The autumn bank holiday is like the five-minute bell at the opera. The shades of the prison house loom. All over the country, kids are looking for missing kit while mothers are trying to remember where they put the Cash’s name tapes — after they have made sure that the grindstone is in working order. Interrogation is certain to reveal holiday tasks incomplete: holiday reading well short of the final page.

But there are compensations. The last chores of summer can be palliated by the first fruits of autumn. On Holland Park Avenue — I suppose you could call it South-West Notting Hill — there is a delightful enclave with a bookshop, a boozer and a butcher. The bookshop is Daunt’s, scene of many a book-launch party. The pub is the Castle, where charming Spanish or Italian girls pull a sound pint. It is so good of them and their ilk to rescue the British from the consequences of absolutely full employment. As everyone knows, the entire youthful population of these islands is in work, so without foreigners, what would we do?

There is one problem with the Castle, and with too many other hostelries. Forty years ago, English pubs were infested with plastic beer: gassy, gut-rotting garbage. Those dreadful brands have been extirpated. But the plastic music survives. Muzak should rank high on any revised Syllabus Errorum. The brewing chains have got into the habit of supplying it. I suspect that it is much less popular than they think.

‘Popular’ brings us to Lidgate’s, the butcher. Although it does mail order, its customers come from all over, to savour the place. You might have risen from a Lucullan banquet, so satiated, so replete, that you feel you could (and ought to) live off watercress for a week. Then you stroll into Lidgate’s, only capable of a slow funeral-march pace. But those glistening red joints: the pies, the charcuterie, the game; your taste buds spring back to life.

I had come to pick up some young grouse, knowing that this would stimulate debate as well as appetite. I would say that those birds had been dead for five to seven days. Cooked rare, they had a delicious sweetness, with the legs a gamier gnaw. So what is the ideal hang? My host once held a blind tasting. Some birds had hung for a fortnight, others for a week, the third lot were straight from the moor. To every-one’s surprise, they won the laurel.

Then there is the question of hot or cold. I think cold is best. But it is hard to believe that anything could taste better than those Lidgate birds. So they have it, at least until I eat my first cold grouse of the season. It is wonderful that grouse freeze so well.

Lidgate: made one think about poor Tertius Lydgate. I do not suppose that he had a hearty digestion even before he met his wife. If only he had been able to link up with-Dorothea Brooke. Although it is tempting to dismiss her as a stupid intellectual, she deserved better than that wimp Ladislaw; Lydgate, than that bitch of bitches Rosamond Vincy. But then there would have been no novel.

Turning from Lydgate’s sufferings to Lidgate’s fruits, we drank a selection of bottles with the grouse. 2000 was an excellent year for Côte Rôtie, and the ones we sampled were only just ready. A Saint-Cosme won the gold medal, but only for Rhône. Years ago, our host had bought some accessible claret for early drinking, including a Grand-Puy-Lacoste ’97. Not yet an aspirant to super-fifth status, it was still affordable, especially from a year that was not highly regarded.

Five cases gave satisfaction. The sixth was somehow overlooked, until four years ago. Far from fading, the wine had reached an admirable maturity. Oenology may be a science, but it does not have all the answers. The master of the hall decided that the grouse deserved to be piped out by the last survivor: a terpsichorean choice. How can we tell the science from the art?