Low life

After three days tête-à-tête (and sometimes tête-à-pied) I walked into town alone to get some air and see what the town was like and the people in it. In one direction, above the hills, the sky was black. Above the town, however, the sun was shining fiercely through a gap in the clouds. Approaching the outskirts, I heard African drumming and a man yelling with demented good humour into a microphone. A single strand of bunting strung between the lamp posts told that the town was celebrating its summer fête. The first person I encountered was a man of about 30. He was walking towards me carrying a plastic litre bottle of cider horizontally. He was gently agitating the liquid inside and seemed to be talking to it affectionately.

My first time back in the local for eight weeks. The manageress lifts the flap, comes around to my side of the bar and kisses me on the lips. We can’t hear ourselves speak as there is a ska DJ barricaded into a corner behind a waist-high wall of speakers and the bar is small and the ceiling low. She indicates that my gin and tonic is on the house. I take it outside and take a seat on one of the picnic benches on the patio. This hippie guy is prancing ecstatically around the tables with fluttering fingers. A couple sit themselves down opposite me and the bloke starts rolling a single skin joint. I know them by sight but I don’t know either of their names.

Then there was the time I took Sharon to the Pamplona bull run. She looked very fetching in the traditional St Fermín costume of white T-shirt, white cut-off jeans, red sash tied around the waist and the red neckerchief symbolising the saint’s martyrdom by beheading. She wore her neckerchief in a big rumpled V at the front, like a cowgirl. The Sanfermines last a week. Hundreds of thousands of young revellers cram into the old fortress town’s narrow streets and cane it. As well as the famous bull runs each morning, and the evening bullfights, there are fairs and parades and marching bands and pop concerts and a nightly firework display competition that is worth going for on its own.

I was two days alone in the caravan and no signal or reception of any sort. It was like a Buddhist silent retreat, where you have to listen in horrified amazement to your own thoughts. During the day I walked the cliff path; in the evenings I sat on the caravan steps wishing I had a rook rifle. On my walks, I did acquire a book, however: Sigmund Freud’s essay On Narcissism. It was on a community book-swap shelf in a disused telephone box. I’ve been picking up Freud and putting him down again perplexed and defeated for most of my adult life. But when I opened this one and glanced inside, I thought here at last was something I might be able to get to grips with.

Just when I was beginning to think I’d had enough, I was offered a free week in a caravan. I took it like a shot, threw a few shirts in the boot of the car, and buggered off down to Cornwall. I arrived in darkness and couldn’t find the electricity switch. But I was so tired I simply climbed into a sleeping bag by the light of my phone and fell asleep. I was woken by sunshine and the cawing of rooks. At this caravan, there is no internet, no phone signal for miles, no telly, no radio. And the air I swear is soporific. It was like crawling out of my sleeping bag on a different, quieter continent.

I couldn’t find the house so I called the number again. Instead of the man I’d spoken to previously, this time a woman answered. ‘I’m surprised you couldn’t find the house with all your advanced technology,’ she said. She sounded elderly. A mid-Devon accent — an older version of it. ‘I’ve yet to join the sat-nav generation, I’m afraid,’ I said, apologetically. ‘Sat-nav?’ she said. ‘You must think us very quaint. Stay there and I’ll ask Maynard to come and fetch you in his car.’ So I pulled the car over and waited. Five minutes later, a beard driving a Nissan Micra came along, saw me, indicated, slowed down, showed me a palm and performed a U-turn. I started the car and followed him.

As Sharon stooped to pour boiling water from the kettle into two mugs, I studied her back and wondered what, if anything, remained in me of the love I once had for her. Was there a residue somewhere? Or a stain? I pictured her back as it had been a dozen years earlier, tanned by the Sardinian sun and bisected by the thin turquoise strap of her bikini top. My love for Sharon was more in the nature of a terrible mental illness than anything nourishing, and when it was at its height, we went away for a week to Santa Teresa Gallura, a quiet seaside town at the northern tip of the island. We stayed in a cool, family-run hotel with views from our window across the blue Strait of Bonifacio to the southern coast of Corsica, and looking the other way, down to the town beach.

Sharon’s back. As soon as I heard, I went straight round to the house and let myself in. She was standing in the kitchen wearing that deceptively vulnerable look that she has. Also in the room was a little girl aged about three with ruby red hair and a Boxer dog. The Boxer was built like Sonny Liston and capered before me. It span round in circles, glancing coquettishly over its shoulder. The little girl was my superior in intelligence and composure. I could see it straight away, as could she. Her name was Amy. Sharon and her partner had adopted her 18 months before. Sharon and Amy shared a companionable stillness that was unruffled by my appearance. I hadn’t seen Sharon for six months. She was thinner than ever, which made her liquid eyes appear larger.

Two years ago, roughly, for a travel piece, I flew to Delhi and took a southbound train to a dusty railway platform in Rajasthan. There I was met by a smiling man with a gold earring who introduced himself as my driver for the week. His name was Babu. I must be a VIP, he said, because he was the company’s top driver and he always was given the VIP work. From now on, he said, he would be treating me as his god. Then he said, just to make sure, because there was no telling these days, and I didn’t by any stretch of the imagination look the part: ‘Excuse me, sir, but in your country are you VIP?’ I laughed and said certainly not. But he seemed to take my laugh and denial as a sign that perhaps I really might be a VIP. I was English, after all.

In the blue corner, wearing 4oz gloves, is the Ninja. Real name Klynton. The younger of my two grandsons. Also known as Ninge. Aged three. Weighed in at 35lbs. Blue eyes, blond hair. Not yet fluent in the language. Has only one word — juvvy. Nobody knows what juvvy is. Possibly a neologism. The word is now in common and versatile use within the family as a substitute for any noun. Example: ‘What’s on the juvvy tonight?’ Otherwise as mute as a fish. We’ve tried him in French and drawn a blank there also. Once a week his father takes him to Chatter Time, a pre-school group for three-year-olds. The Ninja appears preoccupied by a private world that is even more interesting than this one. He is impervious to physical pain. He is only aware of mental pain.

On eBay car auctions one often reads of all sorts of reasons for cars being sold: birth, death, marriage, divorce, promotion, emigration. But rarely is the car an unwanted gift. Terry124 stated that he was selling his Mercedes E320 CDI estate because it was ‘a Christmas present for the missis, but she hated it’.  After years of scrutinising eBay car ads, I like to think I can distinguish between sellers who have a basic respect for the truth and those who habitually palter with it. But with this one I couldn’t decide. It had a ring of truth, certainly, and it ended on a touchingly plaintive note with: ‘I’m an honest man.

Depressed and demoralised after the defeat of his nation of farmers in the second Boer war, Eugène Marais, an Afrikaner patriot, lawyer, naturalist, poet, lifelong morphine addict and journalist, went to live with a troop of baboons in the then remote Waterberg area of South Africa. He camped in their vicinity and was gradually accepted by them and afforded a place in their society. His books about his experiences, My Friends the Baboons and The Soul of the Ape, have subsequently made his name as the father of the scientific study of the behaviour of animals. In The Soul of the Ape he proposed a theory of the evolution of the human psyche that runs approximately as follows. Man and all the higher primates are in a state of bewilderment. Why?

Another sunny Sunday morning and the phone rings. I pick up the receiver. It’s Frank. I groan inwardly. Frank is a doctor and an old family friend and a great talker. What he has to say is always intelligent and interesting and often funny. He will explain scientific laws or philosophical arguments or biological functions with elaborate care and in the simplest possible terms, so that even a child might understand them. My immune system, for example, is run by soldiers with powers of arrest and internment, constantly on high alert for terrorists. His talk is invariably sprinkled with his favourite Jewish jokes, and bawdy songs, which he breaks into with little or no provocation, his cherubic face aglow with pleasure.

My brother’s three Borders are called Roxy, Ruby and Taz. My one ambition in life is to own a terrier again, or rather three terrier bitches, just so that I can call them Tray, Blanch and Sweetheart. (Lear, mad on the heath: ‘The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me.’) I ask my brother for the latest news of his dogs. He says he recently took Ruby up to Yorkshire, to be served by a well-known pedigree Border stud dog. My brother is a regular customer there. It’s a ten-hour round trip. The moment he draws up in his car, he says, the dog’s owner comes out into the yard and unrolls his ‘mating mat’ and lays it down, and his stud dog goes ballistic with joy, knowing what’s in store.

The catheter stung exquisitely when I lay down. So I stood up. All night I stood by my hospital bed, tethered by my penis to the transparent collection bag hanging off the bed rail, reading Artemis Cooper’s life of Patrick Leigh Fermor. In 1931, not knowing what to do with himself, Paddy walked to Constantinople, as he called it. I rested the paperback on my pillow under the spotlight and walked with him across Europe, much of it still feudal. Our hero had just emerged from a hayrick after having a spontaneous foursome with his Serbian girlfriend and two Hungarian peasant girls they had met in a field, when I made a startling and revolutionising discovery.

I’ve had a medical procedure that is ‘likely’ to leave me impotent. A nurse is coming around dishing out Tramadol, a painkiller of the morphine family. I raise my hand smartly. She steers her drugs trolley towards me and my bed in the corner of the six-bed male ward. ‘Are you in pain, Mr Clarke?’ ‘Absolute agony,’ I say. I’m looking fetching in a pair of white, knee-length tights. I’m hooked up to a drip to put fluids in, and catheterised to take them away. This thickness of the catheter tube and the site of its emergence is hard to credit at first. The fluid in the collection bag looks mostly like blood. I’ve lost all feeling from the waist down. But I’m not in pain. On the contrary I feel quite magnificent.

‘In my opinion,’ says Alistair Webster QC, author of the Liberal Democrats’ internal report into Lord Rennard’s droit de seigneur-style pulling technique, ‘the evidence of behaviour which violated the personal space and autonomy of the complainants was broadly credible.’ I’ll tell you what behaviour that violates personal space is. I was on a Nile cruise press trip: Aswan to Luxor. We were three hacks and a woman from the PR company. We’d done Edfu, Kom Ombo, Karnak, Thebes, the Valley of the Kings. In bed at night, if I shut my eyes tightly, I could see hieroglyphics emblazoned on the insides of my eyelids. Our last night was spent at one of Cairo’s better hotels. The other two hacks were abstemious.

My first ride in a stretch Hummer. I haven’t lived, I now realise. The prodigious, ridiculous thing, tricked out in multicoloured neon piping, drew up outside the pub where we were getting stoked. I was privileged to be invited by Trev to his niece’s 18th birthday celebration in a nightclub. It was very much a family affair and they are a proud family. ‘Who the fuck is that?’ I kept hearing from the younger, micro-skirted, six-inch-heeled element, in disgusted tones, referring to me, and Trev would do his best to explain me to them. Trev thought a ‘punch-up’ inevitable when we got to the club. The women were as liable to start one as the men, in his opinion. I looked around at the state of play as we waited to climb aboard the limo.