The last time I sat down with Peter Ackroyd to talk about the idea of England was over a very long dinner, involving, at his cheerfully belligerent insistence, four bottles of wine, bookended by several rounds of whisky and brandy. That evening, 25 years ago, ended with the biographer of Charles Dickens and William Blake lying flat out on the cobble stones outside a restaurant in London’s Charterhouse Square, disputing the material reality of the moon, while repeating a demand to “take me home Timmy and tuck me up”, an invitation I declined.
When I arrived to resume that conversation a quarter of a century on, last Tuesday, Ackroyd recalled our previous encounter with a bit of a wince. “I think we did this before in my drinking days,” he suggested, by way of hello. He runs through one or two recollections of that night as if from a former life, including his memory of trying to tell my fortune (“something once happened to you near a river…”). Ackroyd is now 74 and looks far trimmer and brighter-eyed than I remember. It is, he says, seven years since he gave up the drink (even a decade ago he was suggesting that he was down to two bottles of wine a night). “In the end I just got tired of it,” he says. “And also, it wasn’t good for my health. I mean, I was drinking far too much; it was like Niagara Falls.” He misses nothing about that previous life, he says, with half a smile and half a grimace. “Not least because it caused immense embarrassment and frequent physical pain.”
