Hounds

Thor Steinar Accessoires

Fogey Tea Time

Wine Season

In recent months, on the advice of a weight-lifting comrade, I've been drinking greater quantities of red wine in the evening.

I'm not a wine snob, as you know, but I do enjoy it. I was raised on good wine--courtesy of my parents and the environments in which I grew up (for which I'm extremely grateful)--but I never developed a love or obsession with it, like a lot of chaps I know. It's boring to me. Wine is to be enjoyed, not studied. Still, knowing a bit about wine can be good for business. It's also good for meeting women. They fucking love the stuff.

The exclusive photo (above) shows two recent acquisitions for my table. Nothing particularly fancy, mind you. But, as you will notice, there was a certain je ne sais quoi about each of these bottles that drew me in.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)

Retrospectively

Today in many ways I'm the kind of man I never really thought I'd become. Physically, personally, mentally, professionally. It's quite remarkable to me bearing in mind the upbringing and life experiences I've described in this column over the last several years.

You know to what I'm referring.  The clues were always there: the failed relationships, defiance, restlessness, fighting, sex, drinking, dissidence, jail, etc. All dressed up, of course, in the uniform of the circles in which I was raised. That's me. I own all of it.

These thoughts were elicited by the recent discovery--entirely random, on an unrelated website--of a photograph of me with my late father in New York City in the early 1980s, both of us standing in jackets of Tweed with our backs to the camera.

How things have changed since then! I can say with some satisfaction that I'm not the sort of man I envisioned myself becoming, nor is this the life I sought. But here I am, and there it is.

Across the Universe (Laibach)

Old Barbour

Book Lovers Never Go To Bed Alone

A friend reading the proof of our upcoming debut volume

A Noble Manner

'It was she [Benoist’s Grandmother] who first taught me the meaning of noblesse oblige: viz., that belonging to the aristocracy does not consist in benefiting from more privileges than others or in having additional rights, but in imposing greater burdens upon one oneself, having a higher notion of one’s duties, feeling more responsible than others. Behaving in a noble manner, whatever class one comes from, means never being satisfied with oneself, never reasoning in terms of utility. It means the beauty of gratuitousness, of “useless” expenditure, the beau geste, the conviction that one could always have done better, that it is odious to boast of what one has done, that a man’s quality is tested by his ability to act contrary to his own interests whenever it becomes necessary.'

- Alain de Benoist, Mémoire Vive

White Mischief (1987)

Bowler Assemblage

Tintin: l'un de nous

Tintin en France

Hussar Style

The Flash

Books 4 Lyfe !

Proper Fit

Trout of North America

Quoi donc, old chap ?

Brixton Bowery Flannel

Locals Only !

Eastwood in Italy

Barbour's of South Shields

The classic. I regularly wore a Barbour, the definitive Bedale model in olive, starting in the mid-1980s. In late September 1992 I visited South Shields on a pilgrimage to the Barbour factory. It was dark and drizzling outside. I managed to pick up a couple of Barbour 'seconds' in the factory shop. These days I've no idea where these jackets are, which is of no consequence as there is scant need for such garments in the Southern California sun. Occasionally, reflecting on where I've been and where I'm going, I entertain the notion of moving back to England or Europe just so I can wear a Barbour jacket.