John Cleese won a libel action against the London Evening Standard a few years ago following a memorable hatchet job which had described him as an “humiliated failure”.
I have always rather relished that phrase and I feared it would apply to me too when I held my annual barbecue amid a thunderstorm.
I started holding them for my 40th birthday eight years ago and fortunately everyone enjoyed them so much they have just kept coming.
There was a difficult time a few years back when my girlfriend and I split up.
The problem was that she was an excellent, professional cook, who at one time had her own restaurant and had been used to turning out meals for more than 100 guests or so.
I certainly didn’t fancy taking on that particular challenge, having not even gone to the trouble of learning how to switch the barbecue on, but my friend Nigel Saxton at the Croppers Arms proposed a neat solution.
Why didn’t I buy all the food from a local butchers he recommended, they would deliver the food to him, he and his staff would not only pre-cook it but serve it up to my chums?
Phew! Even better, he said, why didn’t I buy a couple of barrels of ale and pump foaming pints of bitter from the cellars onto the patio?
OK, so it was going to mean that I was going to be about £1,000 out of pocket but at least I would have a cracking day with the pressure off.
Of course, there is one thing no amount of money can buy and that is a nice sunny day in September.
So it was that one particular Friday night with dire predictions of savage winds and tumbling rain that I retired to bed with a large glass of Scotch imagining that I too was about to become an “humiliated failure”.
Fortunately I had been given a large gazebo and some friends brought another.
Maybe, just maybe, I would pull off an unlikely success...
And so it turned out.
Fortunately my friends were not of the fair-weather variety and turned out in droves and, bizarrely, the dramatic storm gave the whole event a ‘Dunkirk’, against-the-odds style.
Some thought it was the best one ever.
But I am not one to tempt fate. So this year I took the precaution of staging it when the good weather came for two whole weeks in July.
No “humiliated failure” me!
