Low life

We parked the car and spent a carefree hour on the beach, Oscar and I. The beach was a crescent of pebbles three miles long, and we were the only people on it. A recent easterly gale had driven the tide much further up the beach than usual, leaving behind it a pebble ridge, ideal for granddads and two-year-old boys to fling themselves off, or roll down roly-poly fashion, which we did until granddad was exhausted. Next we searched for suitable pieces for the driftwood bookcase granddad is making, and found a frayed and salted plank of eight by two. Just the job. Nearby, a stranded dogfish lay stinking among the tide-line debris.

A week into the New Year I drove to town early to do a spot of shopping. The sun was shining, I felt well again, and I marched up the high street with a spring in my step. The still-thriving high street is predominantly Georgian, with here and there a few remaining Tudor merchants’ houses. The foundations and old stone walls are medieval, and the narrow street runs steeply upwards between the ancient river bridge at the bottom and a textbook motte-and-bailey castle at the top. You can either park at the top and walk down, or park at the bottom and walk up. It depends how you feel.   I hadn’t got far up the high street when I met Luke coming down. In streets as narrow as this one, you tend to look people in the face who are coming towards you.

I was woken by my phone ringing. My boy. ‘What time is it?’ I said. ‘Ten past one,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling?’ This was said with a very obvious and unkind touch of schadenfreude. ‘Terrible,’ I said. I felt as though I might be dying, and the sooner the better. ‘Where are you?’ he said. That I did know. ‘I’m in the bar manager of the Merry Fiddler’s bed,’ I said. ‘Oh, yes?’ he said, pretending heightened interest. Feebly, I checked under the duvet. ‘But she’s not here,’ I said. ‘And I’m still wearing my suit and overcoat.’ He rang off and I sank back into oblivion. When I woke next the house was still quiet.

‘Come with me,’ said the barmaid, ‘to a party.’ It was around three and she was trying to close the pub and get everyone out. She seemed to be the one person in a hundred who was maintaining a degree of sanity. The other barmaid, for example, could hardly stand up. The sensible barmaid organised a carry-out of bottled lager for me — she’d had enough for one night and couldn’t get out of there quickly enough — and we went to the party. I’d spent most of the evening in a pub down the road where everyone was partying on drugs as well as being alcohol drunk. You could tell by the way the pandemonium had a soft edge.

I was standing on the pavement outside the Lahore Kebab House, Hendon, after a three-hour lunch, waiting for a minicab. Fifty of us had sat down at a flower-laden table to samosas and champagne, kebabs and Valpolicella. Amid a convivial uproar, our host had stood, tapped his water glass with his spoon, and made a speech of thanks and welcome. Last year, to our host’s transparent consternation, his speech was hijacked by Lord Charles, the ventriloquist’s dummy, who’d made obscene remarks about some of the guests. Today his speech was again persistently interrupted, this time by Sooty on the one hand, and by Sweep on the other, whispering irrelevant comments in his ear.

Royal Mail bosses have suggested to postmen that they should not accept a Christmas tip if it’s £30 or more. This is because under the terms of the new Bribery Act that sort of money could conceivably constitute a bribe. I’ve never been a postman, sadly, let alone a postman at Christmas. I don’t know how much a postman expects to make from Christmas tips. But I was seven years a dustman and for us Christmas was always a cash bonanza of mind-boggling proportions. I have lots of happy memories of stepping down from the dustcart on Christmas Eve, already tight as a tick, and heading straight for the pub, my trouser pockets bulging with wedges of cash several inches thick. It wasn’t just cash we were given.

‘A race through the subways and streets of Paris anuses.’ Startled, I reread the sentence. Surely that couldn’t be right. To pass the time I was flicking through a programme of December’s films at the local art-house cinema. The sentence came in a synopsis of a French crime thriller. Then I realised it was a misprint and should have read, ‘A race through the subways and streets of Paris ensues’. I was about to jab my friend with an elbow and point out the misprint to him, when his surname was called. Five minutes before, he and I had taken the only two available seats in the hospital waiting area, among a crowd of maybe 50 or 60 other outpatients. As we sat, that Bible verse came to mind about tarrying at Jericho until your beards be grown.

As my bike had drawn attention to itself by being nicked, abandoned and found, I decided to renew our old friendship by taking it out for a ride. On Sunday afternoon I slung my leg over it and took it for an hour-long, 15-mile circuit that goes up hill and down dale and ends with an exhilarating three-mile freewheel down to the sea, followed by a final killer hill that normally finishes me off completely. I am currently not fit. Tendonitis in my heels means I’ve taken no exercise for two months. During this time I’ve been further enervated by drink and some rotten, highly adulterated drugs. Worse still, I’ve become fat. And when I arrived at the foot of that final killer hill, I felt too out of condition to face it.

For 21 years my bike has leant against the wall just inside the garage door. On Monday morning it was gone. Nicked. I loved that old Dawes Galaxy. But I couldn’t work myself up into a state about its theft. I tried anger, I tried indignation, but without success. Good luck to them, I thought. I might be a fool, but I try not to be a hypocrite as well. Besides, I was elated and humbled that morning because the postman had delivered another packet of your jokes; the biggest yet, containing about 60 letters, emails and postcards; all of them miles too late, unfortunately, to be entered in the competition to win a party invitation. The party had been and gone, and in the minds of those who had any recollection of it, was already a distant memory.

My grandson Oscar, now nearly two, hardly says a word when he and I are out together. It’s like being out with a dog the conversation is so one-sided. He understands well enough. He’s attentive and interested and usually in favour of anything you care to mention. But he barely speaks. Which is strange because his parents are beginning to complain of his loquaciousness at home. ‘You’ve gone all quiet now grandad’s here, haven’t you?’ says his Mum, not without a touch of sarcasm at her child’s new-found gravitas the moment his grandad hoves into view. When Oscar and I went to the zoo last week, he hardly said a word all day.

The book launch party was terrific. To those who put it on, and to everyone who came, I am a beggar even in thanks. A salute, too, to the 200-plus of you who entered the joke competition and to the 15 winners, every one of whom was the life and soul. A special mention in dispatches as well for the lovely Katrina from Paisley, a competition winner, who selflessly assisted when the first casualty came in. This was Sharon. Later I heard reports that the editor had surprised her getting to grips with one of the competition winners on the deputy editor’s desk. I don’t believe it. She was far too drunk for shenanigans.

Before I went to the party, I went to the pub for a pint. The pub was unusually quiet for a Saturday evening. Jay was on duty behind the bar. She leaned across the bar to embrace and kiss me. She had a terrible hangover, she said. I told her to have one herself, and she thanked me and put a pound coin in her tips glass, as she does. I like Jay. There was a stage in Jay’s life when circumstances forced her and her two children to live in a tent for six months. Everything Jay has she’s had to scrabble for. Yet hard times involving tents haven’t politicised her. I’ve never heard her make a moral or a political judgment about anything. After she’d served me, she resumed her perch on a barstool and continued with her texting.

A big mouth, fewer taste buds and a wider gullet than normal means I’m a fast eater. If golloping your dinner was an Olympic event, I’d be knighted by now. Last week I equalled my personal best with a plate of roast pork, apple sauce, roast spuds, mashed swede and runner beans. We were four of us gathered round the table: me, Stanford, my new brother-in-law, and our two old mums, both in their eighties. Stanford and I had spent the morning bleaching and filling in the cracks of an outside wall, prior to whitewashing it. When I looked up from my plate, having polished mine off, I saw that everyone else had barely started. Stan and his mum were making tentative exploratory cuts around the periphery of their respective heaps, still trying to negotiate a way in.

That famous ideal pub of George Orwell’s, The Moon Under Water? Sounds boring to me. There’s no music, every customer is a ‘regular’ with his own chair and it is always quiet enough to talk. The barmaids call you dear (not ducky as they do in ‘raffish’ pubs). If singing breaks out in the Moon Under Water on Christmas Eve, that singing, George assures us, is always ‘decorous’. He’ll be the lanky one in the public bar, no doubt, buying stamps and sipping stout out of his own china mug. My ideal pub is the Black Lion in Plaistow, East London. It’s the pub we go to before the match. George Orwell would probably think it looked quite promising from the outside.

A very sporting publisher has put together a collection of Low life columns and is publishing it in hardback on 3 November. In the evening there is to be a drinks party at The Spectator offices in Westminster to celebrate the occasion. The boardroom can comfortably accommodate around 50 vertical drinkers. Of these 50, the editor has asked me to use this column to invite 15 readers to the party, if 15 can be found. So if anyone wants to risk it, please send your name, address and current favourite joke to The Spectator office. Your joke needn’t necessarily conform to prevailing rules of political correctness. Should fewer than 15 people send in a joke, then everyone can come, and all the more for us.

On Sunday morning we got up early, met the guide, Khalila, on the hotel steps and went on a cultural landmark and shopping tour of Marrakesh. We’d done the Majorelle garden, which we all thought we liked. We’d done the Koutoubia mosque and the Jemaa el-Fnaa square. We’d had a look around an empty palace, former home of a prime minister with 52 wives, didn’t catch the name, now the home of a small colony of feral cats. And we’d strolled between the baked mud walls of the old quarter, where Khalila had pointed out the old synagogue, now closed. And it was about here, in front of this synagogue, around ten o’clock, that the heat from the sun began to tell.

When my uncle was a boy, he said, he was leading a horse down a hill near North Weald in Essex. The horse was pulling a wagon loaded with cabbages, and my uncle had got down, he said, to assist the horse because the hill was a steep one. The war was on. The hill was on a quiet country lane, so he was surprised to see three limousines approaching together in convoy at speed. As the limousines drew level, they slowed to a walking pace so as not to frighten the horse. Seated in the back of the middle car, his face close to the window, and staring out, curious to see what was causing the delay, was Winston Churchill. My uncle was nine or ten at the time, and he found himself staring directly into that famous, pugnacious face.

Somewhat frayed around the edges after The Spectator’s ‘End of Summer Party’ I drove up to Norfolk to visit my country cousins. The corpses on the A143 told me I was getting deeper into the countryside. As well as the usual pea-brained pheasants, I saw a bloody badger, a broken fox and a magnificent, unmarked hare that was bigger than either of these. Normally, I would have stopped and taken the fox’s brush as a present for my grandson, but there was a car up my arse. I stayed with my uncle and aunt on their smallholding and was given my usual bed in a spare room that doubles as an egg-packing station. Quite often I wake in the night not knowing where I am. I sit bolt upright in the darkness in an existential panic trying to figure it out.

The pub was taken over for a meeting. Every chair was occupied. The speaker’s words were being recorded by a sound engineer standing at a portable mixing console. The middle-aged audience was rapt, the atmosphere one of political and moral seriousness. Few were drinking. I mounted the only vacant bar stool and mouthed the word ‘Peroni’ at the young lad behind the bar as though he and I were involved in a dangerous conspiracy. The speaker, a woman aged around 50, was speaking articulately and authoritatively about something called the blood/brain barrier. To sustain it, she said, we need to maintain adequate levels of fatty acids, vitamin D and particularly iodine, which most people fail to do.

My sister got married twice last week, both times to the same bloke, thank goodness. She was married on the Thursday by the state in a register office, and on the Saturday she and Stan stood in front of an Anglican clergyman in a church and asked God to graciously add His blessing to that of the British government. The state affair took place in the same register office as the one at which I fruitlessly gave notice of my intention to marry Cowgirl back in December. I felt such a nit. There were only three of us there to witness the union, so I couldn’t hide in the crowd, but, if she recognised me, the registrar was tactful enough not to mention it and I was grateful.