Port to port
August 31st, 2008Today I read Kate Fox’s book Watching the English. It’s an anthropological investigation of English cultural “rules” that I should have read before arriving, but couldn’t get through amazon.com in the US.
I read this passage yesterday:
Port must always travel round the table clockwise…so you must always pass the bottle or decanter to your left.
…
No-one has the slightest idea why clockwise port-passing is so important. The rule serves no discernible purpose, other than to cause embarrassment to those who are not aware of it, and, presumably, a peculiarly English sense of smug self-satisfaction among those who are.
I loved this book, and wish I had found a copy much earlier than my penultimate day in London. But the last paragraph stuck in my head as “wrong”, and while I was packing the reason came to me: port means “left” in naval jargon. I think the rule of passing port clockwise/to the left is likely in deference to all the party-going naval officers waiting to make a joke about how unnatural it is to pass something called “port” to starboard.
I did a google search to test this theory. I didn’t find direct evidence, but found the phrase “port to port”, which suggests it is a reasonable assumption.