglings, les mouings, les spittings et le plus de tout, les splashbacks droit en le visage et quelquefois straight en le gob.
Orreebl.
But that is merely me. You will probably have the time of your life there. The love of wine is a love of civilisation; no wine can be made without a reverence for nature, without an understanding, even an unlettered understanding of the science of yeasts, without an appreciation of the complexities of the palate and most of all, without the greatest ingredient of all, which lifts civilisation above the level of the beasts: patience. Have a nice evening, Jancis. Et dodgez les splashbacks, surtout sur les tonsils.