How to Lose a Friend in One Bottle of Champagne

Nearly twenty years ago, almost to the day, I was living in Paris and working for one of the big accountancy firms, the sort with four names and no soul. The hours, to my genuine astonishment, were civilised. The staff were not. This was not London. In London you can turn to the person at the next desk and say “pint?” and mean now, this second, let us go. In Paris, I quickly learned, the very same question was treated as a minor diplomatic event.

You would suggest a drink, casually, like a normal human being, and your French colleague would produce a leather diary roughly the size of a paving slab, lick a finger, and leaf through it with the solemn gravity of a man consulting holy scripture. Then, at last, he would look up and offer you a slot. In two days. At a quarter to seven. For, I assumed, a strictly rationed forty minutes. It was, in a word, awful. I knew no one, I could schedule no fun, and I was slowly going out of my mind.

And then, like the cavalry cresting a hill, Eric arrived.

Eric was American. Young, single, and as gloriously unbothered by the diary system as I was desperate for company. Finally, in a city where I knew precisely no one, here was a partner in crime: someone who also thought a Tuesday was a perfectly good reason to have a drink, and that the reason could be decided on the Tuesday. For a few glorious months, Paris was fun again. I thought I had found my person.

Reader, I had not.

About six months into our friendship, at a staff lunch for someone’s birthday, Eric did two things that told me, with total and sudden clarity, that this friendship was living on borrowed time. In fairness to the drama, both things happened within roughly four seconds of each other, and both of them involved the same bottle of champagne.

Someone had produced one. Good champagne. French champagne. In France. Surrounded by something like thirty actual French people who had, one can only assume, been opening champagne competently since infancy. And Eric, my sweet, doomed American friend, lunged for it. He insisted. He would do the honours. I remember the dread rising in me like a tide. Buddy, I thought, there are thirty people in this room who could do this in their sleep, blindfolded, mid-sentence. Let literally any one of them. But no. It had to be him.

What followed I have since replayed in slow motion for the best part of two decades. He seized the cork like it owed him money. He twisted. He yanked. He twisted again, the wrong way, with the grim, red-faced determination of a man trying to loosen a rusted bolt on a submarine. The bottle began to sweat. Eric began to sweat. The room went quiet in the way rooms do just before something goes badly wrong.

Then, physics. The cork departed at roughly the speed of a small missile, in a direction it had chosen entirely for itself. And the bottle, now less a drink and more a live grenade, slipped clean out of his hand, delivering a warm champagne baptism to the birthday, the tablecloth, and several outfits that had not asked to be baptised. Somewhere, a Frenchwoman began blotting her blouse with the expression of a woman at a graveside.

And in that moment, watching perfectly good Champagne foam gently into the office carpet, I understood two things of my own. The first: to survive at that company, I would have to quietly, painlessly, let this friendship lapse. The second, and more important: to survive in France at all, I could not be seen within fifty metres of a man who treated a champagne cork like a seized nut on a tractor.

Because here is the thing, and I say this with love: opening a bottle of Champagne is not hard. You do not wrestle the cork. You hold the cork still and you gently turn the bottle, thumb resting over the top, at a forty-five degree angle aimed firmly at no one you are fond of. The sound you are after is a soft, contented sigh, the sort a good Champagne makes when it is treated with respect. Eric achieved a starting pistol, followed by a fire hose, followed by something close to social death. (If any of this frightens you, incidentally, a bottle of Prosecco is a gentler place to practise.)

I never really spoke to Eric again. I would love to tell you there was a dramatic falling-out, a confrontation, a slammed door. But friendships in your twenties do not end so much as they quietly stop being scheduled, which, given where we were, felt almost appropriate.

What I took away instead was the single most useful lesson of my entire drinking life, and I now hand it to you, free of charge and hard won. It does not matter how funny your friends are. It does not matter how kind, how loyal, how good they are in a genuine crisis. What matters, what truly matters, is that they can open a bottle of champagne without redecorating the room and ending their own career in the process.

Choose accordingly. Vet early. And if in doubt, hand the bottle to the nearest French person and step well back.