Low life

Roy was a superb mechanic, a methodical master of his trade. For an hour I respectfully watched him work to try and learn something of the mysteries of the internal-combustion engine. I saw instead his oil-blackened fingers pluck away the veil to reveal that there was no mystery, only simplicity. Job done, I invited him up to the house for a meaningful drink. He didn’t need asking twice. Invited to sit, he conscientiously placed yesterday’s Daily Telegraph between his oily backside and the sofa cushions. I made the fire up then went to the kitchen and poured us each a monster pastis with one ice cube and a squirt of tap water for the sake of decency. It was Burns Night so I proposed a toast to the lassies.

Putting old or contaminated petrol in a car needn’t be catastrophic, but in the Golf’s case it was. With 37,000 miles on an 07 plate, it was a tight, solid little car before I accidentally wrecked it. Someone offered £300 for scrap, and I was about to sadly take it, when a pal pointed out that one second-hand Golf door alone costs £300 from a scrapyard. He urged me instead to buy a second-hand Golf engine for a few hundred quid and simply ‘drop it in’ — as he so persuasively put it. He even found a buyer for a Golf thus renovated who was guaranteeing trade price sight unseen. I’m no mechanic. So I made a few calls and found Roy.

I was at home in Devon for the month of December. My sister was also there and her tyrannical, wildly fluctuating moods set the weather inside the house. She sleeps badly and usually appeared in the kitchen at 10 or 11 o’clock in a hagridden state, insane with anger at we know not what, daring anybody to wish her a good morning. I timidly observed one morning that the weather was quite mild for the time of year. She vehemently denied it and flew into a rage, presumably at Nature’s rivalry for supremacy over the climate. She has no culture or accomplishments and doesn’t work. Her only interest outside her competing appetites is in celebrity gossip. As she has grown older, her voice has become more upper class and manual tasks have fallen further beneath her dignity.

The new year was two hours young. My boy and I were side by side on a row of three fixed plastic seats in the corridor of the accident and emergency ward. The both of us had come directly from our respective New Year’s Eve festivities, as had most, if not all, of the patients swaying, hobbling and staggering up and down the corridor or being wheeled in on trolleys by porters. Croc-shod nurses and nursing assistants weaved briskly and nimbly around and between these injured drunks, doggedly preserving their calmness, concentration and courtesy. We faced the wide doorway to the row of curtained cubicles in which the urgent cases were being assessed by a single, exhausted doctor. A medley of deep, soulful groans issued from behind the purdah of wipe-clean curtains. Also female sobbing.

For me, last year started with an appalling whitey outside a pub after swallowing a second ecstasy tablet because I thought the first wasn’t working. I was saved by a young woman yelling ‘Catch me!’ and taking a running jump into my arms — which forced me back to the physical realm — and by being violently sick. The ecstasy came in the form of small white circular unmarked pharmaceutical-grade tablets. The second was passed on to my tongue via the tongue of someone I had met for the first time two minutes before. After that, 2015 was one tablet after another — legal and illegal. I also injected.

My contempt for vaping deepened as vaping contraptions became more ostentatious and people started hanging them from lanyards around their necks. When Trev starting vaping, I lost what little hope for the future of humankind that I had left. He puffs on his elaborate dummy non-stop when we go out. The first time I gave it a sceptical look, he took it out of his mouth and offered me the wet end. ‘Have a taste,’ he said. ‘Blueberry and cream flavour. Nice, isn’t it?’ ‘Ponce,’ I said. During this summer’s Spectator cruise, smoking was banned except on the starboard side of two decks. It was a bit of a nuisance, especially on windy nights. One day we berthed at Heraklion, Crete, and took a taxi to visit the archaeological site of Knossos.

My favourite YouTube video clip this week shows a chap sitting at a desk typing. All you can see of him are his hairy forearms, poised hands and fast fingers. He types for ten minutes. Nothing else happens. The typewriter is a portable designed in the early 1960s by Marcello Nizzoli for Olivetti — the famous Lettera 32. Cormac McCarthy bashed out five million words on one of these, blowing the dust out of it now and again with the air hose at his local garage. He auctioned it a few years ago for a quarter of a million dollars. The video clip is a paean to the beauty and style of the Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter.

On Friday morning I was peeing razor blades so I rang up the doctor and was given an appointment after lunch. The surgery was at the top of a dingy staircase in an ancient, dilapidated village house. Except for some magazines spread out on a table, the waiting room might have been a comfortably furnished private sitting room. The woman with whom I am staying speaks better French than me and she came along to translate if necessary. We sat down on one of the sofas, and while we waited she picked up a magazine and was immediately absorbed by beach photos of celebrity couples. I made a snobbish remark about her interest in such things. She defended herself by saying that she simply couldn’t help herself.

The car: a ’06 rosso red Seat Ibiza 1.9 TDI Sport, bought three weeks ago from a man who had bought the car from the Stig’s mum. If the Stig, with all his motoring experience, had carefully chosen the car for his dear old mum, it was an inspired choice. For an inexpensive, inoffensive-looking little two-door saloon, it is wonderfully quick. The route: from the north-western French port of Roscoff, in the socialist department of Finistère, down to Brignoles, the far-right, pied-noir capital of Provence; a 1,300-kilometre diagonal from the top left of the country to the bottom right.

My sister has a new man in her life: Henry, 60. He lives in a gay hotel. Or rather, it was a gay hotel in the era when homosexuality was illegal; now the Victorian seaside villa is empty save for my sister’s new boyfriend, my sister sometimes, and a transvestite maid called Rita. Sometimes he is a porter called Stan. One never knows from day to day whether he is going to appear as a male or a female, and one has to be careful not to make any rash assumptions because he becomes apoplectic if one addresses him as Stan when he is Rita, for example. But when he is Rita, says my sister, it is usually blindingly obvious, because he wears a microskirt, black net stockings and suspenders. I didn’t get to meet my sister’s new boyfriend immediately.

She was dying for a mad night out, she said, so where was I going to take her? I know, I said. If they’re playing tonight, we’ll go and see Society Rocks, the most electrifying covers band I know. Their Facebook page said they were playing in Exmouth, 40 miles away. Society Rocks are a stubbornly local outfit, and I was surprised that they were venturing so far afield. I booked a B&B off Exmouth seafront and off we went. The friendly receptionist at the Dolphin asked us what our plans were for the evening. ‘You haven’t come to see Jake Wood making a special appearance at the Fever Boutique nightclub, have you?’ she said. ‘Jake Wood?’ I said. She looked sorry for me. ‘Max Branning?’ she said. ‘The car dealer in EastEnders?

The fag end of October. Dark evenings. My smelly old Barbour. Chopping and splitting wood. Uncanny stillnesses. Psychedelic maple trees. The thin winter piping of robins. Sodden leaves clinging to the soles of my boots. And Liberty Caps dotting the pastures. Our Liberty Cap is an insignificant-looking thing. A bent, spindly stalk supports a tiny parasol tapering to the distinctive nipple. The parasol is rusty brown when wet, drying in the sunshine to a pale yellow. They grow singly or in small groups. The psychoactive agents are psilocin and psilocybin.   (Therapists in the United States lawfully give cancer patients psilocybin to take them out of themselves and cheer them up.

The bar at the Special Forces club has the marvellous rule for newcomers that they should talk to the person on their right. So I was standing at the end of the bar in the Special Forces club, ordering a round of drinks to take back to a table. The round was a large gin and tonic, a pint of lager and a glass of house red. To all appearances, while the barman was arranging these drinks, I might have been standing on my own, and the chap on my left duly introduced himself. He was about 60 years old and unmistakably a military man. Even the bags under his eyes looked military. The face had seen all there was to see, but it retained a kind of straight-faced conviviality. Blue blazer, blue and white striped shirt, military tie.

We closed the last page of a gruesome, thrilling picture book called The Day Louis Got Eaten and said our prayers. Our prayers are always the same. We ask Jesus to bless as many people known to us as we can remember, taking it in turns to name them. We aren’t sure what the range of consequences might be for someone if we ask Jesus to bless them, but we do it anyway, and the word has a pleasant, incantatory feel to it when repeated. It has been at least a fortnight since we last asked Jesus to bless our list because Grandad has been away. And as we went through the regulars, it occurred to us that a lot had happened to some of these names since we last asked Jesus to bless them, some of it, on the face of it, not so good.

It rained all day long last Friday in Provence, and it rained all night, and on Saturday morning it was still raining. The rain fell out of a lowering, field-grey blanket of a sky. After breakfast and a wash, we assembled in the living room wondering what to do with ourselves on a day such as this. There were four of us: a couple en route for England who arrived in a Land Rover packed to the roof with possessions; our hostess; and me. The ugly breeze-block house with a large tiled terrace was perched on the side of a hill. Fountains sprayed in unlikely directions from leaking joints in the rain gutters. The rain came down faster than the drains could take it away from the terrace, flooding it. The unmade road below the house was a torrent.

I was looking after Oscar, my five-and-a-half-year-old grandson, for the day. We’d played football in the garden, then we’d come indoors and played three games of chess, one game of Battleships, and several memory card games. I lost the football by 25 goals to 11, all three games of chess, saw my entire fleet sunk one after the other by a succession of direct hits, and my performance in the memory card games was irrefutable confirmation of my early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. After that we drove to the leisure centre for a swim. In the pool I was required among other things to crawl about on all fours underwater and be ridden like a horse. Back at home and ravenous after swimming, we ate beans on toast, and while we ate we played ‘I spy with my little eye’.

The staples of my daily alcohol consumption on the cruise were champagne, gin, red wine and Polish vodka. One morning I woke up in my cabin more hungover than usual, also depressed. Turning my head to the side and looking through the gap in the curtains I saw that we were no longer at sea but docked in yet another Mediterranean island port with barren sun-bleached hills above and beyond. Reaching for my daily news-sheet, delivered to the cabin the night before, I read that what I was looking at this morning was Heraklion in Crete. Further reading informed me that if I returned to the ship from the shore excursion early I could go to the ‘Walk-in wrinkle solution’ on deck 9 at 2 p.m. Turning next to the Spectator cruise itinerary pamphlet, I read that, at 3 p.m.

There is something repulsive about the sea, especially when seen from the altitude of the upper decks of a monstrous floating pleasure palace where all intimacy with it, including the sound and the smell, is lost. On the inaugural Spectator Mediterranean cruise I paid attention to the sea but rarely, and usually when speed walking along one of the upper decks in a dinner jacket and bow tie, and late for something, and wondering where the hell I was supposed to be going. Then my stare would stray over the guard rail to the barren wastes of glacial blue flecked with white stretching away as far as the eye could see, like some dreary desert seen from an aeroplane. On some deeper level the sight horrified me, and I’d count the days until I could get off this infernal thing for good.

Last Saturday afternoon, in Venice, 31 Spectator readers, plus Martin Vander Weyer, the great Taki and I came aboard the Cunard cruise ship Queen Victoria for the inaugural Spectator Mediterranean cruise. The first chance we had to get to know one another was a pre-dinner drinks party in Hemispheres, the ship’s nightclub. I was late, and apprehensive about how things would go. The ship’s commodore, a lonely, courtly figure encased in a starched white uniform, was there in the Spectator readers’ midst offering his right hand to anyone who wanted it. I removed a flute of champagne from the offered silver tray and plunged in. The first reader I spoke to said, ‘My name is Fanny and I am bisexual so there’s hope for you yet.