By the end of a convivial hour, we'd gone a long way towards solving the Australian team's selection dilemmas and given earnest consideration to the relative merits of Bootleg's Raging Bull, Wils Pils and Sou'West Wheat.
There, he and Letitia Baldrige, the 86-year-old legendary social secretary of the Kennedy administration, spent what Mrs. Baldrige fondly remembers as a convivial hour and a half over a French white wine chatting about guest lists and other secrets of the job.
After a convivial hour or so of vin de terrace, aiming one's bean at the lunchtime sun and watching pretty girls trip by in their ski pants, I have skied more fluently, and fallen over more gracefully, than has ever been the case before lunch.
As it happens, I (speaking of self-absorption!) once spent a convivial cocktail hour with him and Sidney Blumenthal, then the Washington correspondent for this magazine, in the Senator's hideaway office in the Capitol building.
The most panoramic vista is the one from the crow's-nest restaurant, La Luna, where, in addition to three meals a day, a convivial tapas hour is offered at sunset.
But you can at least be kind, convivial for an hour.
There followed three hours of convivial conversation, about everything and nothing.
Going out to dinner with friends — for, say, two hours of convivial overfamiliarity and banal, rehashed conversation — seemed like idiocy, and the emptiness was only exacerbated when my friends jumped for the check.
The show – produced by his SNP colleague Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh – still passes a pleasant enough hour: Salmond is convivial company, and enjoys a laugh at his own expense.
(When asked if he himself had ever fit the description of "drunken sailor," Mr. McCain waxes long-windedly: "I must say that in my misspent youth, on occasion I might have enjoyed the company of my fellow pilots at happy hour, and the convivial atmosphere was conducive to a certain number of libations").
