Low life

I shifted a chest of drawers that hadn’t been moved for years, and found an old photograph lying among the dust and the cobwebs behind it. I picked it up and studied it, fascinated by the alien light of the mid-1980s. A summer meadow. A terrier ring at a dog and ferret show. And there I am, a stranger to my present self, crouching beside a tidy Jack Russell terrier bitch. She has liquid, almond-shaped eyes set in a black-and-tan face. The well-proportioned body is piebald black and white. Smooth coated. Her tail is undocked, the blood-blackened bone showing through the sparse white hairs at the tip. She is looking with calm, confident interest at something off-camera. People often commented on what they saw as kindness in her face.

When the ticket collector asked to see my ticket, I took the opportunity to ask what time my connection left Birmingham New Street. ‘Are you travelling onwards with the Vag?’ he said. ‘Excuse me?’ I said. ‘The Vag! Virgin!’ he said, irritated by my ignorance. I laughed at him. His expression remained official. He touched the screen on his portable machine and presented me with a card printed with the information. Then I went to the lavatory, one of those spacious ones with a curved door that slides back with a hiss at the touch of a button. As I lifted the seat, a voice said, ‘This is Ron Burgundy speaking. Welcome to the train throne, or, as the Brits call it, the privy.’ I looked around in surprise, trying to locate the loudspeaker.

Until a fortnight ago there was a healthy, graceful, 70ft-specimen of Eucalyptus dalrympleana — or mountain gum — in the garden. Now there isn’t. Or rather, the remains of the trunk and branches are lying in sections on the ground. To knock a few quid off the tree surgeon’s bill, I’d grandiosely told them not to bother reducing the trunk and major branches to fire-grate-sized logs. Leave it in rings, I said, and I’ll split them up with an axe. Which they did. The next time I looked out, the men had departed and there were a couple of tons of wood lying in wheels in the sodden grass. The biggest rings, from the base of the trunk, were about two feet in diameter and a foot thick. Not a problem. A joy.

So I go to the all-night house party with my rolled-up yoga mat under my arm. Nice house, middle-class crowd, everybody drunk. Women’s screams coming from upstairs. Looking for the lavatory, I find one vacant at the top of the stairs. I’m in mid-stream when this bloke bursts in and slams the door again behind him. He’s a big bloke and it’s a small lavatory. To accommodate him, I shuffle around the bowl and come at it now from the side. ‘Don’t mind me, pal,’ he says, all business-like. He delicately opens a tiny plastic bag, licks his thumb and shoves it into the powder as if it’s sherbert and he’s ten years old. He licks his thumb lovingly and plunges it into the bag again.

I went from the first yoga session of the New Year to the pub. I felt ever so noble. The place was rocking. There was a bloke at the bar looking at his watch, curious as to how long it would take the pill he’d just taken to affect his brain. I was with a woman who kept excusing herself to kiss this other woman. It wasn’t snogging exactly. Rather it was miniaturist nibbling and lip-licking. Some tongue, too. But it looked a bit theatrical. Look at us, kind of thing. Were we supposed to be surprised? Aroused? This is an agricultural town. Nobody has batted an eyelid at lesbianism or bisexuality for centuries. If they’d put their backs into it a bit more then, yes, jolly good show, and we might have spectated a bit.

Christmas shopping in Waterstones, I came across a memory card game called We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. I snatched it up and almost ran with it to the till, where I paid the woman with the smug attitude of a connoisseur. If I’d had a cavalry moustache, I’d have twirled the ends. I’d intended wrapping it up and putting it in my grandson Oscar’s stocking, but the wait would have been unbearable. So when I got home, solemn with excitement, I simply handed it to him, and we cleared the decks immediately to play, with Grandad still buttoned into his overcoat. Do you know the book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt? No? You haven’t lived. The grandson and me, we read a lot.

It’s a disgrace! I went up to London from Devon, a hick up from the sticks, to Annabel’s in Berkeley Square to a ‘party to start the Christmas party season’, it said on the invitation. ‘Eight till late.’ ‘Champagne, cocktails and old school fun.’ I’d never been to Annabel’s. I’d never dreamed of going to Annabel’s. I was always fairly certain that if I did go to Annabel’s I wouldn’t be allowed in. They’d just laugh. I took a cab from Paddington to Mayfair. It curvetted smoothly to a halt two pavement-slab widths from the discreet entrance.

Can it be that the one single agreeable thing about getting old is that one loses one’s pot paranoia? No. I thought I was going to get away with it, but here it came again like a creeping fog: the terrible introspection, the loss of identity, the psychic disintegration, the paranoid delusions. And here already, I noted, was the paralysing delusion that I am rooted to the spot and somehow tied to the company by a bond of loyalty, to the extent that even to uncross my legs and leave the beer-garden table would feel like a terrible betrayal. It’s horrible. I hate it. My immediate task was to try to drink off the paranoia or the evening would be over before it started. Trev was pulling belated, nauseated faces about there being too little or no vodka in his vodka and lemonade.

The beer garden at the back of the pub was empty, save one woman sitting alone at a table contemplating a pint glass. It was Saturday night, early, already dark. I placed my carnival glass of Kirin Ichiban on the table next to hers and sat down. The beer garden was floodlit with blue and orange light. The stars were out. I craned my head forward, sucked up an inch of cold lager without using my hands and looked sideways at the woman on the next table. I noticed a reaction to the mouthful of chilled beer on a cellular level. The woman looked miles away. ‘If you’re interested in a chat,’ I said, ‘this is the most sensible I’m going to be all night, so we should have it now.’ She backed out of her reverie and regarded me. ‘OK,’ she said.

Theresa May must have been a little disappointed. Her government limousine rolled silently to a halt at the rear entrance to the Savoy hotel, she got out, and the only people around to witness her latest fashion statement were a top-hatted doorman and your Low life correspondent having a fag. She was again wearing what the Daily Mail describes as her ‘zany, patterned’ coat. I confided to the doorman how upset I was that she wasn’t wearing those shiny, over-the-knee S&M boots. Something about the doorman suggested a vast and perhaps dangerous hinterland that only a top hat and Regency-style coat could keep from spilling out into everyday life. He expressed agreement by distending his eyeballs and giving a discreet little spasm of ecstasy.

In the Spar shop I overheard someone talking anxiously to the woman on the till about an approaching ‘hurricane’. I had thought the fast forwarding sky was looking a bit apocalyptic, so we hurried back to the caravan and put the radio on and waited for the news. The most important thing to have happened in the world in the past 24 hours, apparently, was the death of the ‘influential’ former Velvet Underground member Lou Reed, the man who characterised his style of musicianship as: ‘One chord is fine, two chords is pushing it, three chords and you’re into jazz.’ The gathering storm was the second item. Hurricane-force winds were a possibility rather than a certainty. A disappointment, this.

We’d being trying to meet for lunch for weeks, but always something had got in the way and either she or I had had to cancel. But at long last we’d managed it, and after two pleasant hours we emerged from the fish restaurant and made our way along the sea front towards the car park, still marvelling at the achievement. We hadn’t gone far when she noticed two planks leaning against a wall. They were six by twos, each about 2ft long. The sight of these planks seemed to cause her to lose the ballerina’s poise that she’d maintained throughout lunch. She became agitated and started hopping from foot to foot. An absent person was putting in a new window frame. The job was half-finished.

I’d been trying to curb the habit — one day at a time — and then I felt a bit toxic and marched smartly into my favourite local charity shop as though I were on rails. I’ve been in this particular one a thousand times — a peasant enamoured with tat. I know all the volunteers by sight. One day it might be the big humble guy in the frock and with the devil-may-care approach to applying his lipstick.

I’d booked a private one-to-one session with her for an hour on the afternoon of the day she flew in. I’d booked it casually, thoughtlessly, on a recommendation, a month in advance, unaware of her reputation. I’d dutifully filled in the form she sent me, circling problem areas on a drawn representation of my body, and mailed it back. It was only as the appointment drew near that I began to take heed, when overhearing talk at the yoga centre, of the excitement at the imminent arrival from across the pond of the great Linda Strong (as we’ll call her). The impression was of a St Paul scheduled to visit Antioch for a few weeks to whip the faithful into shape. The day, then the hour, of our private session came.

A surprisingly convivial atmosphere prevailed in the second-class carriage of the fast London-bound train when I stepped aboard at Bodmin. A loud, cheerful, messy young family was eating and drinking unrestrainedly, though it was not yet 11 o’clock. Cans of bitter and lager, not all of them unopened, were arrayed on several other tables. Animated conversation and uninhibited laughter were widespread. And — was it my imagination? — a Cornish national spirit presided, vivid with pleasure at the prospect of exchanging a green wet peninsular for the solidity of the metropolis. As I moved down the carriage aisle searching for an empty seat, Cornish eyes lifted to meet mine, not shyly or slyly, but with friendly curiosity.

I went to a Tibetan yoga all-day workshop. Tibetan yoga is very simple. It would be hilariously so if it didn’t hurt as much. For the first hour we stood and very slowly raised our hands — as slowly as a satellite seen from the earth on a starry night, was the advice given — from down by our sides until they met above our heads. For the second hour we lowered them back down again to their starting point. After a frugal lunch we stood and swung our heads in a fast tempo from left to right and back, and for the final hour we nodded them up and down. Then we went home. When I got home, the grandson was there clamouring to be entertained, so I took him out for a stroll along the promenade to see what we could see.

I woke up in the foetal position, on my back, on Trev’s tiny sofa, with an old curtain over me. This curtain was a step up from the tea towel I once found draped over me when I woke there. Then the usual panic-stricken search for phone, wallet and glasses. My wallet was in my back pocket. My glasses were on the floor over by the television as if flung there. No phone, though. Oh, good. I had not the faintest idea what the time was. I peered out of the grimy window to try to gauge the hour by the strength of the daylight. The sky was overcast, the road empty. Difficult to tell. There wasn’t a clock in the sitting room. Nor was there one in the kitchen. I opened Trev’s bedroom door and crept in to look for his phone.

‘Jeremy! Jeremy! I can’t believe it! There’s no bloody booze!’ I’d walked into the music room where Elgar and Fauré were lavishly entertained by their sponsor, the flamboyant arts patron Leo Frank Schuster, whose townhouse 22 Old Queen Street once was. Our magazine was holding its annual ‘Meet the Readers’ afternoon tea party. And there he was, standing close to the door: the tanned, immaculate, cheerful figure of the great Taki. A sight to gladden every heart. It seemed too good to be true. That tan, those easy good manners, that lightness on the feet, that devotion to fun epitomise my romantic notion of what The Spectator is. Before every Spectator event, one idly wonders, or even goes as far as to ask, whether Taki will be there.

One evening last week, I trotted over to the caravan site’s clubhouse to use the wifi and pick up emails. One email was from a friend who reported that someone had described me, after meeting me for the first time, as an ‘intellectual’. Unsure whether to be flattered or appalled by this misjudgment, I ordered a hot panini (cheese and red onion) to save cooking dinner back at the caravan and running the battery down on the smoke detector, which was going off so often when I cooked that I’d begun using it as a timer. As I rammed the panini into my face, an elderly man, with what was almost certainly a chapel Christian face, came and set up a table, chair and microphone in a central position.

We picked up the key to the caravan, let ourselves in, ascertained the phone signal situation (none) and went to the beach. Polzeath beach is the kind of bucket-and-spade beach Janet and John’s Mummy and Daddy might have chosen for their annual holiday. First, soft white sand ideal for burying Mummy;  then a broad shining plain of hard, smooth sand, ideal for sandcastles, dam projects, or tunnelling to Australia; then gentle inch-deep wavelets — spent rollers — for toddlers and oldies to paddle in. Then flags. Then thundering surf crowded with Neoprene figures, all shapes, sizes and ages, some of them screaming, and riderless surfboards flipped skywards; each successive wave a chaotic and exhilarating drama.