Autumn has always been my favorite season, and evening has been for me the pleasantest time of day.

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 161.

I had meant to see them off from the station, but idiotically went to Paddington instead of Waterloo and missed them. Long afterwards, my mother told me that my father had been strangely upset by my nonappearance. She and I could both see that he was ailing; but only he knew how ill he was.

At around teatime on New Year’s Day 1954, I was working at my desk in the Foreign Office when the telephone rang. I can still hear the crackles on the ship’s telephone line, and the familiar but almost inaudible voice behind them: “My darling, it’s the worst.” I knew exactly what she must mean, but played for time. “What do you mean, the worst?” “I mean the worst—Papa’s dead.” The hemorrhage had apparently started the day before; realizing that one of his passengers was seriously ill, the Captain had turned back towards Vigo on the northwest coast of Spain, but it was too late. My father was six weeks short of his sixty-fourth birthday. Fortunately he had lived just long enough to see the publication of his autobiography, Old Men Forget, which he had ended with the words:

Autumn has always been my favorite season, and evening has been for me the pleasantest time of day. I love the sunlight but cannot fear the coming of the dark.

By the time he wrote this he knew all too well what was coming: cirrhosis of the liver was a killer. All his life, as he had cheerfully admitted in the same book,

I have consistently drunk more than most people would say was good for me. Nor do I regret it. Wine has been to me a firm friend and a wise counselor. Often . . . wine has shown me matters in their “true perspective and has, as though by the touch of a magic wand, reduced great disasters to small inconveniences. Wine has lit up for me the pages of literature, and revealed in life romance lurking in the commonplace. Wine has made me bold but not foolish; has induced me to say silly things but not to do them. Under its influence words have often come too easily which had better not have been spoken, and letters have been written which had better not have been sent. But if such small indiscretions standing in the debit column of wine’s account were added up, they would amount to nothing in comparison with the vast accumulation on the credit side.

Alas, if he had stuck to wine, all would have been well; but there were also dry martinis before lunch and dinner, port and brandy afterwards, a whisky-and-soda or two before bed. This is not to say that he was in any degree an alcoholic: I only once saw him seriously the worse for drink, and that was after an intimate dinner for six at the Soviet Embassy in Paris. After the thirty-fourth toast he had lost count; he had lost count; he had been seriously ill for a fortnight, and never touched vodka again. But diplomatic life, the endless lunches and dinners in which the French did their gastronomic best to impress him—our own Embassy not doing too badly either—eventually proved too much, and his liver simply packed it in.