Low life

Last Thursday I was volunteer driver for the day for a Heartbeaters’ outing. Heartbeaters is a local exercise and social club for people recovering from heart attacks that meets weekly (and perhaps weakly) in the Baptist church hall for an hour of gentle physical jerks. We went to Greenway, Agatha Christie’s house on the east bank of the river Dart in Devon. She bought Greenway and its 33 acres in 1939 for £6,000, and the National Trust has just spent £5.4 million doing it up, in the words of its website, ‘to retain the spirit of the place, its almost wayward character, its atmospheric beauty and its timeless qualities’.

It’s a proud day when your boy goes for his first job interview with a career in mind and says he wants to borrow your suit. He left school two years ago, aged 16, knowing a bit about the Nazis and how to bake a scone and that’s about it. He gained no qualifications, something of an achievement these days. The parents’ evenings I attended each year were like going from one party political broadcast to another. Through their unhappy smiles, his overworked teachers assured me that my boy was either ‘brilliant’ or ‘doing brilliantly’. Which was a strange thing for anybody concerned about academic excellence to say about a lad who has never read a book in his life, nor shown the slightest inclination to do so.

The help-yourself breakfast buffet was a single, waxed carton of orange juice (made from concentrate), and a stack of small upturned glasses. I filled one of these, tipped it down my throat, poured another and bore it to a table set for one beside the swing service door leading to the kitchen. A grubby laminated menu on the tea-stained tablecloth said that the Continental breakfast was tea or coffee with brown or white toast. Dotted about at the other tables were what appeared to be foreign tourists: a solitary meditative backpacker, two not quite awake couples, a fitfully vivacious table of four Spaniards. The unspoken shame of having to start the day in such shabby, penny-pinching surroundings was palpable. On the far side of the room, directly opposite my table, was a large mirror.

The average age of the residents in our village here on the south Devon coast must be up in the seventies. Every time I answer the door the person standing there is panting and leaning on a stick. There was a murder in the village a couple of years ago. This man battered and stabbed his blind wife to death as she lay in bed, then killed the cat. He was 88 years old. His wife was 87. I don’t know how old the cat was. He was the oldest man to be charged with murder in English legal history. He pleaded not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility and the judge immediately set him free owing to his being too frail to be a danger to the public. That’s how old we are in our village.

I owe English Heritage an apology. In last week’s column I was scornful of the content of the short historical documentary they show every half hour on a screen suspended above the ruins of Lullingstone Roman Villa. Specifically, I took issue with the idea expressed in the film’s narrative that Romans — or Romanised Britons — were social climbers obsessed with material gain, upward mobility and dinner parties.

There was this evil Albanian gang specialising in kidnapping young girls, forcibly addicting them to heroin and selling them on to wealthy Arabs as sex slaves. To simplify their operation and reduce shipping costs, the gang had decided to concentrate their efforts on kidnapping middle-class Californian girls arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. But when they abducted a sensitive teenager on her first visit to Europe, they hadn’t reckoned on the determination of her war-hero father to find and rescue her. The girl was worth much more to the Albanians than their other captives ‘because she is a vier-jeen’. She was therefore set aside for an invitation-only auction for high-rolling Arab sheikhs.

‘My life’s over, doctor,’ I said. ‘A young man like you! Nonsense!’ he said, peering at me over his half-moon glasses. He was that wonderful combination: a fat man squeezed into an old-fashioned waistcoat. Occasionally, he mopped the perspiration from his brow with the handkerchief he kept in the outside breast pocket of his jacket. ‘How old are you?’ he said. I told him. He wrote the figure down. ‘And how old is your partner?’ I told him. He raised his eyebrows and wrote this figure down underneath. ‘How long have you been together?’ ‘About three months,’ I said. ‘And how long have you been having difficulties?’ ‘About three months,’ I said, and he wrote that down as well.

The bride was several minutes late arriving at the church. Her side of the congregation were farming people, and while we waited, and the choir sang, the bloke on the pew beside me showed me photos of his new Bedlington terrier, Archie. He did look a handsome chap. My one ambition is to keep a dog — in particular a Bedlington crossed with a whippet — so my appreciation of the slide show on the back of his digital camera while we waited for the bride was enthusiastic and genuine. It was strange to be sitting in God’s house again. I was brought up going to churches of all denominations and continued to go of my own accord as an adult for several years.

I can feel a tremendous draught of change affecting me,’ said Dave, waggling his fingers at us as if playing a chest-high piano. ‘It’s the strongest, most noticeable draught I’ve felt for 20 years. You can feel the draught, can’t you?’ The meeting, last Friday night, was entitled ‘The Saturn-Uranus Oppositions of 2008–9 and the Eclipses of 2008’. We’d met in Dave’s study. Listening to Dave describe the planetary draughts he was experiencing, besides myself, were three women called Mara, Hara and Zhiva. Somewhere upstairs in his big old house, teenagers were galumphing about and shouting. I’d seen the meeting advertised on a café noticeboard.

I first came across the book Iron John: Man and Masculinity by Robert Bly when I saw it being clutched in the bony old fingers of the man that used to chair meetings of our local Alcoholics Anonymous group. At the end of one of our weekly meetings he held up this book and pointed the cover at us. This man never managed to master the Alcoholics Anonymous principle that we were to depend on a ‘higher power’ for help. He’d overcome his addiction by applying his great intellect to the problem. He said to me once, ‘I wouldn’t argue with me because I had a superb education, you know.’ And here he was giving us poor deadbeats a glimpse of the kind of thing that a superbly educated man was reading these days.

I’m down in the bar underneath the stand at half time and everyone’s exceedingly jolly. The team isn’t playing badly for a change. At least we’re trying. Plus, we’ve got a new bloke who can actually pitch over an accurate corner kick. And the sun’s shining. The police run a tight ship at football matches these days. We aren’t allowed to stand up during the game, or smoke, or consume alcohol. And we have to watch what we say or sing because certain subjects are strictly off-limits. Shirt-sleeved policemen sitting in a control room closely monitor our behaviour on CCTV screens. They are assisted in this task by hundreds of match-day stewards who crouch in front of the wall separating us from the pitch, watching and listening.

What rain! And what gales! No wonder sales of thermal underwear have shot up by 50 per cent already this year. I live a stone’s throw from the beach and I haven’t had a dip in the sea once yet, let alone done a stint relaxing on the beach with the kids. And along at the far end of the beach, at the designated naturist section, only the most diehard nudists are sticking it out this summer. The only thing to do in continuously foul weather like this has been to keep indoors and watch the Olympic Games. I watched as much as possible down at the local gym on the recently installed row of high definition tellies. It was marvellous. I saw the opening ceremony there, quite by accident.

I’m in the pub before the first match of the new Premiership season, a pint of lager in each hand, and I’m thinking here we go again, another nine months of the same old overpriced, overhyped rubbish. The same old faces are pushing their way into the packed bar — though some are browner than when I last saw them back in May — and ordering pints from the same old bar staff. Out in the beer garden, the same old groups of mates face each other in convivial circles, pints in hand, beer bellies straining against the shiny material of their replica shirts. I’m out in the beer garden, standing with my lot. Six are here already, one more on the way. I went through secondary school with three of them, so it feels like the beginning of term.

Under a low oak-beamed ceiling, three middle-aged men were perched on stools around the bar. One of these greeted me, walked around to the other side of the bar and asked me what I was having. He wasn’t the landlord, he said. The landlord was busy out at the back for a moment. There was a small selection of real ales. I chose the Badger’s Todger. He poured me a pint and returned to his stool and rejoined his muted three-cornered conversation. The bar was cosy enough but the quietness was oppressive. A big mistake coming to this place, I thought, as I took a sip. Nice pint, though. Then the landlord materialised behind the bar. He was a large man, well manicured, conservatively dressed. You could tell how he voted in the last general election just by looking at him.

As we went in, our hostess mentioned that the restaurant had three Michelin stars, but at 78 years of age the chef felt he would rather live without the daily pressure of living up to three stars and had requested Michelin to reduce it to two. We were shown to our table and I chose to sit with my back to the large picture window, through which could be seen half a dozen mountains and a couple of lakes, and faced instead a blank wall. I thought I’d let others enjoy the view as we ate. But virtue has its own rewards, and after a few moments this blank wall slowly ascended, like a cinema curtain before the main feature, to reveal, behind glass, an immaculate, brightly lit kitchen with a dozen chefs in snow-white uniforms busily and unselfconsciously preparing our evening meal.

‘Gordon, can I have your autograph?’ I said, offering pen and small notebook folded back at a new page. I’d butted into his conversation, but he swung round in his seat and smiled pleasantly up at me and took the pen and notebook and inscribed his name. ‘You’re a great man, Gordon,’ I said, as I looked over his shoulder to watch him write. ‘I was behind the goal that night you saved the Geoff Hurst penalty.’ ‘You’re West Ham, then?’ he said respectfully. ‘I am,’ I said. Gordon Banks OBE returned my pen and notebook and then opened his right palm and presented it to me. The economy and intimacy of the gesture took me by surprise. This was no formal invitation to shake hands.

Last month I noticed that the only poem I’ve ever written was a suitable candidate for the local literary festival’s poetry competition, whose theme had been announced as ‘landscape as muse’. So I dug it out of the drawer and had another look at it. I thought the poem excellent. One of the competition rules was that each entry must have a title, however, and mine was untitled, so I sat down to think of one. After some thought, I gave it the title: ‘Snapshot of my eight-year-old son and Mr Allen standing on a hillside above a bay in early autumn waiting for the albino ferret Fatima to come out of the rabbit hole’.

I rested my chin on my hand and watched the passing scenery all the way to London. For most of the journey the sky was filled with towering black clouds and from time to time rain smashed against the window. The train seemed to be racing just ahead of a deep, fast-moving depression travelling west to east. Passengers with a raincoat or umbrella stowed on the luggage rack were probably quietly congratulating themselves for their forward thinking. At Paddington station I stepped down from the train and went and stood on smokers’ corner and smoked a fag in violently gusting wind and bright sunshine. I was headed for a rooftop party. Squinting up between the buildings, I tried to work out whether or not it was going to rain.

I’ve not been to Pamplona’s famous week-long ‘running of the bulls’ and bullfighting fair of Saint Fermin since 2002; but every year since, on 6 July, at midday, when the town council lets off the rocket signalling the start of the festivities, I’ve felt a pang of regret that I’ve once again failed to manage my life sufficiently well to be there with the thousands who have. I first went ten years ago, after reading Hemingway’s bullfighting encyclopedia Death in the Afternoon. After half a dozen chapters of meticulous description of the Spanish corrida, Hemingway admits that it is beyond even his powers of description to convey fully the effect on the senses of a bullfight, and challenges the reader to go to Spain and see one before reading on.

An extraordinary email from theatre critic Mr Lloyd Evans arrived in my inbox last week. He’d written a play, it said, a two-hander, and one of the characters was based on me. He’d based the character on me after we’d met at a Spectator Christmas lunch five years ago. The play was opening at the King’s Head in Islington on Tuesday. If, after seeing his dramatic representation of me, I was minded to sue, it went on, perhaps we could come to an arrangement that benefited plaintiff and defendant at the expense of the lawyers. Meanwhile, would I like a ticket? I don’t know Lloyd well.