Editorial: Here's to Methuselah

Popping down to the local rugby club for takeaways was a shock last Thursday. The first sign of something up was local wastrels, in assorted mobile wrecks of questionable legal status, hurtling flat sticks up side roads away from the village.

Upon arrival all was revealed. A booze-bus and a posse of police cars stuck out like flashing beacons from a sea of parked cars occupying every available space for kilometres.

Of course, I should have known a massively important rugby fixture (aren't they all?) was scheduled to invade our otherwise tranquil rural community.

Had I actually scanned the sports pages before using them to light the fire, I could have entirely avoided running the gamut of police, gate security, crowds, possible public embarrassment at being mistaken for a rugby fan, and an oxygenating 2km sprint from car to club and back for which absolutely no advance training was undertaken.

Clearly rugby is a menace to the community, but each to their own: although even the most controversial art exhibitions tend not to impede traffic. However, I understand that since thousands of happy rugby fans trump one contrarian, I must lump it. It's a tough job. Someone has to do it.

Likewise the onerous task (I jest) of (with others) helping a friend with the birthday Methuselah of champagne - a 6.0-litre bottle, named after the Bible's oldest person at, allegedly, 969 years - she was given by a younger brother doubtlessly implying a cheeky reference to her advanced age.

Apparently Methuselah (Noah's grandfather) was so virtuous that when he died, just as the eponymous ark was completed, God postponed the flood for seven days in mourning.

Why this might qualify his name to grace a large champagne bottle is unclear.

At the popping, however, we were more concerned with the technicalities of chilling and pouring such an enormous container. Happily, it went with a bang in fine style without a drop wasted.

Even larger bottles are named for Mordechai, a cousin of the Queen of Persia (9 litres); Balthazar, one of the Three Wise Men (12 litres): Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon (15 litres); and the whopping Melchizedek, High Priest of Israel at 30 litres, which could well have proved trickier to handle.

Strangely, Noah does not appear in the arcane canon of champagne-bottle nomenclature, despite being known as the Biblical father of viticulture who, post-deluge, planted vines. He too, according to Genesis, enjoyed the extreme longevity seemingly common in those ante-diluvian times, not even begetting his three sons until aged 500!

Opinion is divided about how these unbelievable lifespan figures arose. One theory is water-vapour covered the Earth before the flood circa 4990BC, filtering the ageing effect of solar radiation. Others reckon the numbers are either pure fiction or a mistranslation of a term meaning a tenth of a year, which would make Methuselah a far more credible 96.9. The final theory is superior diet, although consisting of what is not clear. Genesis is more whakapapa than lifestyle/recipe book.

Mind you, life is not a numbers game - more about quality than quantity - so I've never understood the contemporary health sector fixation on longevity, which seems to conflict directly with the current economic sector contention that we cannot afford old people.

Whatever the answers, in the meantime, let us raise our glasses, give thanks, and toast the Rumpole of the Bailey dictum that there is no pleasure on Earth worth giving up for another five years in the sunset rest-home.