Low life

I hadn’t seen cousin Claire for five years. She was as lovely and as enthusiastic as ever as she welcomed me into her barn, where she was throwing a party for her mother and father’s golden wedding anniversary. She clocked the tie — the White Park Cattle Association tie — immediately. White cattle heads on a navy blue background. ‘I recognise that tie!’ she exclaimed, clasping her hands together and buckling at the knees with surprise. She’d kept several specimens of this ancient breed as a hobby for several years, but gave them up, or was persuaded to give them up, because they can be a bit touchy and she had young children around. ‘I’m on the committee,’ I said. ‘Vice-chairman.’ She almost fell over backwards.

I inserted my earphones and stepped up on the treadmill. I kept my finger on the treadmill’s speed-control button until it showed 11.5 kilometres per hour, then I pressed ‘recently purchased’ and ‘play’ on my MP3 player. The first track was Albert King doing his version of ‘Honky Tonk Women’. I was up and running. If I’m in the right mood for it, I go a bit mental when I run on the treadmill while listening to music. I mouth songs, or dance and run at the same time. I get a few looks, but let them look. Running’s the governor, as boxing trainers say, and I enjoy running more than anything else at the moment. The novelist Haruki Murakami put me on to it.

After lunch on Sunday the sun put in a rare appearance. While everyone shot off to the beach, I ignored it in protest and went to the cinema. The local cinema is a converted barn run by volunteer movie buffs, who leaven mainstream Hollywood with a strong dash of European arthouse. For two-and-a-half hours, while everyone was out sunning themselves, I sat in darkness and watched a 40-year-old black-and-white Japanese film about a man and a woman down a hole. In the advance publicity sheet for Woman of the Dunes, the reviewer said that the film was a collaboration between three of Japan’s leading post-war intellectuals: Hiroshi Teshigahara (director), Kobo Abe (screenplay) and Toru Takemitsu (music). This statement had excited me.

The answer to all my problems, I read last week in a fascinating little booklet on fungal infections, is a substance called caprylic acid. Left to run riot, it predicted, the fungus growing in my throat and digestive tract will cause flatulence and itching (which I already have in spades), and eventually psychosis. Caprylic acid, a substance found in coconuts and breast milk, was the best natural substance to combat it, it said. That, combined with as much raw garlic as I can stomach. Of course I can always visit a doctor and get a prescription for some virulent chemical that will have a scattergun effect and kill off the good fungus as well as the bad, leaving me nauseous and debilitated for a week, it said. But the booklet’s author warned sternly against this.

I hoped Joe was following me down the cliff path. It was unusual for him to lag behind. Normally he likes to lead the way. Perhaps he’d stopped off to self-medicate at the bank of tall grasses where he sometimes likes to browse and bite off a few individual stems, making judicious choices like a careful shopper. Perhaps he was feeling particularly seedy today and he needed to stop off. Certainly his rolling, spastic gait was more pronounced, so he must have been feeling his arthritis. I was about to call him, when he came careering around the bend in the cliff path, grinning at me. The path at this point is a foot wide and bordered by brambles on one side and tall stinging nettles on the seaward side. (A hundred and fifty years ago this was the main coach road along the coast.

I handed Trev his usual — a large house vodka and coke. ‘Come outside for a fag,’ he said. We took our drinks outside and Trev got out his Mayfairs. The landlord followed us out and told us ‘for the hundredth time, for crying out loud’ that we weren’t allowed to take drinks out on to the pavement, so we followed him back inside and placed our drinks on a table and went out again. Trev had had a bad week, he said. He’d broken a bone in his cueing hand on someone’s head, he’d spent a night in a cell, and to cap it all one of his houses had burnt down. (Trev is a builder. Recently he bought a couple of ruins, did them up, and let them out.) ‘What, completely destroyed?’ I said.

‘Busy in here tonight,’ I observed. ‘Hello, stranger!’ she said. ‘We’ve got a band on later. Didn’t you know?’ I didn’t. Eight pints of Foster’s, ten Silk Cut, and a game of pool had been the upper limit of my ambition for the evening when I looked in the mirror before coming out. I told Candice to make hers a large one. ‘And have you heard?’ she said over her shoulder as she pressed the glass up against the optic. ‘I’ve got a fella.’ ‘No!’ I said. Candice hadn’t had a bloke to call her own for ages and she couldn’t quite believe it herself. More good news. We both laughed. ‘Poor bloke,’ I said. ‘Anyone we know?

On Saturday night the hotel management threw a party for the guests. A Summer Party. We kicked off at 6.30 p.m. with tall drinks and canapés on the terrace. While we quaffed and nibbled and chatted, a singer sang to us. She sang her heart out to our indifferent backs and sunburnt necks. It was as if she were invisible to us, or her passion made her unreal. Then we went inside for a sumptuous buffet supper in the ballroom. Here, a five-piece band, including an accomplished lead guitarist with a golden earring, was doing its best to make the party go. The food queue passed right in front of him, and we stood there clutching our plates and chatting as though he wasn’t there either.

Once a year I turn out for Peter Oborne’s cricket team, the White City All-Stars, for their annual cricket weekend at Horningsham, a ludicrously pretty village next to Longleat House in Wiltshire. I can’t bowl, I’m hopeless with a bat, I can’t catch or throw. I try to make myself useful, however, by offering around cigarettes, helping to look for the ball when it’s been smashed into the long grass, pouring the teas and clapping when required. But I always come away afterwards with an uncomfortable feeling that, even in the game of cricket, conscientiousness and conviviality will never quite atone for ignorance of the rules and uselessness on the field of play. So why Peter rings me up each year and asks me to play I can’t fathom.

His shop was empty. There was no waiting. The barber delightedly welcomed me into his chair. Was I Iooking forward to the start of the new football season? Who did I support? Was it them over there? (He pointed with his head to the football stadium just across the road.) He was a Manchester United supporter, he said proudly, running the clippers up the sides of my head. Everybody at home in Mauritius supported the Red Devils: his brothers and sisters, his father, his grandfather, his uncles. He was a chatterbox. I was glad: I hadn’t spoken to a soul all day. But on hearing he was a Manchester United supporter, I immediately lost confidence in his intelligence. Conscious, perhaps, of his fall from grace he changed the subject and asked me how business was.

I was in the Groucho Club swapping self-satisfied greetings with leading hacks when the urge for nicotine became insistent and I stepped outside for a fag. The door hadn’t stopped swinging behind me when I was pounced on by a range of even more heartless, shameless characters. They were literally queuing to con cash out of me. ‘You want some coke, boss?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘Very good, very cheap.’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘Boss, let me give you a sample right here. Blow your mind.’ ‘Go away.’ ‘Only £40. I give you my phone number. Money-back guarantee.’ ‘Get out of my face.’ ‘OK. Give me one cigarette.’ A smoke-blackened man took his place.

Last week I’d had all I could take of the idiotic moral criticism levelled at me by those who profess to love me, and I fled and took refuge in a Premier Lodge. Or was it a Travelodge? I always confuse the two. Even as I checked in I wasn’t sure with which of the two hotel chains I’d made the booking. But the cheerful, dissolute-looking receptionist found my name on her printed list and told me I was welcome. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to me for ages. Room 312 was a small, square room with a double bed and a small portable TV. And that was it. There was no chair, no table, no trouser press, no fridge, no hotel chain art on the wall. It was merely a clean, comfortable, carpeted cell. Yes, the room smelt of sweaty socks.

There’s an obscure corner of me that relishes pain and physical injury. It doesn’t want permanent pain. But an occasional sharp reminder of the reality of pain exhilarates it. So when I foolishly unscrewed the cap on my car radiator and a fountain of boiling water erupted, scalding the underside of my forearm, this masochistic side of me was quite chuffed. The rest of me was immmediately concerned with refilling the radiator and reservoir. From the midden in the rear footwells I dug out two empty plastic water bottles and carried them up the drive of the nearest house and rang the bell beside the front door. It was a well-to-do sort of a road: a strip of grass separated the pavement from the road. The house was detached mock Tudor with roof gables.

My old BMW failed its MOT on a bald tyre and no spare. On this particular model the tyres are metric safety ones costing £200 each new, and that’s if you can find any. However, I eventually found a set of five on eBay, in used condition, with plenty of tread left, and won them for £31. They were in Lymington, near Bournemouth. I rang the seller to establish contact and arrange to pick them up. The phone was answered by a calm, measured voice reciting the six-digit telephone number in the old-fashioned manner. Judging by the noises off, he was speaking from a mechanic’s workshop. I said I’d be along to pick up the tyres tomorrow afternoon. He said it was best if I rang him for directions when I was approaching Lymington.

Siren’s call ‘Looking for love?’ said a junk-mail invitation to join an online dating site free of charge. They’d hit the nail on the head. I signed up and followed the step-by-step instructions to compiling and posting my profile. First I had to describe myself in at least 28 words. Then I had to tick boxes about whether I eat meat, or smoke, or want children and so on. Finally I had to display a photograph of myself. I have few downloadable digital photographs of myself and resorted to a snap of me taken on holiday in Guyana. I’m stepping out across the savannah at first light on the trail of a giant anteater.

My last day in Australia I spent in Sydney. In the afternoon, under a blackening sky, I took the ferry out to Manly, sat on the beach and wrote a letter to my boy, enclosing a sample of Manly sand between the pages. Then I returned by ferry to Sydney, and on the way back to the hostel I stopped off at a city centre bookstore. While visiting Digger in Kalgoorlie, he’d praised a biography called A Fortunate Life as a classic of Australian literature, and I thought I’d see if they had a copy that I could look at and possibly buy. A.B. Facey was born in the goldfields of Victoria in the 1890s. Aged two he lost his gold prospector father to typhoid and his mum left him in the care of his grandmother. He started work as a farm labourer aged eight.

Journey’s end After visiting Digger in Kalgoorlie, I drove his old ute across Australia. In Australia, ute is short for utility vehicle — or what we Poms call a pick-up truck. Digger had recently bought himself a secondhand Toyota Landcruiser, with double fuel tanks and an extended cab to accommodate a massive fridge behind the seat to keep his beers cold. So he had no further use for his faithful old workhorse. I was to drive it across the continent to his home in Wandiligong, Victoria, an old gold miner’s cottage that he abandoned after his marriage failed, and leave it there. The ute was a 3.8 litre diesel Toyota Hilux, sun-bleached beige, originally used for herding cattle. Steer-sized dents in the door panels gave it character.

I met Digger 30 years ago in a plastics factory. We put in 12-hour shifts on adjacent injection moulding machines, which is a good way to get to know somebody, and we knocked about together after work, mainly in pubs, for a year or so, and then I went away and we lost contact. Six weeks ago he sent me an email. He’d recently taught himself computer skills and gone online and he’s getting in touch with all his old English buddies, he said. He was living in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, working for a mining company. He takes geologists into the outback, sets up their camps and generally looks after them, and when they’ve finished examining the rocks, he conducts them safely back to civilisation.

Kalgoorlie, Western Australia Yesterday my friend Digger and I spent the afternoon touring the brothels of Kalgoorlie, an old gold and nickel mining town in the middle of nowhere. In more prosperous years Kalgoorlie had as many as 18 houses of ill-repute, but now there are just three. The global economic downturn has dealt Kalgoorlie a solid blow, though locals are expecting things to pick up again, and soon. We spent an hour at 181 Langtree’s — motto: ‘The girls are yum at 181’ — a new and elaborately themed brothel operating with just two working girls at the moment, but six more, they told us, were starting work on Anzac Day. Prostitution is traditional in Kalgoorlie.

I’m virus aware. For example, I don’t touch door handles in public lavatories. If they’ve got in-swinging doors, I time my exit to coincide with someone else and let them grasp the handle. And I never, ever, touch the rubber handrail on Tube station escalators. Imagine what hundreds of thousands of commuting fingertips deposit on one of those during the course of a day! I suppose the paranoia is a leftover from my nursing days. Once you learn about the mechanics of infection, you hear it in every stranger’s cough or sneeze, and see it on every hotel TV remote. I’m always conscious, too, of the 40,000 potentially infectious droplets that fly out of a person’s mouth at speeds variously estimated at between 95 and 650 miles per hour when a person sneezes.