Low life

Two old carrier bags at the back of the cupboard I’d not noticed before. I dragged them out to see what was in them. It was old letters from the war and sepia photographs, hundreds of them. Detritus from Uncle Jack, whom we looked after in his last years when he couldn’t remember anything and took to the bottle. Uncle Jack was my grandfather’s brother. (My grandfather died of a brain tumour long before I was born.) I sat down and looked at the photographs and read some of the letters. The majority were from Uncle Jack’s mother, my great-grandmother, whom he adored. In them she tells her son all the family news and about how she longs for the day when the family is reunited. Uncle Jack was in the Royal Artillery.

The emblazoned ship was just in. Foot passengers had yet to appear in the terminal’s arrivals shed, which was silent and deserted except for this wonderfully fat, moon-faced man taking up all the room on the only bench provided for meeters and greeters. He was perched at the exact centre, his legs as wide apart as they’d go. He looked up and smiled at me, and without any formal preliminaries told me that he was waiting to meet his Aunt Dolly, his only living relative, whom he hadn’t seen for about a year. I would have liked to reciprocate his open-heartedness by telling him I was there to meet my 16-year-old boy, who has just left school.

Another reason why Trev should have gone on the stage instead of becoming a builder, apart from his love of the limelight, is the wonderful expressiveness of his face. Now, merely by giving me a level stare and bulging his eyes at me, he’s conveying that he is about to lose his struggle to keep the lid on his mirth. That he, Trev, should be suppressing an emotion merely out of politeness, and then confiding this, to me, via a subtle facial gesture, like some fastidious bourgeois, is in itself an example of this street-fighting farm boy’s highly developed sense of dramatic irony. What’s amusing him is the scene being enacted at the next stout pub table, where a chap is trying to have a ‘heart to heart’ with Sharon.

My boy left school at the end of last term, aged 16. He can read and write after a fashion, and he knows something about the rise and fall of the Nazi party and how to make delicious scones, so all in all a good result. After he’d been at home for a week his mother’s boyfriend asked him what he was going to do for a living. My boy said he wanted to be a businessman. My boy’s mother’s boyfriend — an unbelievably decent, hardworking, teetotal, pigeon-shooting man — scoffed. This led to some hard words being said on both sides, which made my boy’s mother weep and left an unpleasant atmosphere in the humble but normally harmonious home. So when he came to stay at the weekend I sat my boy down and gave him some fatherly advice.

If ever I was passing the Courtauld Institute in London with five minutes to spare, I’d chuck the woman behind the desk a fiver, jog up the 300-year-old spiral staircase and go and look at a picture by Wassily Kandinsky called ‘Rapallo: Grey Day’. I know nothing about painting and I knew nothing about Kandinsky except what it said on the wall: that he was Russian and that he travelled around Europe at the turn of the last century with a female artist called Münter. If I thought anything at all, I thought that perhaps Mr Courtauld had unwisely subscribed to someone else’s enthusiasm for a passing fad, but they’d kept it on display because it was so pretty. Knowledge or no knowledge, however, looking at this picture always did the trick.

The only cinema within a 30-mile radius of my home is an Art cinema in a 400-year-old barn. A thatched 400-year-old barn. If the nonsense being shown is the latest cutting-edge nonsense, cottage-based intellectuals flock there from miles around. And to see these intellectuals en masse in the bar before the film is to begin to understand why Guinean President Francisco Nguema had them all executed, then banned the use of the word ‘intellectual’. Admittedly, Nguema, who ordered that church sermons include references to him as ‘The Only Miracle’, may not have been thinking clearly at the time. He had a chip on his shoulder because he failed the Spanish civil service exam three times. I have no such chip on my shoulder, however.

Given all the hoo-hah surrounding Prince Charles’s decision to allow a granite stone memorial to be placed in a secret and remote spot on Dartmoor in memory of his friend the poet Ted Hughes, I expected to encounter something along the lines of Cleopatra’s needle when I went to look for it last week. The objections to Ted Hughes’s memorial were many and various. Environ- mentalists were concerned about soil erosion caused by the feet of hordes of literary pilgrims and paint pot-wielding feminists. Levellers complained about the exception being made to the ‘no memorials’ rule applying on Dartmoor. What’s so special about a poet? they said. Why not a farmer? Regional patriots were disgusted because Hughes was a Yorkshireman.

I’ve got my ticket. I can’t quite believe how I managed it — I keep studying it under a magnifying glass and holding it up to the light to make sure it’s real — but I’ve got one. And like a lover who has to introduce the subject of the loved one into every conversation, I tell people who aren’t remotely interested in Saturday’s FA Cup Final all about it. It’s a kind of revenge. Village life consists mainly of people pinning you up against a dry-stone wall and telling you things that neither concern nor interest you. Have you ever driven through a rural area and remarked how village after village appears to be deserted? Friends, they aren’t deserted: we’re all hiding from the village bores.

On Saturday morning I woke early. I was in a strange bed, in an unfamiliar bedroom, fully clothed, with my shoes on. Curled up beside me was a woman I didn’t recognise. I lifted the covers and peeked underneath to see if she had anything on. She was wearing a blue dress. Tilting my head gave me an excruciating pain just behind my eyeballs. I’d fallen off the wagon again. Why am I so powerless against alcohol? I’d left the house the night before brimming with health and optimism. Now I felt as if I was actually dying. What had caused the capitulation? I tried to piece things together. Party. One drink had led to another and I’d been to a party. Had I danced? I’d danced. I’d tripped the light fantastic. And had there been any drugs?

There were four of us last week in the caravan near the beach in north Cornwall for our annual family holiday: me, my boy, my boy’s grandma and my boy’s little half-sister, Amy, aged ten. We were very excited to be bringing Amy this year. Her Mum has agoraphobia and hasn’t been out of the house since Amy was born, and Amy’s father labours six days a week and rests on the seventh, so Amy never really gets to go anywhere. But this year — hallelujah! — because Amy’s grandma was going down to the caravan with us, her mother agreed that Amy could come as well. Ten years old and the first time she’d been away from home for more than a day.

I was in the gents at the Black Lion in Plaistow, east London, standing at one of the two urinals, when it hit me. I was thinking about my Mum. She hasn’t been well. First it was a chest infection, then the violence of the coughing fits put her back out, rendering her out of action for over a fortnight. They say nurses make the worst patients and they’re right. Mum is 75 now, but the state registered nursing training she underwent in the Fifties became so ingrained in her, she’s remained a nurse at heart ever since. And she’s a difficult patient, permanently in a state of frustration at the weakness of her body. As a Christian, she’s waged a lifelong war against the flesh.

I feel sorry for Gorgeous George. It was a terrific idea to go on Big Brother and turn himself into a popular icon and get his political ideas across to a young audience. Full marks for that. And it might have worked if our close scrutiny of his interaction with a random group of strangers had shown him to be the cool guy he imagines he is. Unfortunately, the horrible truth unfolding daily before our very eyes, made more vivid, perhaps, by cruel editing, is that Galloway is a vain, arrogant, prickly, two-faced, conniving, paranoid snob. I still like him, though. I admire his balls, which were on show the other night when he was made to prance in front of the other house-mates wearing only a skintight rose-pink leotard.

On the second day of the New Year, I rose, dressed, arranged myself on my crutches and hobbled down the road to the station. It was wonderful to be outside again. (Never give credence to ideas that occur to you indoors, said Nietzsche, which I think I’ll take as my New Year’s resolution.) At the station there was a handy ramp up to the ticket office that I’d barely noticed before, then a footbridge over the railway lines to platform two. At London Bridge station I toppled off the train and stumped through the ticket barrier, down an escalator and along a subway to the Underground station, where I took a Jubilee line train to West Ham, then a District line train to Upton Park.

A special-needs bloke comes to our gym sometimes. He can’t speak, and he’s deaf, I think, and he doesn’t walk too well, but the disciplined intensity of his work-out is an example to us all. A carer follows him around to advise, guide and watch over him; an elderly man with a neatly trimmed beard and moustache. His respectfulness towards his charge borders on the abject. The special-needs bloke obeys his carer, allowing himself to be guided from machine to machine, but shows him no affection nor does he look him in the face. I’ve yet to see the special-needs bloke do anything controversial. Always well turned out in designer gym wear, he works out with exactly the right amount of seriousness for long-term gains. He’s a proper geezer.

We’d been excommunicated from the eBay auction site for over a year. Non-payment of fees. They said I owed £4.17; I maintained that I’d paid it. And because it’s easier to get in touch with God than it is with the eBay administration, that’s how things stood until a fortnight ago when I caved in to pressure from my boy and sent another cheque. At the weekend my boy comes to stay, as usual, and he’s logged on to eBay before he’s even taken his coat off. After lunch on Saturday I’m in the kitchen washing up. He comes in and advises me that he’s bid £500 for a car on my behalf and we are currently the highest bidder with 20 minutes to go. I dry my soapy hands and go and have a look at the computer screen.

I’ve gone round to Sharon’s and walked into a stand-up row between Sharon and her brother in their kitchen. They’re yelling at each other and the dog’s going barmy. She’s a slut and he’s a dick is the argument in a nutshell. The phone rings. I make myself useful and answer it. It’s Trevor, Sharon’s ex. He’s drunk, he’s down the pub and he wants Sharon to drive him and his van back to his house. He’s shouting as well. I relay the message to Sharon. She sags theatrically in despair, bursts into tears and aims a girly haymaker at her brother. I drive Sharon, who’s still weeping, to the pub. We can hear Trev shouting in the pub from outside in the carpark. He got a real gob on him. Trev’s in the back bar.

My friend and I arranged to meet outside the Boleyn pub, which is on the corner of Green Street and the Barking Road, 15 minutes before kick-off. I was about five minutes late and he wasn’t there. I had both our match-day tickets, so I couldn’t go in without him. I stood in the pub doorway and waited. If he didn’t turn up soon, we’d miss the start. I should have been gutted about this, because I’d flown across Europe that morning to get there, and he’d only had to come from Clapham, but the truth was I was just happy to be there.

The active volcano Stromboli, one of the Aeolian islands, rises out of the sea off the north-east coast of Sicily. It is forbidden to make the three-hour trek to the top without a guide, so I signed on with a chaperoned party of 30 tourists for a night climb. Our piratical-looking guide was a fierce disciplinarian. At each resting place he issued very specific instructions in harsh and oddly guttural French. Here we must drink something. Now we must put on our anoraks and hard hats. Here those that need to must urinate. Now we must eat something. And then, about halfway up, just before darkness fell, he ordered us to stop, turn around and look at the moon. Obediently we turned and looked. The light was just beginning to fail.

It’s believed by some that the town we use for shopping has something therapeutic in the air. Those who have looked into it go further. They say that the town stands beneath an intersection of ley lines, which subtly energises the inhabitants. This belief that occult energies permeate the town attracts to the area people who are well off, educated even, but permanently tired, dissatisfied with themselves and assailed by minor illnesses. They come in search of that spiritual key, pin number or magic word that will restore them to health and imbue their lives with significance. Last week a philosopher came to town, name of Freke, and I went along to hear him. The venue was a Tudor period meeting room in the High Street, not far from the King Bill pub. The time, early Friday evening.