I had an email from my old friend the lovely Jenny Winn, remembering our time working at William Collins & Sons Ltd in the late ’60s. She won’t mind if I quote her:

“I loved 14 St. James’s Place with its creaky floors, that lady in the basement making trays of tea & coffee in the afternoon for everyone, Mark Collins as debonair as Bertie Wooster, elegant lady editors who wore expensive perfume and that very scary receptionist. Places of business like that probably no longer exist and I am grateful to have worked in such a civilized, elegant publishing house.”

Ten years after that I was working in very different circumstances — a one-room office at the top of 10 Greek Street in Soho, the thrusting, bustling HQ of HPR Publicity, the World’s Greatest Publicists. HPR consisted of me, Joan Plachta and Sue Rolfe. The only security was a feral ginger tom who lived in an alcove off the rotting staircase between the third and fourth floors, spitting and snarling at anyone who passed. Anyone could wander in off the street, and this being Soho they frequently did.

One day the office door burst open and a little man with a briefcase marched in. We were hunched over our Adler Electrics and paid scant attention. Without a word he set his briefcase on the floor, opened it, took out a tin of lighter fluid, sprayed it all up his arm and set fire to himself.

With my typical dynamism I sat there with my mouth hanging open. Joan had the reaction speed. She catapulted out of her seat and cannoned into the little man’s midriff, expelling him out of the door which she promptly slammed and locked.

There were incoherent shouts from outside, together with bangs and thumps on the securely locked door. The shouts degenerated into screams, and a few tendrils of smoke began to waft under the door.

Sue and I were congratulating The Plankton (Joan) on her speed of thought when we noticed the little man’s briefcase still lying open on the floor.

Inside was a salesman’s pack of sample fire extinguishers.

Six Nations Rugby kicks off today. There’s nothing quite like it. I won’t say the rugby is incidental, but I can’t think of another sporting event where the playing element is secondary to the event itself. For my friendly aliens who read this blog, the Six Nations is a competition between the national rugby union teams of England, Scotland, ireland (both Northern Ireland and the Republic), Wales, France and Italy.

It’s one of the oldest continuing sporting fixtures in the world. It started as the Home Nations in 1883, then France joined in 1910 for it to become the Five Nations, and Italy made it the Six Nations in 2000.

Of course everybody wants to win, but what drives Wales, Ireland and Scotland hardest is the need to beat England, comfortably the richest and biggest union, with the world’s largest playing base. The fervour is intense. It’s nice to win the championship, but beating England is the prime motivation.

The second motivation is the travelling. Up to 40% of the crowds — all the games in the 80,000 seater stadiums are always sold out — are travelling supporters. I used to go the the France Wales match every other year, and Paris filled with hopelessly drunk Welsh revellers was not a pretty sight. There’s no hooliganism, by the way; all that takes place on the pitch.

Today France will be playing Italy and Scotland plays England. The convention is to name the home team first, so the games will be in Paris and Edinburgh. Tomorrow it’s Ireland vs. Wales in Dublin.

What’s like it? The Palio, a horse race in Siena, takes place twice a year, on July 2nd and August 16th, and has done since the 14th century. Ten of the sixteen parishes of Siena race against each other (there’s no room to run all sixteen at the same time) and the support for each parish is obsessive, verging on the fanatical. Just like the Six Nations. I have good English friends who cannot bear to speak to me if Wales beats England.

The only other contest which stirs as much passion is the American Presidential election campaign. This is a continuous event with a brief hiatus once every four years between the Tuesday after the first Monday in November and January 20th the following year. Although technically not a sporting event, all the same elements are there — the passionate partisanship, the dissing of opponents, the microscopic analysis of form, the long, drawn-out foreplay — culminating in the climax, the brief ejaculation of the actual event.

Supporters can’t switch sides. It would be as unthinkable for a Welsh supporter to root for England as it would be for a Democrat to follow Trump. Being Welsh, THE match of the season for me will be England v Wales on March 12th.

Ireland has won the championship for the past two seasons. England has a good chance this year, as has Wales. Scotland cruelly lost to Australia by one unjust point in the Rugby World Cup back in October while England lost to them by 20 points. France has a new coach, the one they should have had ten years ago. Italy are the wooden spooners.

My forecast for Scotland v England later this afternoon? Partly bonnie, with occasional glowers.

We never had any money, but I had the most blissful childhood anyone could wish for. I had loving parents and we lived in a succession of fabulous houses which came with my father’s job as a senior Army Chaplain. So we moved house every 30 months, but thirty months at that age was a lifetime, and there was always the exquisite thrill of somewhere new to look forward to. There weren’t many friends, and that was sad, because in later life I have become aware that sometimes I have striven too hard to be liked. It’s not an attractive trait. Rather needy, actually.

I was sent away to boarding school in North Wales when I was ten. Because my family lived in Berlin, I was called a Nazi. Then when my parents moved to Antwerp, I became a Twerp. It didn’t bother me, because at least it meant other people were paying attention to me. And I made friends! David Gordon Jones, Martin Farnell, Nicky Seyler, Rhodri Hughes-Jones: we played together, learned together, had fun together. In the holidays I went to their houses, met their people. I’d never experienced that before. It was great.

But I noticed something was different. I had a few toys, but they all had lots. Lots and lots. Lots and lots and LOTS of toys. And their toys were serious, not the tinplate Schuco cars I used to have. And they had pocket money. Pocket money was unknown in the Headley household.

What each boy had, which took my breath away, were Mamod steam engines. These were solid metal stationary steam engines with big boilers heated by methylated spirits in a little burner beneath. They had dials to show the steam pressure, whistles to release it, drive shafts and spinning wheels. They actually chuffed as they ran. David Gordon Jones used the drive wheel to power little mechanical snippets in his workshop. Nicky Seyler just sat there watching the wheels going round and round. Both equally valid states of mind.

I really wanted one, and as my 11th birthday approached I broached the subject with my father. He had a mechanical turn of mind, and I could see he wasn’t entirely against the idea.

Then he found out how much the most basic Mamod steam engine cost. It was 59/6. That’s fifty nine shillings and sixpence. That’s, oh, that’s £2.98. That was about the average weekly wage at the time. It was Out Of The Question. No further discussion. I was heartbroken, but determined not to show it. I realised I couldn’t have the treasures the other boys had. But I lived in a much nicer house.

Fast forward 27 years to 1984. I was on holiday with the gorgeous Yvonne in Tuscany, creaming around in my red TVR Tasmin 3.0. I was making a little bit of money and life was good. We sauntered through the side-streets of Lucca and there in a shop window was a Mamod steam engine! bigger than I remembered but still with that mighty boiler, and a steam dial, and a pumping handle. I had to have it. Von stared with amazement as I marched into the negozio, slapped a foot high bundle of lire on the counter and pointed ‘Questa!’

“It doesn’t say Mamod anywhere on the packaging’, observed Von that evening back in the shack. We looked at the device, sitting in state on the table. I couldn’t see any wheels. “You know what?” she went on. “I think it’s a coffee machine.”

Nobody had a coffee machine back then. We were tea drinkers. We barely drank coffee. We looked at each other and started to laugh. How we got it back to London in the TVR, with a boot which could just about take a hairbrush, I have conveniently forgotten.

My Mamod turned out to be a La Pavoni Professional espresso maker. I learned how to make espressos and cappuccinos. We learned to like them. We used the macchina every day.

More years passed. La Pavoni broke down regularly. Unlike most modern ‘manufacturers’, I discovered that La Pavoni operated a spare parts service. Every single part of the machine, right down to the washers and circlips, could be replaced; and many were. The steam dial went; the frothing arm went, the base was replaced twice (lactic acid is astonishingly corrosive), the glass sight tube broke, all the seals needed replacing every 18 months, I forgot to turn it off one day and burnt out the heating element. Almost everything apart from the main boiler was replaced. Yet after nearly thirty-two years it was still churning out perfect coffee every day with really hot steamed frothy milk, not the lukewarm gelatinous foam you get at places like Starbucks.

It leaked. It rusted. We were constantly mopping up after it. Unlike me, it had become incontinent with age. So last month we decided we’d start looking for a replacement. Coffee machines now tend to be big black boxes with complex digital readouts enabling you to switch from an espresso ristretto to a skinny soy latte in a second. Wonderful, if that’s what you want to do, but somehow they look so … corporate.

We asked around. We were impressed by the Jura. “Too Swiss,” said DC David. “Superb,” said Zürich David, but then went on to say “We’ve always been very happy with the two Jura machines we had since 1995 (the first up to 2006, the second since then).”

Hang about. That’s an 11-year life cycle. Our beloved Pavoni is in its 32nd year to heaven and still making superb coffee.

Eventually familiarity bred admiration. We plumped for another Pavoni. You can see how much the design has changed in the past 32 years. And because this one is made of brass and copper, the little problema con la ruggine is no longer relevant.

DC David considerately asked me “How many coffee machines do you think you have left in you?”

This is the last one, David.

The greatest coffee machine in the world — both of them.

Why call this blog The Peacock? Because that’s what La Pavoni means in English.

We’d had the machine for twenty years before we found out.