A good lunch

There was fishing to organise so it called for a lunch. I do like a good lunch. For years it was the institution of business - a time and a place to gossip, learn stuff and make deals. Some of my best journalism commissions have come out of a lunchtime conversation.

But lunch has to be with people you like or people you find that you like over lunch, and the best lunches tend to involve a drink or two. In the past few years I have had the occasional lunch that just involves water. In fact today, as often as not, abstemiousness is assumed. These puritanical American-style "meetings with food" start promptly and end quickly because they're shoe horned in to a schedule.

It's worse still if the venue is one of those fashionable glass and steel echo chambers designed to create "instant atmosphere". I can't hear what's being said. I've noticed that women often pick these places.

I've always enjoyed the company of women but, just as some choose badly in love, they do so at lunch. They pick fancy places to eat, typically somewhere "that I've never been to but I've heard it's good". A few scraps of vegetable and maybe a sliver of meat are piled on some mush in the middle of the plate with something dark drizzled on top. After the main course - which can be consumed in 30 seconds - the woman is desperately wanting some pudding but she denies herself and sips water throughout with one eye on the watch.

At this week's fishing lunch in the Boot & Flogger, one of our group was an hour late but it didn't seem to matter. True, this particular lunch went a little bit beyond what would strictly qualify as lunch and ended in some singing, but that's not necessary for a good lunch. A good lunch develops; it happens; it can't say "good lunch" in your diary although sometimes you have an inkling about the possibilities.

Everyone ordered rib-eye steak with chips. There was nothing drizzled and no white space on the plate. Real food, real people and real conversation in a real wine bar where it would be impolite to drink too much water.

In the 1980s when I first joined the Financial Times, every department head was given access to the private dining room three or four times a year. The idea was that you hosted a nice lunch for a few guests or "contacts". Mostly, however, it was an excuse for a department blow out. The dining room was in the bowels of Bracken House where nothing could be disturbed. There were several courses of top nosh with a great selection of wines. It helped that Pearson, the parent company, owned Chateau Latour at the time. Then there was brandy or port (or both) and cigars. And some of us still managed to get a story written before heading home.

Over the years successive economies, a move to a smoked glass box at Southwark Bridge, and a focus on the bottom line, changed everything. The vineyard was flogged off, in-house dining curtailed, drinking discouraged and the whole working environment was effectively "delunched" through this creeping sobriety so that the snack in front of the computer terminal has become the norm.

Having sampled both the old regime and the new puritanism, I know where my preferences lie. Today we have instant news, instant everything. But the best news is slow cooked and the best writing, well seasoned, if no longer slightly pickled.