WALDEN’S WORLD
Fun at The Spectator summer party
They ought to hand out those disposable rain ponchos at The Spectator Summer Party. Not that it was likely to rain on one of the hottest nights of the year, but as Rachel Johnson sighed when I told her I’d been doused with two drinks in the first hour: “Every year, I work on the basis I’ll have at least one martini thrown over me in the scrum.”
But nobody really minds. It’s the scrum, the martinis and the oddball conversational memes doing the rounds of the magazine’s tiny Old Queen Street back garden that make it one of the best parties of the year.
Dominic Lawson kicked off this year’s most infectious discussion with the point that, like electrical circuits, the very best marriages tend to be between optimists and pessimists. “I’m an incurable optimist,” he explained, “while Rosa [Monckton, Lawson’s wife of 26 years] is a pessimist.” “Oh, I’m broadly massively optimistic about everything, but hide it well because, well,
I’m English,” chimed in Emily Maitlis. “While my husband’s an emotional hedger: he bets against the thing he’s longing to have happen in order to bring it on.” Andrew Neil agreed that “two optimists together would be unbearable”, while my pathologically optimistic husband countered that “two pessimists wouldn’t make it out of bed in the morning”.
When it started to rain, everyone muttered: “It was only a matter of time.”