The Important Things In Life (Part One)

For your enlightenment, I intend to address the important things in life. I imagine this series of thought-provoking advisory material will be published in a collected form in the future, so be grateful for an early sight of it and the opportunity to get your life in order accordingly.

We live a very short time on this spinning globe and so it is vital that we live right, focussing on the essentials and not on the inconsequentials. Or, as another writer who has aspired to match my own prose put it: Don't get theeself in a muck-sweat over nowt, d'ye hear?

So, I turn to what is undoubtedly the most important contributor to the happiness I enjoy, and could so easily come to be yours too: the unalloyed joy of a perfectly-warmed brandy.

I have seen so many struggle to get this right. But this weekend I witnessed a callow youth get it spot-on. I was ensconced in one of Manchester's most famous watering-holes ("Robbie's Bar", named after the famous Mancunian word-smith and alcoholic Robert Burns) and ordered a glass of their finest "horse d'age". The lad behind the bar turned up with a glass of the nectar perched majestically atop another glass that, filled with hot water, was doing the job I usually need my right hand for.

I tested this approach for consistency a further seventeen times that evening, and each glass tasted more glorious than the last.

You can probably understand my confusion to then find myself surrounded by a troup of wandering Assyrians!

Manchester - so much to answer for.