Low life

I sprinted through Milan station, speed-read the departures monitor without stopping, and arrived gasping on platform 8 with two minutes to spare. The driver of the FrecciaBianca bullet train was waiting only for the guard’s signal to depart. The guard was standing on the platform beside the open door of the rearmost carriage, fingering her whistle. This short, plump, raven-haired woman was exuding geniality and relaxed informality through her far too big peaked cap and ill-fitting uniform as though it were fancy dress. I was about to fling myself up the short ladder, but had to step aside for lust’s young dream in satin hot pants descending the steps with feline grace. She asked the guard if there was time for a last cigarette. The guard said something like, ‘Why not?

‘How many people have you slept with in your life, roughly?’ she asked. We were lying in bed in the morning. ‘You go first,’ I said, needing time to think of the right answer. She looked at the ceiling and thought long and hard. ‘About 50,’ she said finally. I asked her about the worst experience. ‘Your turn, Low life,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to hear this.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it would take a Professor Brian Cox working with the latest European Space Agency number-crunching software to come up with anything like an approximate figure.’ By a weird coincidence, the next evening I was invited by a friend of a friend to have dinner with Professor Cox at his home.

Toby goes to bed at 10 o’clock sharp every night otherwise he gets irritable. Toby sleeps on the bed always. Toby is too old to jump up on to the bed, so the bedroom footstool should be placed next to the bed to help him to climb up. He is also allowed up on the furniture. Toby’s food bowl should be filled every morning and his squeaky hedgehog toy should be placed in the bowl with his food, or he won’t eat. He is allowed six treats per day from the Silver Jubilee tin on the fridge. Toby likes to be patted but not stroked. Stroking upsets him and he may bite. These were the instructions for my three-night dog-sit. Toby is a 12-year-old, mostly white, very male Jack Russell.

On Saturday my boy had a mini-stroke at home, aged only 26. ‘You’ll have to give up smoking and do a spot of exercising now and again,’ I told him as the ambulance drove away. Smoking is his solace and consolation. ‘Out of the question,’ he said. On Sunday morning I went to church. ‘Your son ought to have taken the option of going to hospital,’ said the vicar before the service. Before becoming a vicar, she was a medical missionary in Papua New Guinea for 40 years and one wonders at the mental adjustment required for dealing with the subtler barbarities of a pretty English village. ‘He’s going to the doctor first thing tomorrow morning. Or so he says,’ I told her. The service was a special Songs of Praise celebration.

After Trev had mugged the mugger in the toilet we moved quickly on to another club. The Double O is frankly a horrible place, but it stays open later than any of the others, and is only a bracing ten-minute walk along the seafront. As was usual on the walk between Mandy’s and the Double O, salt air plus who knows how many house doubles equalled intoxication squared. Halfway there I took off my cashmere and silk charity-shop pullover and gave it to Trev to put on to hide the bloodstains on his shirt. It was several sizes too small for him and he needed my help getting into it. We tried to get his head into an armhole for a long time before realising our mistake. From a distance it must have looked like we were having a set-to.

‘I’ve lost my phone,’ yells Trev. We’re in a club. He’s come charging on to the dance floor to tell me. He’s always forgetting where he’s left his phone and getting in a state. Trev’s phone is old and crap and the screen is the most shattered screen I’ve seen on a phone that still works. Everyone knows Trev’s crap phone. People pinch it for a laugh just to wind him up, then give it back. It’s value to an opportunist thief is less than zero. He generally loses his phone two or three times of an evening. ‘Where did you have it last?’ I shout back. It’s an obvious question, but not one that has occurred to him, apparently. The pertinacity of it stuns him momentarily.

Watching the daily running of the bulls through Pamplona’s narrow streets online this week has given me a wistful pang about not being there again. I once went to Pamplona’s feria three times in four years and ran with the bulls every morning. One year I took Sharon. The day we arrived, she took one look at the streets pullulating with thousands of handsome, drunk young men and did the psychical equivalent of a graceful swallow dive into their midst. I had rented us a room in the town but she visited it only rarely and never slept there. I hardly saw her for the seven days. I should explain that when I went anywhere with Sharon at that time it was accepted that she would bestow her bountiful sexual favours on anyone and everyone except me.

After hitting me with the cancer diagnosis, the urologist offered me the choice of a longer life in exchange for my testosterone production. After some soul-searching, I agreed. I’ve been on testosterone-suppressing injections and tablets for exactly two years. The urologist has fulfilled his side of our Faustian pact. I’m still here. And everyone seems to agree that that’s the main thing. At the same time as I was diagnosed, then agreed to have my testosterone reduced to castrate levels, I asked whether there would be any side effects apart from the obvious. And I’m almost certain that someone, perhaps a nurse, said that I might find crossword puzzles more difficult. In other words, the outer reaches of my vocabulary could become less accessible.

Rachel Johnson, in last week’s Spectator diary, says that her husband says she only writes a book in order to have a launch party. Me too. My thoughts are too disordered to write a book from scratch, but now and then someone offers to publish a collection of these columns and I, fantasising about a party with all my pals there, agree to it. Times must have changed for the publishing industry since Short Books put out the last Low life collection and gave me a terrific launch party, because the publisher of this latest collection stated with finality (once the book was done and dusted) that publishers no longer finance launch parties. I am invited to book launches all the time and was therefore gobsmacked and sceptical on hearing that.

Ninety-two readers (thank you!) sent accounts of their worst debacles on drink or drugs. I printed out each one and clipped it into a ring binder. Last Thursday afternoon I made a pot of tea, opened the file, and settled down for a good read. The first sentence of the first entry was: ‘Priggish as it sounds, I am ashamed of the lesbian orgy I initiated while off my nut on champagne.’ I read that — it was amazing — then I took a restoring sip of Rosie Lee and turned the page. The next one was from a soldier. His first sentence was: ‘Kabul was darker than a Pashtun’s fanny.’ It was a tale of hellish debauchery at a party of South African mercenaries, embassy staff, NGO nymphomaniacs and ‘bemused translators’.

Before delivering his sermon, the vicar said we must offer one another the sign of peace. He struck the first blow by stepping forward and thrusting a stiff karate hand at the nearest inert parishioner and demanding that peace be with her. I hoped to get away with shaking hands with just the pair of female deaf mutes in my row or, if the spirit moved, with the very elderly woman in front of me, subject to her having the agility and the ambition to turn around. But the giving of the sign of peace in this church, I now learned, meant getting up off one’s arsebones and trotting about, offering it to as many people as possible before the music stopped.

On Sunday morning, I was kicking a football in the back garden with my grandson. I had bought him his first pair of football boots, Optimum Tribals, junior size 11, blue and orange, each boot furnished with six very adult-looking steel studs: four on the sole, two at the back of the heel. We were shirtless. With a football at his feet and his shirt off, my grandson is transformed from an intelligent, biddable boy who is perhaps overly concerned with questions of right and wrong into an arrogant, argumentative liar given to pettish sulks. He tackles like a terrier gone berserk during a rat hunt. It wasn’t long before I was rolling around on the grass clutching my ankle bone after a two-footed studs-first challenge. I sat up and rolled down my sock to inspect the damage.

The entries are crawling in on their hands and knees for the ‘drunkest I’ve ever been’ competition to win a place at the launch party for the Low life column collection. Gawd. Reading your accounts makes me feel as sober and upright by comparison as a sidesman in the Dutch Reformed Church, and that I have the Low life position on this magazine under false pretences. What we do have in common however, I think, is that we are terrible lightweights who can’t take drink like others can. For me, a single pint of strongish lager is a shape changer. Pass me a second and I couldn’t give two figs about the future. Three and I’m Gussie Fink-Nottle giving out the prizes or Augustus Carp after several glasses of Portugalade.

On 26 June there is a party at the Spectator office at 22 Old Queen Street to launch a paperback collection of Low life columns. If you would like to come, please send an account, in about 800 words, to editor@spectator.co.uk by 15 June of your worst or funniest debacle when intoxicated. If more than 12 readers send a story, then the senders of the 12 best stories will be invited. The following, for example, is an account of what happened to me only last week. At the literary festival bar I ran into a writer I’d met a couple of times at parties. He was perched at the bar and waved me over, asked me what was I having, and appeared so pleased to see me that I felt sorry for him. I asked him whether he was speaking.

From somewhere in the tree canopy, a nightingale song. The virtuoso trilling and warbling, the underwater bubbling, the teetering on the brink before the tumbling cascade. I’m wearing turquoise Speedo swimming shorts and a panama hat and lying on a terrace lounger. In my hand, a tumbler of the local rosé, one ice cube. The glossy paperback covers of R.W. Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages — now discarded — curl in the heat. Mr Southern says that in the Middle Ages personal freedom was seen as resulting from a constrained will rather than a free one. I’m looking at the view and thinking about that. A fitful wind is churning the trees further down the valley.

I’ve been on two cruises before: one was fun, the other misery. The misery one was a late August cruise from Dover to Iceland via Shetland, Orkney and Faroe. The weather was unseasonably chilly, the North Sea rough. The ship pitched and rolled through fog for days on end. At Shetland we went ashore and looked at rails of knitwear in shops. Ditto Iceland. At Faroe we went ashore and watched two women knitting in a hut. At Orkney we visited a prehistoric circle of standing stones that were remarkably jagged as standing stones go. The average age of the passengers was 79 and the restaurants smelt faintly of a poorly run nursing home. The ship was old; the passengers devoted to it and clubbish. Some had booked their cabins before asking where the ship was going.

The old fishing town faced the sea psychically as well as architecturally. Dressed as pirates, my grandson and I walked down through the steep and narrow streets to the quayside, where we found other pirates. It was still early and there weren’t yet the solid crowds of pirates we were hoping to see. The overcast morning was the last day of the pirate festival, and this fishing town, with a long tradition of privateering, buccaneering, smuggling, piracy and rugby, was slow getting to its feet after two days and nights of carousing. The ticket hut in front of the replica Golden Hind was open for business, however, and there were hungover pirates to welcome us aboard. So we paid the nice lady and descended the wooden gangplank. The pirates greeted us gruffly but warmly.

Two stylists work at this deeply rural French ladies’ hairdresser. Christelle is a gorgeous 17-year-old point-of-lay pullet, so lithe and well made I want to weep. Sylvette, the owner, though knocking on a bit, is a man-eater on the rampage. I had my old barnet thatched here for the first time about two months ago. Christelle scissored and shaved my hair with a cut-throat razor for the best part of an hour and I came out of there mentally deranged but with the best haircut I’d ever had. Later that day I found in my jacket pocket a torn-off piece of card with Sylvette’s name and phone number written on it in black biro. She must have slipped it in while I was under the cape.

I’m such a constitutional lightweight lately that I’ve started looking on the website What’s On in South Devon for things to do of an evening that don’t involve total annihilation. What’s On in South Devon is surely one of those ‘shortest book in the world’ contenders. Weeknights it’s mainly the same local musicians playing the same deserted pubs; or some functioning psychotic preaching new-age nonsense in a church hall to folk whose gullibility gives one a rough idea of the infinite; or bingo. Listening to functioning psychotics in church halls is fun at first, but soon palls. I’d go to bingo if I didn’t already own a life-sized ceramic cheetah.

To say that Oscar was warmly welcomed as he stepped through the massive oak door into a chilly House of God for the first time in his life on Easter day would be an understatement. Delighted crones came bounding up, mewing and moaning at the rare and unexpected appearance in their midst of an innocent child. One of them thrust her face in his and excitedly interviewed him. ‘What’s your name then, my dear?’ she said, thrilled to meet someone under 70. Oscar diffidently but courageously answered that he was called Oscar. ‘What? What?’ she said, deaf as a post. ‘Do you know what the little chap’s name is?’ she asked my mother, who was standing nearby. Oscar and my mother live in the same house.