Low life

My boy’s mother’s husband was plastering a wall last week when a sack of lime fell off the scaffold and landed on his dog... My boy’s mother’s husband was plastering a wall last week when a sack of lime fell off the scaffold and landed on his dog, which was lying at the foot of the ladder. The sack burst open and some lime went in the dog’s eye. For nearly a week the poor dog’s cloudy, pus-encrusted eye introduced a welcome little drama into their united family. Would Duke lose his sight in that eye? (And, if so, would he still be able to retrieve shot birds with only one eye?) Or would the vet’s unbelievably expensive eye-drops save it?

The moment the announcer stated that the 9.05 to Newquay was leaving from platform four, virtually the entire crowd on the concourse at Paddington station arose like a Zulu impi and ran towards it. Platoons of young totty, hampered by pink and lilac suitcases as heavy as themselves, screamed with excitement and frustration as they were left standing by the swarms of young lads who raced along the platform to secure seats. I was standing, fortunately, beside the entrance to platform four, and was in the vanguard of the pell-mell race for the second-class carriages at the front of the train. Spotting a vacant seat in the carriage on the far side of the buffet car, I jumped aboard and dived into it.

When I was six or seven I went up to London with my father in his car. As we passed through Whitechapel in the East End, he pointed out a pub called the Blind Beggar. ‘That’s where Ronald Kray shot George Cornell,’ he said. There was an element of something approaching pride in his voice, as if the grim-looking pub set back from the road was a significant cultural landmark of which I ought to take note. I did take note (I was an obedient and faithful child), and later, when I became a reader, I tried to find out everything I could about Ron and Reg and their criminal ‘firm’.

My sister was round at our house at the weekend, trying to give up cannabis after 35 years. It’s her idea but she was absolutely furious about it and her mouth was twisted with vexation, even when she lay asleep on the sofa. On Saturday afternoon me and my boy thought it best to be well out of the way should the volcano erupt again. So we drove up to Dartmoor and sat in the shade of a small primeval oak wood for the afternoon. Wistman’s Wood is a rare and unusual remnant of the kind of oak woodland that used to cloak the moor. It has survived because it grows out of a ‘clitter’ (boulder-strewn) slope, which has saved the oaks from the axe and protected young saplings from creatures that nibble.

I’m back in the gym. I put it down to the lighter evenings and the rising sap. It’s been so long since I last worked out that I had forgotten what the gym card in my wallet looked like. ‘Sorry, sir, we don’t take library cards,’ said the woman on the reception desk. ‘Where’ve you been, anyway?’ Looking around the gym I wasn’t the only returning penitent. Bikes, treadmills, steppers, rowers and cross-country ski machines were all occupied and flat out and there were loads of unfamiliar backsides. The combined noise from the treadmills and rowers was deafening. Someone I hadn’t seen there before was a pal called Dave. Dave is a drug dealer (est. 1999) and a heavy drinker and smoker.

We love this old house and can’t imagine living anywhere else. But needs must and we’ve finally bitten the bullet — the house is on the market from today. Twenty years we’ve been here. For 15 of these it was a home for nine elderly residents run by my parents. Now everyone’s dust except me and my mother  — and she reckons she’s not far off it. We’re two lonely planets orbiting in a house on a cliff with seven bedrooms and 11 lavatories to choose from. It’s a long walk just to answer the phone. If it’s someone for my mother, the caller might hear the receiver being slammed down on the telephone table, receding footsteps, irritable shouting, doors banging — then prolonged silence.

Since my boy passed his driving test, just one month after his 17th birthday, I no longer drive the ten miles to his mother’s house to pick him up at weekends. Now he comes and goes between his parents as he pleases, and the weekly mug of tea and a cigarette at her kitchen table, the 20 minutes of gossip, and the ceremony of the handing over of the 40 quid child maintenance, have come to an abrupt end. Missing the tea and gossip, however, I popped over there one day last week for a purely social visit. My boy’s mother hasn’t been able to go anywhere in the past 12 years. During that time she let herself go. Her hair ran wild, and she piled on the pounds. The fatter she became the less she moved around, and the less she moved around the fatter she became.

At Cheltenham this year I was once again a guest of racing tipster and bon viveur Colonel Pinstripe. The Colonel is famous for his rambling, gossipy, sexist, often libellous telephone tipster line, the avowed goal of which (seldom attained) is to send callers home with ‘bulging trousers’. Serious, high-rolling gamblers who ring up his tipster line must be surprised to find themselves invited by the Colonel to repeat solemnly after him, as if it were a mantra, the words ‘bulging trousers’, having earlier learnt, at a pound a minute, about the Colonel’s obsessive passion for the wife of Irish trainer Willie Mullins.

We didn’t get to Sheffield till after dark. But when the Renault Mégane drew up as we waited beside the station taxi rank, the boredom and discomfort of the interminable train journey was instantly forgotten. Our dog-eared second-hand car-price guide stated that a 1998 Renault Mégane 1.6 Sport was worth anything between £800 and £1,500. My boy had won this one on the eBay internet auction site for just £500. All being well, he’d got himself a bargain. We took the car in greedily with our eyes, scanning it for such obvious defects as might be visible under the tangerine street lighting. It seemed to be all there. No obvious dents or scratches. We climbed in the back. The seller had brought his girlfriend along.

Supporting West Ham this season has been so full of drama and surprise, it’s been like living in the Book of Revelation. A brief summary. Last season the newly promoted team of Young Turks put together by our decent manager Alan Pardew feared no one. We finished a vertiginous ninth in the Premiership and got to within a whisker of winning the FA Cup final. It was a wonderful, unbelievable season. Even the doubting Thomases among us (given our history of glorious failure, that’s most of us) succumbed to cautious optimism for the future. This season it’s been like watching a car crash in slow motion. Wealth and unaccustomed success, it turns out, has ruined our team of young millionaires.

During the last week of my stay in the Alpujarras, the almond trees flowered. It happened almost overnight. There was an exceptionally warm afternoon and evening, and next morning the trees were foaming with pink and white petals, and very pretty it was, too. The day they flowered was my birthday. To mark it, I went for a long walk in the countryside. I didn’t enjoy it. The almond blossom’s perfect newness made me jealous. At 50, it seemed to me, I had more in common with the stones under my feet than with the flowers. Fifty! Even the word seemed distasteful. To have lived for half a century somehow seemed wrong. Today, life expectancy in the world’s poorer countries is about 45.

Las Alpujarras There’s a man in one of the high mountain villages who lives with a cow and spends much of his time studying the cloud formations. By all accounts he can predict the weather for months, even years ahead with some accuracy, a skill passed down from father to son. For several months now, however, the clouds have consistently baffled and amazed him. Nothing like them, apparently, has been seen either in his lifetime or his father’s. If pressed to stick his neck out, his prediction for the coming year or two is tragedy, miracles, and meteorological cataclysm. On Saturday I joined a protest in the town square of the local equivalent of the county town, a hippie-infested place lower down the mountains (my ears popped on the way), about the water shortage.

Las Alpujarras When I was in Spain at Christmas, I bumped into the guide who had led the walking tour of the Sierra Nevada that I’d been on nearly a decade ago. I met him and his wife by chance in the narrow street. He recognised me and invited me to join them at a nearby bar for café con leche, where he told me his news. He’d had to give up the walking tours because he’d been ill with shingles behind the eyes. But he was better now. He’d finally been persuaded to have a consultation with a white witch living in his village who specialises in curing herpes and shingles. All the witches around here specialise. There are black witches too, he said. These also specialise, he understands, in perpetrating certain kinds of evil.

The check-in queue was constrained by portable barriers into one of those snaking, pointless and unexpectedly intimate queues that are all the rage at British airports. Every time I made the 180-degree turn, I found myself once again face to face with these two elderly women. They were short and stout and festooned with gold chains, and one of them had the same kind of striking, deeply lined face that W.H. Auden had in later years. And they both had something unusual about them that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Finally I checked in my bag and joined the queue for security clearance. Someone touched me on the shoulder. A young, black-haired woman. Was I going to Malaga? I was, I said.

Winston Churchill’s secretary John Colville records that one of the first signs that the great man’s phenomenal memory was beginning to fail him, and that dementia was setting in, was when he made the intriguing faux pas of addressing a man by the name of Brownjohn as Mr Shorthorn.  A sure sign that the mental ebb tide is in full flood, of course, is when you can’t remember your own name. Nursing homes are packed to the rafters with people who’ve forgotten what they’re called. It’s said that US President Ronald Reagan, making a visit with Nancy to a residential home for the elderly, was led up to the oldest resident and, to the woman’s obvious delight, embraced her warmly. ‘Do you know who I am?

It must be very dispiriting to be born into this world and find that you are an intensively reared hen. But maybe, if a representative of the human race explained gently to you in chicken language that human beings are the apex of creation, and chickens commodities, and that this, in a roundabout way, accounts for your breasts being so heavy your legs can’t support you, you might think to yourself, as you hang upside-down waiting to have your six-week-old throat slit by a youth on piecework listening to drum and bass on his iPod, ‘Hey, it’s been fun. Glad to have been of service.’ But if you learnt instead that your breasts, instead of nourishing a human being, will be fed to a domestic cat, you’d probably want to register a complaint somewhere.