Low life

On Sunday morning I went outside and found that my recent bout of mild depression had gone, the sun on my cheek felt as warm as it does in May, and the birds were singing different songs. I was the first person in the gym — my first visit of 2010. I wished the bleary-eyed attendant a happy new year. Two hours later, showered, changed and brimming with vim, I jumped in the car and set off across town to find the address I had written down on a creased bit of paper. The evening before, I had answered a free ad for a 30-kilogram chrome dumb-bell set and arranged with the vendor to be there at noon to inspect them. They were for my boy, not me. He’s recently expressed a wish for firmer muscles.

Almost without fail, I bash out a daily diary entry on a loose sheet of A4 then shove it in an old ringbinder. Glued on the inside cover of this ringbinder is a yellowing newspaper clipping. It’s a column by the late Nigel Nicolson, written around the time of the New Year, offering Sunday Telegraph readers some useful rules, from a lifelong diarist, about how one should go about keeping a diary. Write first thing in the morning when the mind is fresh, he says. Be truthful, he says. Don’t feel obliged to write daily: write only when you feel that you have something to say. Write your diary in code or hide it. And never, ever, mention train times, minor illnesses or the weather.

I set off in a rainstorm. Whether it is, or isn’t, caused by CO2 emissions triggering global warming, I’ve never seen an English monsoon season like this one. From our house, there’s a five-mile-long, single-track lane to negotiate before you can get anywhere. Normally in heavy downpours the water pours into the lane off the fields and lays in one or two low-lying dips. But in this new, more concentrated type of precipitation we’ve been getting, the lane itself is a live torrent. At least the tempest and early darkness have kept other people indoors by their fires. I meet no other cars. A section of the lane where I’ve never seen standing water is flooded to the tops of my wheels.

I finally found Trev playing darts in the Volunteer. Usually you can tell which pub Trev’s in because you can hear him whooping and roaring, or even crowing like a cockerel, from halfway down the high street. But tonight he was planting his arrows calmly, modestly and considerately, without all the usual alarums and excursions. I hadn’t seen him for several months and I wondered whether, at 48 years old, he was finally beginning to feel his age. I bought a pint and took it over to the dartboard. Trev saw me coming and bowed low, as though I were a visiting dignitary. With his face to the floor he pointed a forefinger at the top of his head. ‘See that!’ he said. Through thinning short hair I could make out a scab the size and shape of a 10-pence piece.

Everything had gone wrong for him lately, said Mr Beaumont. He was going blind. His prostate trouble had worsened. His dear wife of 60 years had passed away just a fortnight before, following a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. And the day before she’d died, she’d fallen on him, breaking his leg. We were standing in the tidy living room of his bungalow. He was leaning heavily on his stick with both hands and telling me all this because I was about to have a look at his car, with a view to buying it. His point, presumably, being that it was this succession of disasters, rather than any fault of the car, which had decided him to part with it. ‘You’ll love him.

‘Take a pew,’ said the doctor, scanning my medical notes. ‘Been to Africa and playing the field with the local beauties, have we?’ The tone was brisk, enthusiastic, conspiratorial, perhaps even a bit nostalgic. I nodded dumbly. ‘Right-ho, old man, drop the trousers.’ My underwear was a natty repeated pattern of the international warning symbol for radioactivity on a vivid yellow background (Top Man, £4.99). If he registered my little joke, he gave no sign. Instead, an impatient little wave of his hand ordered these down, too. The instant they were down he lunged forward, and without a word of warning assaulted me in an extraordinarily intimate manner with a cotton bud, causing me to jack-knife forward in pain and surprise.

I came up to London last week for a four-day jolly: two football matches, two parties. I can’t afford London hotel prices, so I booked myself into a youth hostel behind Portland Place. A smiling Uruguayan beauty checked me in to an eight-berth dormitory on the second floor. I laid claim to one of the top bunks by leaving my self-help paperback, Solitude, on the pillow. Then I stowed my wheelie bag in one of the lockers, set my shiny new four-number combination padlock to the year of the Peterloo Massacre, then went to Plaistow for a few shants before the first of the football matches. A liquid evening ended at about three in the morning, in a cellar in Soho, with an argument. The bouncer wanted to throw me out for falling about all over the place.

I met Combo at dawn. I was standing on the Malawian shore of the lake watching the sun rise over the mountains in Mozambique and she came and stood wordlessly beside me and we watched together. After a while I offered her a swig from the bottle I was holding. ‘No,’ she said, without taking her eyes away from the sun. ‘I am too drunk.’ It was the first sunrise of a four-day music festival. I’d been dancing all night on the beach. A line of four middle-class English girls were kneeling in a row at the water’s edge performing the Astanga yoga Salute to the Sun. You could feel the heat of the sun as soon as it had freed itself from the mountain tops. I was utterly at peace with myself for the first time in as long as I can remember.

Seven hours between flights at Nairobi airport and nowhere to smoke. So I bought a ten-dollar transit visa, left the airport precincts and headed for the nearest bar. It was called The Pub. The white-shirted, bow-tied waiters saw me coming and greeted me with a chuckle, as if they were thinking, ‘Here comes another nicotine addict on his ten-dollar transit visa.’ I hadn’t been settled at my outside table for more than a minute with a Tusker and a fag when a brisk, unshaven man asked if he could share it. He was on a three-hour stopover between Kinshasa and Dubai (final destination Pakistan). He’d smoked four cigarettes already, he said: two in the transit-lounge toilets immediately after disembarking the plane, and two on the short walk to The Pub.

Mvuu Lodge, Liwonde, Malawi I arrived at the jetty in pitch darkness. A boat was waiting to ferry me across the river. On the other side I was handed a refreshing drink and asked to sign a waiver form exempting the management from legal action by my next of kin if I was attacked by wild animals during my stay. Then I was shown to my tent. The ranger led me along a sandy path across open bush. It was a bit of a hike. My tent was ten yards from a lagoon, explained the ranger, when we got there. That peculiar slapping and splashing noise was the sound of crocodiles snatching at fish, he said. Beside my bed was an aerosol can of insecticide. This was to be fired at any nasty insects encroaching on my tent. Next to that was a red plastic trumpet attached to an aerosol can.

Prince Philip is right about modern television sets. He says they are poorly designed. If one needs to adjust one’s set, he told a television interviewer, one has to get down on all fours with magnifying glass, instruction manual, and a torch between one’s teeth, and virtually make love to the thing. He also has a horror of remote controls. The smallness and mysteriousness of the symbols irritate him. For keen-eyed ten-year-old children, he says, they are fine. But for elderly dukes they are a maddening, unfathomable mystery. I wonder whether he’s been on all fours on the carpet with a torch between his teeth because he and Her Majesty the Queen have gone digital. We have down here in the West Country. It’s been a protracted and confusing business.

As I was getting changed, a naked figure emerged from the clouds of steam in the showers. The upper half was the Incredible Hulk, the lower half Charles Haughtry. I recognised the face. It was a lad I always used to see working out in the other gym. Usually, we’d be the only ones in there: him red-faced and grunting, lifting big weights in front of the mirror; me on the warm-up mats, bending myself into shapes. At first I didn’t speak or even acknowledge his existence. But I saw him there so often that eventually it would have been rude to continue ignoring him, so I used to give him a single curt nod before going down stiffly into Downward-facing Dog or the Plank.

After three days walking alone on the high moor, and two nights at a remote youth hostel, above which the silence and the immensity and brilliance of the universe were unnerving, I jumped in the car and drove down to the nearest centre of commerce and civilisation to reacquaint myself with humanity and get some more cash. The small market town was built on a reassuringly human scale and busy with shoppers. It had narrow streets with narrow pavements, and a one-way system and parking restrictions were in operation. The Marquis of Granby was open. So was the Spar and the post office and the charity shop. And, crucially from my point of view, there was a cashpoint machine. I parked the car between two mud-spattered Land Rovers.

I glanced in my rear-view mirror. A police patrol car, right on my tail, blue lights flashing. A woman cop in the passenger seat leaning forward and jabbing instructions at me with her forefinger. I was to turn left into the pub car park. I knocked up the indicator stick and swung in. The patrol car followed close behind. I cut the engine and got out of the car quickly and walked a few paces towards the policewoman as she got out of hers. No doubt she wanted a word about my not wearing a seat belt. My brother is a big incorruptible policeman. Only the day before, funnily enough, he’d given me a useful tip for exactly this kind of situation.

The plan was that in the morning we’d gather our wild foods from the woods and hedgerows, and in the afternoon we’d light a fire and cook and eat a communal meal. But if our survival had really depended on it, the first thing I would have done was to butcher and eat the little boy Zac. He was about five years old, and he arrived at our base camp in the redwood plantation with his mother, two older sisters and older brother. His mother was a care-worn, ethereal, still beautiful middle-class woman and one saw immediately that she was a woman of new-age beliefs and sensitivities. You heard it first in her high, thin voice, which avoided assertive cadences. Then you recognised that her every utterance, from her ‘Sorry we’re late, everybody!’ to her ‘Wow!

William was standing alone at the bus stop so I pulled over and offered him a lift into town. He accepted with alacrity. My passenger seat was a long way down, much further than he anticipated, and he lowered himself into it gingerly, and with difficulty and some agonised groaning. But once he was established and his seat belt was on, he recovered quickly. ‘’Tis lovely to see you again,’ he said, placing four fingers lovingly on my bare forearm and keeping them there. I think the old countryman was hoping I’d lean across and offer him my mouth. The fingers exerted the faintest pressure and I could feel his gaze, intent on my profile. I’ve never given William the slightest encouragement, but he never fails to give me the opportunity to allow him to kiss me.