Low life

I took my grandson, Oscar, 20 months old, down to the regatta on the bus, a double-decker, his first experience of one, and we sat upstairs at the front. The bus was far too big for the narrow country lanes and the overhanging branches of trees thrashed against the upstairs windows. We alighted at a bus stop in the middle of the festivities, beside a funfair in full swing. The tipsy bank holiday crowd, the flags, the bunting, the lines of orange police cones, and the bright yellow fixed-penalty notice stuck on the side window of almost every visible parked car, made for a colourful scene. We hadn’t been there more than a minute when a precise naval officer’s voice on the loudspeakers announced the arrival of a Hawker Sea Fury over the town.

In summer the cottage next door is let out to visitors. Each week there’s someone new. I see them coming and going and sometimes circumstances dictate that I get to meet them. Last week a man staying in the cottage came to the door to ask about the television signal in the village. It wasn’t very good, was it? This visitor spoke with a Welsh accent and limped. Reception does vary a bit according to the weather, I said, but our signal seemed fairly strong at the moment. Theirs was fine at the beginning of the week, he said, but now the picture was breaking up on all freeview channels. This morning they’d had to abandon the Jeremy Kyle Show and watch Homes Under the Hammer on BBC1, which they weren’t keen on, to be honest, and now even BBC1 was unwatchable.

I open my eyes. I’m on my back looking up at the neat joinery of a wooden roof. Resting between two of the cross trees is a row of handmade longbows. Green daylight filters through bushes and trees outside the window. I’m half in and half out of a sleeping bag on the floor of a cabin, next to an old-fashioned pot-bellied stove. I don’t know how I got here, or exactly where this is. But I’m assuming it can only be Ted’s place, the hideaway in the woods where he practises and teaches survival skills and makes love to all the ladies who continuously parade through his life. I only know Ted from standing next to him at the bar sometimes, and usually when we speak we keep things on a purposefully superficial level. His preferred topic is always women.

I don’t think any of us were really that interested in being shown over his 14th-century chateau, and very quickly it was clear that neither did he really want to show it to us. But a personally guided tour of his chateau was on our itinerary, and presumably a fee had been agreed, perhaps when he was in a more expansive mood, and the time had come for him to meet his obligation. We decanted from the minibus and gathered under a tree, five of us, on the far side of his courtyard, and after a few minutes he came crunching across the gravel. He was a tallish, broad-shouldered man in a blue, well-tailored shirt, faun slacks and tasteful loafers. He was about 40, his hair had been beautifully scissored and he spoke English better than I do. His handshakes, though, were perfunctory.

A new grandson, and a night in the pub Grandson number two was delivered by caesarean section last week. Nine pounds. A boy. Clynton. He was plain Clinton to start with, but one of their more sophisticated friends suggested the alternative spelling and the suggestion was taken up. Of course the older relatives are either horrified or derisive. Ridiculous, they say, all these silly new children’s names. The world’s gone mad. What’s wrong with a good old traditional English name, like Arthur or George? I’ve been pointing these reactionary spirits in the direction of our parish magazine. In the latest issue a correspondent listed some of the Christian names recorded in the Baptism register between 1836 and 1900. Hocaday, anyone?

‘If you want to get off and walk or run along the towpath, we’ll meet you at the fourth lock,’ the skipper had told us after breakfast. Breakfast was a croissant and two cups of tachycardia-inducing coffee. The towpath was a six-foot-wide strip of smooth asphalt between two grass verges. It was drizzling. The coffee buzz, the level smoothness of the towpath and the overcast sky were ideal conditions for running a mile or two. I stepped off the gangplank and hit the towpath running. The scenery was French. Burgundian. Sleek and contented Charolais cattle were up to their knees in pasture in every other field. A buzzard circled the vines on the hillside. Six magpies were pecking in a field of long stubble. Even the barbed wire seemed somehow more stylish than ours.

I asserted that my room was booked and paid for by the travel company organising my trip. Maarika, the lovely Estonian trainee receptionist, said the room was booked, yes, but not paid for. I insisted, she resisted, I gave way. I handed over my credit card and signed here, here and here. She handed over the card key to room 286 and said she hoped I would sleep well. Only when I was standing in the tiny, not particularly clean room overlooking a noisy road junction did I realise that Maarika’s hope might have been sincere. It was 11 o’clock on Saturday night. Police and ambulance sirens blared more or less continuously. From every fourth car issued the boom, boom, boom of a boom box. The double glazing was old, cheap, badly fitted and useless. I was sober.

Someone comes to the front door, which is wide open to let in the sunshine, lifts the heavy brass knocker, and lets it fall, once. I’m upstairs, in a dark bedroom, bent over the laptop. I don’t hear anyone go to the door to answer it. The visitor waits patiently, then after perhaps half a minute touches the doorbell just enough to make it bubble into life. A modest ring. Not peremptory. Still no one comes. I’m feeling far too unsociable today to haul myself out of my swivel chair and put on an appropriate face for dealing with strangers at the door. For whoever it is must be a stranger. Anyone familiar with this house knows there’s no need to knock or ring, let alone do both. Someone answer the door for crying out loud, I think.

I listened to actor, presenter, and ‘activist’ Tony Robinson choose his Desert Island Discs on Sunday. He’s a doctrinaire leftist, and all my prejudices are on the opposite side, so I didn’t expect I would be cheering the man on. Nor did I. I’m an ardent listener to Desert Island Discs and I don’t think I have ever heard such flagrant moral vanity in a castaway. However, he said two things that I agreed with profoundly. One was that we owe a debt of gratitude to the generation who fought the war and that we ought to treat them better in their old age. The other was how thrilling it is to take your grandchild to the zoo, as he had recently done.

Our relationship lasted a week. This is how we met. She was standing outside the pub at kicking-out time. Could I do her a favour? Would I go back inside, into the gents, and buy her a packet of condoms from the machine. They weren’t for her. They were for her teenage son, who has recently become sexually active. In the gents, at the machine, I pulled out the wrong drawer and obtained by mistake a capsule of herbal aphrodisiac, the last thing he needed probably, and had to return armed with more pound coins. Before we parted I put my mobile number in hers. We met the next evening. She gave me a Reiki massage. She gives them for a living. She gave it at her place of work, on the floor. Before starting, she said did I have any current health concerns.

Early on Sunday morning the phone rang. Trev. He could hardly speak because his ribs hurt so much, he said. And I should see his face. One eye was closed, he had a deep gash across his forehead and a chunk had been taken out of the top of his nose. But how had it happened? One minute he was walking home alone from the disco, and the next he’d woken up in bed and found himself in this terrible state. Did I know what had happened to him? And where did I disappear to, anyway? One minute I was there, he said, next to him on the dance floor, and the next I was gone. I’d left early to catch the night sleeper to Paddington, then the Heathrow Express to Terminal 1, I said. I was sorry, I said, but I had absolutely no idea what had happened to him.

After I’d migrated from Essex to Devon during the last recession but one to look for casual work, the first woman I ‘went out’ with in any formal sense was my boy’s mother. She lived at her mother and father’s tied cottage and for a while I more or less lived there as well. Her father was a cowman, and the sweet, lovely smell of liquid cow manure permeated the house when he was there. The mother was, in her words, a ‘scrubber’ and she scrubbed for a Mrs P and a Mrs R to the point of total exhaustion. My boy’s mother was then still at school.

On the morning of the day that the Elect were scheduled to be whisked up into Heaven in what is known by Christians as the Rapture, I was standing outside a neighbour’s front door holding a piping hot baked potato in each hand. On the morning of the day that the Elect were scheduled to be whisked up into Heaven in what is known by Christians as the Rapture, I was standing outside a neighbour’s front door holding a piping hot baked potato in each hand. This neighbour is a tiny woman in her mid-nineties who ought to be in a nursing home, but she’s one of those intransigent souls who would rather die. She lives entirely on bread, butter, eggs and potatoes.

After the Cow Girl debacle, I went straight back online with another dating site. I was working on the same principle as those eager to get behind the wheel again as soon as possible after a serious accident to regain confidence. I signed on with a dating site designed for people wanting to have sex with as many people as possible and posted a photograph of myself with no clothes on, just my glasses, and smiling confidently and a little suavely at the camera, as though clothed or unclothed it was all the same to Lord Tangent, as I called myself. I also indicated, by ticking boxes beside diagrams of little stick people making love in various positions, the positions I preferred.

‘Come on, man, wake up! What are you doing lying here like this, dressed like this?’ He was a young black man, confident, street-wise, and he sounded let-down, disappointed. I think it was the suit and tie. He didn’t like to see good clothes treated like that. The tie meant I was a conservative type with a comfortable home to go to, and I had no business making an exhibition of myself like this. I sat up. His minicab was right over there, he said. He could take me home. Or, better still, there was a cheap hotel just around the corner. He could walk me to the end of the street and point it out. It wasn’t good for me to be laying there on the pavement like this, man. I could get robbed or anything.

I came up to town for a party to launch a new publishing company called Notting Hill Editions. One thing led to another afterwards, my rail ticket was open-ended, and I stayed up in town for two days and nights, drinking in pubs and clubs. Two incidents stand out in my mind from the broken kaleidoscope of experiences, one right at the very start, one near the end. In the first, an evangelical Christian flung himself down next to me in a crowded railway carriage and started boasting about his close relationship with God. In bragging loudly about God to me, he was also testifying to the entire carriage. The more people who heard him, was the line of thinking, the more chance there was of the Holy Spirit convicting someone of sin and adding to his tally.

The Spectator is a civilised paper. If they give you a weekly column, they are pleased for you to say what you like. The only editorial interference you can expect, apart from being hired, is the sack. They’d all rather die a slow and horrible death than exert the slightest influence over what you write. Each week I email this column to the infinitely forgiving Arts editor, Liz Anderson, who has cheerfully fielded my usually late copy for ten years. The only time she interferes with the content — and always with tremendous reluctance and a profusion of stricken apologies — is when the lawyer has indicated that he is ‘uncomfortable’ about something and that we should change a name or delete a libellous word. It’s happened once, maybe twice.

I rang my boy. He was in the supermarket with Oscar, my 15-month-old grandson, spending his last 50p on four ‘basics’ toilet rolls, he said. The toilet rolls cost 48p. It was a good job, he said, that he had nine cigarettes left in his packet to last him until his partner’s pay cheque from the government arrived. Ten minutes later, I received a text from him. The usual one — ‘can u ring me pls’. He’s never got any credit on his phone so he texts me and I call him right back. I called him. He and Oscar were in the back of a police car, he said. He was being cautioned and fined for having no car insurance. Could I come and give them a lift home? He was outside the school, he said. When I got there, it was as though a major incident had occurred.