Low life

The lintel across the kitchen doorway comes up to my collarbone so I need to duck as I go through. A grinning toy duckling suspended by its neck from the lintel by a piece of cotton attached to a drawing pin is there to remind me. Usually I stoop just low enough to feel his little feet dance across my hair as I pass. But on this occasion I was looking down at my phone, and, presuming that my head was low enough, going full steam ahead into the kitchen. The next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back on the living-room rug and the top of my head felt wet. I went upstairs and stuck my head under the bath’s cold tap and kept it there until red turned to clear. Then I blotted the red from the rug and stair carpet with a damp face flannel and towel-dried my hair.

My laptop is a year old. The granite boulder on which it rested was, according to the guidebooks, 290 million years old. The granite was coarse-grained stuff, studded with oblong crystals of quartz and feldspar, and furry with lichen. My laptop is made of shiny black plastic, usually marred by my greasy palm prints, though it buffs up nicely with a tissue. Both granite boulder and the plastic laptop shell have previously been in a molten state and then cooled. They had that in common. But the laptop looked worthless next to the stone. I made this daft comparison while waiting for my email web page to load via my new dongle. Dongles have been around for ages, but I hadn’t used one before.

No radio, no telly, no internet. No mobile-phone signal. The stone cottage I’m staying in for the summer lies at the bottom of a steep, curved valley, well beyond reach of the 21st century. The day I moved in, a slender young deer in the next field watched me trundle my possessions down the path in a wheelbarrow. It stood motionless and stared with absorbed interest, as if a human being was a rare and extraordinary sighting. I’ve been here a week. Unless I climb the path to the car and drive across a boulder-strewn waste to the nearest village, I live in a world in which the only noises are gentle ones supplied by nature.

‘Carry-on luggage,’ said the trip organiser by email. ‘If we all take only carry-on luggage we won’t have to do any hanging about at the airport.’ I spent the evening before I left packing, unpacking, sifting, making new decisions and repacking my smallest suitcase until I was more or less satisfied I had made the neatest use of the limited space available. In the process of reorganisation, I swapped a pair of thick cotton pyjamas for a thinner pair and my electric toothbrush for a folding one. The long linen trousers stayed, but out went socks and underwear. Books I considered carefully. Many a time I’ve gone away laden with a small library, then read nothing all week except laminated menu cards and the contraindications advice for medicines.

This is how it goes for flibbertigibbet morons like me. I’m at the laptop processing words and it’s not going well. I’m beginning to bore myself. With so much to see and do within reach of the tip of my middle finger, I take a break and go shopping. A click on ‘save’, another on one of the icons on my ‘favourites’ tool bar, and the next moment I’m sauntering through a virtual global bazaar where I can buy virtually anything from a second-hand car to an Ivy Compton-Burnett first edition. I acquired this taste for shopping late in life. Already this taste is showing unmistakable signs of turning into a tawdry addiction like all the rest.

Opinion behind the counter in the busy, family-run Silver Grill fish and chip shop was sharply divided. The grieving Leicester City supporter who ran the place thought that Portsmouth had every chance of pulling it off. In the betting shop next door they were offering 33–1 on Pompey winning 1–0, he said, riddling the chip cage. Ridiculous odds. They are an experienced team and they won’t mind mixing it. If they rise to the occasion, Chelsea won’t have things all their own way, you mark my words, he said. But his nephew — baseball cap, beard and his arms so densely tattooed that at first glance it looks as if he’s wearing a purple and black cardigan — rolled his eyes at his uncle’s romanticism.

My boy and I have fallen out. It happened like this. He decided to drive his newborn son, his partner and his partner’s three kids up to the Outer Hebrides, where his partner’s mother lives. The mother wanted to see the baby, and my boy and his partner were keen for her to see him. They wouldn’t all legally fit into my boy’s saloon car, so he tried to hire a seven-seater for the journey. But the car-hire companies won’t hire to the under-21s (even the under-25s have to fork out a whacking great premium) and my boy is 20. Why not buy an old seven-seater for the trip? I said. If you aren’t worried about the state of the bodywork, I said, you might pick one up for less than it would cost to hire one for a week.

I used to see Tom now and again at the local gym. I’d be on the treadmill and he’d be in front of the mirror lifting weights. He was already big then, but he was all chest and shoulders and no legs and the disproportion looked ridiculous. Broad at the top, he seemed to taper down to a point. Also, his shoulders were too high, too level and too immobile. One day this inverted triangle with blond hair flopping over a spotty schoolboy face spoke to me. He appeared on the next treadmill and said he’d just been outside to do some sprints on the football pitch, but abandoned the idea because there was too much dogs’ excrement underfoot. His soft voice and careful enunciation surprised me.

Here is a middle-aged man lying in bed in his black and green striped pyjamas. The bed is a single bed and he is reading a book. On the bedside cupboard is a 1970s Grundig Elite Boy portable radio tuned to The World Tonight. Next to that is a photograph of his 17-year-old son in a cheap frame. His son is looking annoyed with the person holding the camera. Slippers, much stained, rest east–west in parallel alignment beside the bed. On the wall above the man’s head is a framed colonial map of the Nyasaland Protectorate. On the floor, but within easy reach, a pile of books nearly two-feet high. As he reads, he is absentmindedly fingering a place on his chest, high up near the collarbone, where lately a gristly little spot has appeared.

I saw three films at the cinema last month. The first was a French-made job, with subtitles, called A Prophet. It was awarded the accolade of ‘best film’ at Cannes in 2009 and I drove the 20 miles to the arthouse cinema full of optimism. In the café beforehand for a cup of green tea and a slice of carrot cake (I know, I know — ponce), I asked the woman behind the counter if she’d seen it and what it was like. The still-handsome, slightly intimidating woman in a green apron must have been a real stunner when she was young. She looked at me carefully before answering, as if deciding whether I was worth an honest opinion or not. She’d seen it in London, she said. What had stood out for her was the violence. It was a violent film from start to finish.

I was standing in line in front of the container truck-sized skip designated for waste metal. Each Sunday, the local council puts three of these huge skips — one for wood, one for metal and one for gardening refuse — on one of its old storage sites, calls it a civic amenity centre and invites householders to bring along recycling waste that is too bulky for the fortnightly collection. It also supplies a static dustcart for rubble and cardboard and three workers to supervise, assist and keep an eye out that nobody abuses the service by sneaking in old tyres, tins of paint or asbestos. Ten years ago, we would have all been filling a trolley at the garden centre or DIY megastore on Sunday afternoon.

Joe always went ‘potty’ when there was snow on the ground, said Marjory. He would clamour at the back door to be let out to play in it, and once outside he’d rush around in frenzied circles, barking at it. Not that it snowed much during his lifetime, she added. Twice, she thinks. But each time, Joe’s excitement had made it a memorable event. When it snowed this year, he went spare as usual, she said. When she let him outside to play in it, he became so excited he had another epileptic fit, then a heart attack and he died, lying on his side in the snow, on Christmas Eve. Old Joe was a likable chap, and because Marjory was becoming frail, I used to take him out for walks.

The advert said: ‘1991 BMW 740i. Owned previously by an elderly couple. Fully serviced. Fully loaded. New front windscreen. This car is immaculate. Quick sale required.’ In other words — at least, one sincerely hoped so — the vendor was in dire financial difficulties and forced to let his cherished motor go for a song. There was a photograph of the car. It might have been taken professionally for a full-page advertisement in a lifestyle magazine. In gleaming gun-metal grey, the executive saloon appeared to be in showroom condition. It was parked on rose-coloured brick paving outside a steel-and-glass luxury apartment block.

I arrived late and perspiring at the novel-writing workshop. Four would-be novelists and the tutor were seated around a table. I apologised for not being punctual and received amused, forgiving or complicit smiles, reminding me that it was art that we were about today, not commerce or industry. Two rows of paperbacks divided the table. The tutor said that these were what she considered to be exemplary novels taken from her bookshelves and that we might take a note of the titles. I switched my phone off, took out my pen and notepad and looked eagerly along the rows. Three Tracy Chevaliers, two Jeanette Wintersons, two Virginia Woolves, an Alice Sebold, a Dodie Smith, an Emily Brontë and an Angela Carter.

When the relationship ended a week before the Christmas before last, she’d already bought my Christmas presents. Instead of posting or burning them, she stored them under the desk in her office, resting her exquisite feet on them during working hours, until three weeks ago, when we finally met again over a tapas in a Spanish restaurant off the Edgware Road, and she managed to hand over, after some 14 months, the carrier bag containing her parting gifts.  One was a hardback copy of Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis. I read it straight off when I got home and loved it. It’s a boozer’s manual, informative and funny. The chapter on hangovers I found particularly fascinating.

On most days of the year there is a guide-led walk on Dartmoor. These walks, advertised in the Dartmoor Visitor, are ideal for a lazy person like me who enjoys tramping across the high moor from time to time but prefers someone else to do the map-reading and the worrying about not getting lost. Each walk listed in the Visitor is given a title, such as ‘Peaks and Pixies’ or ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’, and an Ordinance Survey map reference. The map reference tells you where to meet and usually refers to a car park. Whenever I go on one of these walks, I often get off on the wrong foot, as it were, because I’m improperly dressed.

I’d booked sleeping berths to Fort William, onward tickets for the scenic passenger line to Mallaig, and a double bed in a country-house hotel. But at the last moment she said she couldn’t come. So on my birthday I woke from a drugged sleep in an upper bunk on the Caledonian sleeper and there was one less person in my romantic Scottish Highlands sleeper-compartment fantasy than planned. I climbed down the ladder, released the window shutter and looked out. We were travelling slowly across a frozen bog. In the far distance, mountains; their snowy peaks glowing orange in the weak early-morning sunlight. Between the strand of barbed wire demarcating railway property and these far-off peaks, not a single sign of human endeavour could be seen.

The Junior Common Room of the School of Oriental and African Studies is a noisy, tatty, paper-strewn room with a curving wall at one end like the stern of a small liner. Tall windows let in plenty of wind and sky, and when I was studying there I used to imagine I was sailing steerage class on a slow voyage across Bloomsbury. My train was due to leave Euston station — just up the road — in an hour. My old college was as good a place as any to wait on an afternoon of bitter cold. I took my packet of tangy-cheese-flavoured Doritos, my carton of cappuccino, and my subsidised copy of the Guardian newspaper and found a comfortable berth on a battered old sofa under one of the tall windows. A plain white T-shirt was laid out on the table in front of me.

Choosing frames for my new varifocal lenses was like choosing a new personality. Each pair I tried on projected something slightly different. What kind of person should I pretend to be from now on? Philosophical? Whacky? Left-leaning? Post post-modernist? It was an unexpectedly exciting moment. The young assistant stood with me at the display and offered her professional opinion. In quick succession I popped on a couple of dozen different frames and looked into her eyes and tried to be serious. She knew immediately whether or not a particular pair of frames suited my face. If they did, and she liked them, she shook her fingers as though she’d just burnt them on a hotplate.