Burning issue

Just back from Ireland.

Business concluded, I managed to squeeze in a visit to my old schoolfriend Bill who lives near Greystones in Co Wicklow, just south of Dublin.

I’ve known Bill since 1969 when my family moved to Scotland. We were briefly at Wormit Primary School together, before we moved on to Madras College in St Andrews.

During those teenage years we spent our summer holidays camping locally and then further afield in places like Pitlochry where I experienced my first (awful) hangover following a long night drinking Newcastle Brown Ale.

In 1975 we went hiking in the Lake District, and the following year we spent a fairly miserable ten days cycling around central Scotland in the pouring rain, desperately seeking refuge in a variety of youth hostels.

After studying law at Edinburgh University, Bill embarked on a hugely successful career in corporate law that eventually took him to the Cayman Islands via Hong Kong and, if I remember, Bermuda.

In Australia, en route to the Caymans, he met Patty, who is Irish, and it all worked out rather well because, a few months after they got married, I got married too and they invited us to spent the second week of our honeymoon on Grand Cayman, where they lived.

Some years later they moved back to Ireland, so I see them fairly regularly. We’ve even shared a couple of holidays - a week in Westport, Co Mayo, and a transatlantic cruise to New York aboard the Queen Mary.

Bill is a keen climber and his achievements include the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, Mount Teide (Tenerife), and a previously unchartered peak in Greenland that he and his team named Mount Crean after an Irish explorer.

Anyway I caught up with them on Wednesday evening and Bill decided he was going to cook on the barbecue, a skill he perfected while living abroad.

None of your labour saving gas barbecue nonsense. This was a proper charcoal barbecue that you kick start using ‘natural’ fire lighters.

It then takes about 30 minutes for the charcoal to be white hot, at which point you start cooking, but I’m assured it makes a big difference to the taste of the food.

The only thing that marred the evening was the subsequent, and rather poor, Scotland-Switzerland match whose only saving grace was that it was slightly better than England’s performance against Denmark yesterday.

A low bar, I’ll grant you, and thankfully I missed most of the England game because I was still travelling.

Fingers crossed it can only get better but England have been here so many times I wouldn’t bet on it.