Low life

Deep breaths. Swap ‘Hound Dog’ Taylor for Toumanie Diabaté. Wind window down, rest bare arm on sill. Feel warm breeze on bonce. Tell self to overcome anger as only hurting self. Tell self to count blessings, live in moment. Tell self kids back at school next week, after which fewer holidaymakers, traffic less horrendous. Tell self, finally, no need to hurry, film doesn’t start for an hour. A sharp bend in the road ahead. Our procession goes very slowly round the bend then comes to a dead stop. The combine harvester has caught up with the tail end of a queue of stationary traffic snaking down to the T-junction. I can see police down at the T-junction and a line of cones across the road. The police are telling drivers they can’t turn right, by the look of it.

I turned up at Trixabell’s massage studio in a lather. It was a hot morning and I’d been rushing. Sweat was trickling down the sides of my face and soaking through my shirt in the usual places. I’d better have a shower, I said. There wasn’t one, she said. Nor was she worried about a bit of sweat. Trixabell was as friendly and talkative as she had been when she gave me her card in the gym. I should take off everything except my underpants, she said. As I stripped, she told me about how embarrassed she’d been at the garage earlier, not having enough money to pay for the repairs to her car. New alternator, £230, she said, when I pressed her for details.

I’d been away for three weeks and when I came back the lockers had been moved. I was directed to a space on the gym floor between the drinking fountain and the rowing machines. On the rowing machine nearest to the lockers was a woman with the face of Gina Lollobrigida and the body of Silvia Saint. She was rowing slowly, almost voluptuously. I’d seen her — you couldn’t really miss her — several times before, working out with her strongman husband. She is a sort of cartoon version of my teenage fantasy of the perfectly proportioned woman. It’s a ludicrous fantasy which has unfortunately lost little of its power over me and the sight of this woman thoroughly intimidates me.

Cursing myself, I rushed out of the house in my pyjamas. I’d forgotten to put out the brown recycling bin for the fortnightly collection. I lifted the lid on next door’s bin and peeped in. Empty. I must have missed the truck by minutes. Now I was in trouble. Putting the recycling bin out on Wednesday morning was my one and only duty while she was away and I’d fluffed it. She’ll do star jumps in the hall when she comes home and finds out. Hoping there might be something I could do to salvage the situation, I rang the council office. The woman dealing with refuse collection enquiries sounded young and happy. I’d missed the fortnightly food waste collection, I said. Was there anything I could do about it? She was making a note, she said.

We circumnavigated Iceland in a clockwise direction, calling on successive days at Reykjavik, Grundarfjordur, Isafjordur and Akureyri. At each of these places we disembarked and took an excursion led by a local guide. At Grundarfjordur, I took the Snaefellsnes national park coach tour. Our guide was a smartly dressed, highly educated Icelandic woman who spoke better English than me, albeit more slowly and methodically. Her commentary revealed a comfortableness with contemporary discourses on geopolitics, ecology, economics, culture and technology. Though because we were British, renowned for our philistinism, and willing to laugh at anything, even if it isn’t funny, she tried to keep things simple, and even attempted one or two laboured witticisms of her own.

Last weekend I returned from France on a cross-Channel ferry. The decks were crowded with young people jabbering away in French, German, Dutch, English. It occurred to me that whichever language they spoke these kids were very much alike in dress, conduct, outlook and lack of physical fitness, as though a European cultural union had almost been achieved already, and I was sorry about it. A few days later I was back in Dover, this time to board a cruise ship. The passenger list is 90 per cent British and of these the vast majority were born before the war. On this boat no such surrender of the national identity has occurred. We are so thoroughly British, we are almost stupefied by it.

When the cabin crew capo spoke on the public address system, she expected nothing less than our undivided attention. We had to suspend our conversations ‘right now’ or ‘right at this moment’. Her accent, I think, was Sydney suburbs. But this one passenger had the sheer gall to continue reading his Daily Mail right through the safety demonstration. Well, she wasn’t having that. She abruptly suspended the demonstration at the oxygen mask stage until the offending newspaper was lowered. The man was so engrossed in his paper he was oblivious to everything going on around him. She leaned an elbow against the wall in a sort of sarcastic ‘against our better judgment we allow passengers to read newspapers on the flight, and this is what happens’ posture.

I was in Ypres, about which Churchill said, ‘A more sacred place for the British race does not exist in the world.’ Thousands of members of that race were knocking about in the town. We were easy to spot among the more prosperously dressed Belgians. But not always. I said bonsoir to this bloke who was coming out of the hotel as I was going in, and he said, ‘I’m English. You don’t have to “bonsoir” me, mate.’ ‘Here for the war cemeteries?’ I said. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I come twice a year every year without fail. I am obsessed by the Great War. I came here once and that was it. Hooked for life.’ I told him I had just arrived and that I was disoriented; disoriented above all by the scale of the killing.

I was lolling in a deckchair with a vanilla ice cream, watching the literary types in their interesting shoes pass to and fro along the cobbled path, when, 30 yards away, across the grassy courtyard, Martin Amis appeared in a doorway and lit up. I recognised the face instantly. I watched him carefully. He must have been gasping. How many seconds, roughly, do ordinary smokers inhale for at each visit? One second? Two? With Martin Amis I counted up to five. He sucked the guts right out of his fag in about four goes. The last time I saw anyone attacking a cigarette with as much boggle-eyed addiction was on a long-stay ward in a psychiatric hospital in the mid-Eighties. Martin Amis paced up and down a bit, head down, deep in thought.

On Saturday I went to a wedding and didn’t touch a drop of alcohol and it was fine. I enjoyed myself more, I think, than if I’d been slinging them back. On Sunday evening, pleased with myself about this, and seriously considering permanent sobriety, I went to the pub. The England v. Germany match had been over for several hours and every face in the bar could have stood in as a model for that wonderful Picasso of the absinthe drinker, put up for auction the other week. Of the people in the bar I knew to speak to, two were the drunkest I’ve seen them. One, a genial, chuckling character who is always pleased to see me, was unusually sullen and apparently so preoccupied with unhappy thoughts that he failed to acknowledge my greetings.