MCLEAN Northabout

Istudied philosophy at Edinburgh University, which practically-minded friends and family told me was a waste of time and would never lead to gainful employment. How wrong they were! What else would have equipped me, decades later, to fill the existential void between putting bottles of cheap Merlot and Pinot Grigio through the till? (Sartre: “Hell is other people’s wine choices.”)

Philosophy also gave me a teacher who became a dear friend until his death a few years ago at the age of 97. Richard Hamilton was born just after World War I, his father a miner, his mother a domestic servant. He grew up in Musselburgh in what we’d now consider grinding poverty, but rose, through support from a Miners’ Welfare fund, to study, and eventually teach, at several leading universities.

At first glance he might have seemed to conform to donnish stereotypes: the tweed jacket, the Shakespeare quotation for every occasion, the study lined with a library of ancient volumes. But a moment or two of conversation and his thoroughgoing radicalism became apparent. A lifelong socialist and pacifist, he was a conscientious objector during World War II. Career-minded students sometimes complained that he wasn’t providing them with the answers required to pass their exams. “Education isn’t about passing exams,” he’d reply. “It’s about learning to think.”

Richard introduced me to many writers he thought I should read and think about. Some were typical of his age and vocation – Matthew Arnold, AE Houseman. Others revealed his radical streak – Mikhail Bulgakov, Arthur Koestler. He also introduced me to an appreciation of whisky. He believed in moderate consumption of all the fine things in life and especially in a good dram between friends. His favourite was peaty Islay, and it was a bottle of this that taught me a lasting philosophical lesson.

I met Richard in Chambers Street one day, looking ashen. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “I’ve just overcome a serious dilemma,” he replied. “As I stepped out of Oddbins, I dropped my bottle of Laphroaig 16 Year Old. What to do? Only one thing: go back in without hesitation and buy another. Future pleasures should not be sacrificed on the altar of past losses.”

It was Richard who gave me that classic old-buffer wine tome, Notes on a Cellar Book by George Saintsbury. It’s distinctly fusty and verbose; even when it was published, in 1920, it must have read like something from another age. Yet it’s full of fascinating recollection and rumination on wines none of us will ever experience (unless we are friends of Rudy Kurniawan): “The bouquet was rather like that of the less sweet wallflower. And as to the flavour one might easily go into dithyrambs. Wineslang talks of the ‘finish’ in such cases, but this was so full and so complicated that it never seemed to finish. You could meditate on it; and it kept up with your meditations. This was a red Hermitage of 1846.”

Last month I attended a wedding in Glasgow. (Piper-Heidsieck Cuvée Brut, since you ask, followed by Yealands Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir.) The happy couple were of a literary bent, so each table was named after a favourite writer, and decorated with artfully strewn antique books. At the end of the evening we were invited to take a volume or two, as they were otherwise being returned to the charity shop from whence they came.

I picked up and put down several cheap reprints of Dickens and Walter Scott, then lingered over an entirely forgotten book by an almost forgotten author: On Translating Homer, by Matthew Arnold. I leafed to the title page and found an owner’s signature in familiar neat handwriting: Richard Hamilton, 12-xi-40.

Later that night I raised a glass of Laphroaig in honour of a good friend, and the other fine things of life.