Whole lot of truffle

There are not many ways to make a 12-hour flight bearable, but this week I discovered a method of making it even more hair-tearingly, eye-poppingly miserable: just before you board, pick up a newspaper and read something that sets your blood boiling.

Flicking through the Times, I spotted a report that a Hong Kong consortium had paid E95,000 for a single truffle. That’s £64,000 or more than $110,000, for a lump of fungus. By the time you read this, the £64,000 fungus will have been eaten... unless it got pushed to the back of the fridge and forgotten, in which case it will have rotted, because Tuber Magnatum, the white Alba truffle, lasts less than a week before spoiling. And once sliced, it must be eaten the same day.

I first tasted truffles in Germany, in the early Seventies. They were served to me with a flirtacious flourish by a hostess who whispered that the pungent, fibrous, wafer-thin slice of garnish was a powerful aphrodisiac.

Lust didn’t grip me, but an odd flavour lingered on my tongue, as if I’d licked a charred bicycle tyre. It wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever eaten (it didn’t have legs and it wasn’t wriggling) but I don’t know that I’d pay to taste it again. And to pay such an obscene sum...

All the way to Korea, my head was swimming. Even when I lay in the central aisle, my favourite method of avoiding deep-vein thrombosis, I was still furious. Truffles, I decided, were the biggest waste of money in the world.

There are, I suppose, a few vintages of wine which would set you back more: a 1787 bottle of Chateau Lafitte Bordeaux holds the world record, at £105,000. But you can show off a bottle of wine for years before you finally pick a date to uncork it, on one of the most significant nights of your life — a child’s wedding, a milestone anniversary, the birth of a grandchild. And afterwards, you can always display the empty bottle.

I’m not saying the Chateau Lafitte is money well spent (after 218 years, it might be a bit vinegary) but it’s an investment, which a rotting hunk of fungal matter is not.

The first thing I did when I touched down in the Far East was to ring my researcher, Steve, back in England and tell him to add up ways of spending £64,000 more effectively. My anger subsided a little when I realised the truffle was auctioned for charity and the profits went to Hands And Hearts, which supports cancer patients. That’s an excellent cause.

Marco Pierre White was one of the celebrity chefs bidding for truffles at the Ristorante Fiore in London, where he paid more than £9000 for four truffles. If you’ve never tasted one — and honestly, you’re not missing much — imagine a toadstool that tastes of stinky blue cheese and burned rubber. Delicious, eh? They’re a kind of underground mushroom, which makes them harder to find than the floppy shittakes you buy in Waitrose: dogs and pigs are trained to snuffle them out.

I was just getting over my indignation when Steve called back, and the figures he threw at me made my jaw drop. The price of an ordinary meal in London — nothing fancy, no truffles — can change the lives of hundreds of people forever in many developing countries.

In Madagascar, for instance, the materials to build a well cost £225. The community will gladly do the work for free, because a well means clean water for up to 300 people... and that means countless children’s lives saved from diseases.

In Bangladesh, a public pump in a city slum will provide water for at least 100 families, for £470. In India, a toilet block for 150 schoolchildren costs £350 to build.

In Afghanistan, £170 treats ten people for cholera. £79 buys a village midwife essential equipment, and £145 provides shelter for ten homeless families.

In Gambia, £60 buys tools and training for a saddler and a farrier, whose new skills will save hundreds of horses from a life of pain.

Back in London, it is common to pay £100 a head for dinner, and that’s before you open the wine list. My family prefer more reasonable venues, especially ones serving Japanese and Middle Eastern cuisine, but if I’m dining with showbiz friends I know the bill will go through the roof.

So here’s a promise — next time I’m eating out with TV executives or celebrity pals, I’m going to veto the expensive restaurant and we’re heading for somewhere we can eat for under a tenner. A chippie is fine, a Chinese takeaway is great. If we end up sitting in my people-mover with greasy paper on our laps, that’s OK: it’s all food.
And then we’re going to pool the cash we’ve saved, donate it to an action charity such as Save The Children, and give lifelong hope to hundreds of people.

Because a goal like that has got to be worth a bit of truffle.

Lord Lichfield, who passed away earlier this month, paid me one of the most charming compliments, when he was a guest on Sir David Frost’s show, Through The Keyhole.

Asked to guess who owned my home, seen through the eyes of Loyd Grossman and his camera team, the noble lord called it “easily the nicest house I have seen”.

We chatted after the show and I reminded him that he had photographed me on the QE2 in the early Eighties, when I was lecturing on board. He used black-and-white film, which he said would “capture the mystery”.

Years later he dropped in at my home for a photoshoot, and he seemed to fall in love with the place. The session didn’t involve an array of the world’s most beautiful women in provocatively alluring poses, though that was his speciality: this time, he was photographing garden furniture.

When he left, the furniture stayed. I still have it, and now it will always remind me of a gracious man.