PHILOSOPHY IS ALL VERY WELL, BUT ONLY MAGIC WILL PRODUCE THE PERFECT LUNCHEON

By the desk lamp on the table in my office, the little pile of election literature is growing. With the elections less than a week away more of the stuff tumbles through my letter box everyday. As if I hadn't enough to read. Nevertheless I keep it all.

It is destined for the Political Archive at the National Library of Wales who keep a record of these devious, misleading and blatant falsehoods, printed these days in glossy colour, the better to grab our attention in the few seconds it normally takes to consign them to the bin.

Twenty years ago I did play some minor role in the ferment of Welsh politics, which is why the Library now ask me for the collection favour. I know what it is to knock on doors and to write those same leaflets. Mind you, I like to think, as we all do I suppose, that things ain't what they used to be. Summers were brighter and leaflets less insulting to the intelligence in the hazy days of yore.

Short of libel, it seems you can say, or more particularly omit, anything you like these days. If you said 'Blair's Government has debased the Moon by turning it into Green Cheese.' I don't suppose anyone would complain - or even notice. And if they did some apparatchik would produce something said in private at three in the morning as evidence that it was true.

But what indeed is truth? Does truth exist? Is there one truth or are there many truths?
Was Oscar Wilde correct when he memorably said 'The truth is never pure and rarely simple?'

As it happens I toddled along this week to the village Philosophical Society, which meets a speaker once a month in the pub in the hope of philosophic or ethical challenge. Once Stanley Johnson came to visit, he being the block from which the tousled haired Boris is not so much chipped as budded, so like is the father to the son; an occasion marked, not so much by philosophy, as by the copious quantities of wine. Still, in vino veritas, as they say.

This time we were in for a religious treatise, but owing to unspecified maternal complications, the speaker had to withdraw. Thrown back on our own resources we plunged, appropriately enough for election time, into a discussion about truth.

This, I have to say, is very much a male argument, the men making far more noise than the women among us. I tried to keep my end up, though my tendency is to want to see things in the practical rather than the abstract.

How can you be sure the refrigerator light truly goes out when you close the door, I ask? And how, unless you look, can you truly know there isn't a troll in your understairs cupboard waiting to pounce on you when you blunder down in the morning for your caffeine fix?

Of course you assume there isn't - we live our life on assumptions - but, I argued, you can't truly know for certain.

But the men were having no truck with the possibility of trolls under staircases, or even that there might be many truths, and went on disputing; I've forgotten quite what about. I became bored and so plunged in again with one of those interventions in which you don't really know what you are going to say until you've said it.

"Why can't we discuss the philosophy of cooking a good beurre blanc?" I found I had asked.

Momentary silence!

"But why should anyone want to discuss that? That's not interesting," said the most argumentative of the men.

I regret the sisters did not rush immediately to my aid and with Fennie having been suitably put in her place, no doubt beside the troll in the stair cupboard, the conversation resumed over whether you could ever truly say that A had killed B.

A long time later we retired to Helen's house and a cup of late-night cocoa. Aged Mother sat in the corner with her stick, beaming at everyone and waiting for a suitable moment to launch, yet again, into her saving the Canadian airman story.

"Why ever did you mention beurre blanc?" asked Helen.

"I was thinking of the very ordinary Station Hotel in Clisson," I replied. "And how they once magically served 80 portions of fresh Loire Zander in the most perfect beurre blanc with the same ease and insouciance that you'd expect to receive three portions of egg 'n' chips. Though I was there I still find it as hard to believe as an election leaflet."

"Maybe your troll was under their stairs," said Helen.

"Don't let's start another abstruse discussion," I replied. "The real truth is that philosophy is all very well, but only magic will produce the perfect luncheon."