After Life

How do you live with yourself when 179 air passengers are burned alive on a South Korean runway, and you’ve spent the last few weeks binge-watching YouTube videos about plane crashes? The obvious answer is that I need to seek help. I have a defence, but I don’t think any British jury would buy it. I started watching the air-crash videos to escape the anxiety caused by the American presidential election. Anxiety that Donald Trump might lose, that is. On YouTube there’s always someone listening. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet for monomaniacs I can imagine Emily Maitlis and Rory Stewart’s reaction: ‘Self-declared Trump supporter chills out by imagining planes full of holidaymakers falling out of the sky. That figures.’ But I don’t care what they think.

It’s been 30 years this month since I last touched alcohol and I still can’t face the prospect of a social event without drinking. Other people drinking, that is. I’m terrified by the thought of going back on the sauce again, but that doesn’t mean I want to hang around with teetotallers who’ve never had to apologise after a party or suffered an apocalyptic hangover. That’s what keeps me away from the drink: the biological penalty One of the leitmotifs of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time is that you can’t trust teetotallers. They’re control freaks who love seeing other people make fools of themselves. They spend the whole evening gathering ammunition. The slimy Kenneth Widmerpool barely drinks, of course. Or they’re sex-obsessed.

One afternoon in June 1995, I found myself trapped in the Bodhi Tree, a stucco-fronted bookstore on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood where New Age wisdom-seekers sip herbal tea while discussing the latest ravings of Shirley MacLaine. I was freaking out because the professor I’d travelled 6,000 miles to meet had apparently stood me up. Stephen O’Leary, of the University of Southern California, had just published Arguing the Apocalypse, a prize-winning study of the rhetorical techniques of televangelists. I was researching my own book about the end of the world and was desperate to pick his brains. He was almost two hours late and the wind chimes were driving me nuts.

 When a friend asked if I wanted anything for Christmas I took a deep breath and replied: ‘Well, maybe I finally need to watch this.’ I handed him a video cassette retrieved from my sister’s attic and he took it to a place that digitises such things. On Christmas Day I nervously plugged in the memory stick. There we were: Carmel and I, aged about seven and nine, bathed in late-1960s sunshine in the garden of our mock-Tudor house in Woodmansterne Road, Carshalton Beeches, Surrey. (I emphasise ‘Surrey’, because in those days Carshaltonions were in Margo Leadbetter-style denial over new local government boundaries that landed them in – shudder – south London.