Low life

The yellow plastic tables on the terrace outside the ferry-terminal bar faced directly into the afternoon sun. It was the last week of September and surprisingly hot. We’d been over to Roscoff for the day, from Plymouth, just for something to do, and we’d been uncomfortably hot all day, traipsing round in our sports anoraks and rucksacks. My boy said he was going for a wander, which I’m beginning to think is a euphemism for having a crafty fag. We’d seen all we wanted to see of Roscoff, a pretty little fishing town full of sprightly old French people, with an open-air food market, very expensive, with middle-class stall-holders. And we were hot.

In the 167 years that the blue riband of hare coursing, the Waterloo Cup, has been run, there have been just 21 slippers. For those unfamiliar with coursing, perhaps I should explain that I don’t mean over the years people at the event have been spotted wearing carpet slippers, and a record of these sightings meticulously kept. No, the slipper is the red-coated official who holds back the competing pair of greyhounds until he judges that the hare has about 100 yards’ start and both dogs have it in their sights. Then he runs forward with the animals frantically bounding under their leashes and releases them with a balletic flourish.

Six for Sunday lunch. Me, my boy, my mother, my mother’s boyfriend Dr Lovepants, my sister, and this poised, well-groomed, long-haired chap, billed as the new man in my sister’s life. Me and the boy are a bit late and everyone else has started eating. The new man in my sister’s life’s hair is receding at the front and long at the back and he’s got a pointy beard. I’m dying to discomfit him with searching questions. New men in my sister’s life, as a group, are normally among the most unserious people in the world. But this one looks like he’s treating the occasion with at least as much earnestness as my sister. The mien is essentially polite. The price tag on the bottle of French wine he’s brought says a whopping £6.50.

In summer we let half the house out to paying visitors, who generally stay for a week, from Saturday to Saturday. Before the guests arrive we always worry about whether they’ll like the place; whether they’ll feel that their hard-earned money has been well spent. The ones that come every year must like it, of course. But if people are coming for the first time, there is always the nagging anxiety that they might not think the place is all it’s cracked up to be in the brochure and feel cheated. This week’s guests, a couple, were first- timers. On Saturday morning I mowed the grass and strimmed the edges in their separate walled garden as usual.

Leaning against the hotel bar after dinner on the first evening of our residential erotic-writing course. On my right, John, a tall young energetic skinhead theatre director. On my left, Yannis, a short dignified old Greek intellectual who was kicked out of Greece by the Colonels. Yannis owned the hotel. John and I were would-be erotic writers. Our trio was a sort of self-consciously male enclave in a bar jam-packed with wine-swilling female erotic writers. We hadn’t met before. John wanted to talk politics straight away. Worse still, he wanted to shake Yannis and me out of our — presumably — bourgeois complacency. He kicked off by lamenting the fact that none of the political parties was committed to an ideology these days.

My boy’s mother’s boyfriend is in his mid-fifties, works his arse off six days a week as a builder’s labourer and spends next to nothing on himself. He’s honest, decent and kind. His only vice is the ten cigarettes, machine-rolled from smuggled duty-free tobacco, that he smokes every day. But somehow he’s always broke, always in debt. And now he’s got the Inland Revenue on his back. Last week he gathered together the most pathetic collection of bric-a-brac I’d ever seen, and laid it out at the weekly car boot sale. The car boot sale takes place in the leisure centre carpark. I sometimes have a quick scoot round before going in for my Sunday morning swim.

Clouds Hill, Colonel T.E. Lawrence’s former Dorset pied-à-terre, comprises four cramped rooms — two up, two down — and you have to mind your head as you go up the stairs. At the top of the stairs is a cell-like bunkroom, lined from top to bottom with aluminium. The wooden ship’s bunk would only be remotely comfortable to a man of Lawrence’s height, which was 5'5". Daylight comes in via a first world war battle cruiser’s porthole, fitted by Lawrence just days before he was catapaulted from his Brough Superior motor-bike and fatally injured.

We’d had a tiff in the Strand and I’d stormed off. It was late. I didn’t have anywhere else to stay the night, and I live in Devon, so I had to storm off halfway across Britain to get home. I caught the last train out of Paddington by the skin of my teeth. Once aboard, my anger subsided. It was the last train headed for the west country and it stopped at every station in Berkshire, Avon and Somerset. This put it in a leisurely frame of mind and it also stopped in open countryside for long periods of time just because it felt like it. Finally, at Exeter station, the train decided it just couldn’t be bothered any more and called it a day.

Back on track with the abstinence regime after the debacle at the dog lunch, I treated myself last weekend to a guided walk on Dartmoor. The walk, advertised in the Dartmoor Visitor, was called ‘Crock of Gold and Childe’s Tomb’. Twenty Gore-Tex-clad people, some with ski poles, plus yours truly, dressed appropriately perhaps for a longish journey on the District Line, met at Princetown, under the massive granite walls of Dartmoor Prison. The guide introduced himself as Brian. He was clean-shaven, 50-ish and if you closed your eyes when he spoke he might have been Alan Bennett. The first piece of information he gave us was that there were nine Brians in the Dartmoor Guides Service.

In church last Sunday, the reading was taken from the first chapter of Paul’s letter to Timothy. ‘Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners — of whom I am the very worst,’ Paul boasts. I’ve never seen eye to eye with St Paul. He rubs me up the wrong way. Here, his bragging about what a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man he was, and how abundantly the Lord has showered him with grace, sounded to me like a newly converted David Brent of The Office. Glancing further down the page, I read that Paul laid the blame for the Fall fairly and squarely on the ladies, who, in future, he tells Timothy, must ask permission to speak. Before we hit controversy, however, the lesson ended and we thanked God for it. Then the vicar led us in a prayer.

The cognoscenti will tell you that the best time to visit the south Devon coast is the autumn. The vulgar summer hordes have departed, the weather in September is generally reliable and accommodation is cheaper. Unfortunately for them, word has got out. The lanes round here were more congested with traffic last week than in July and August, and in town the pavements were packed with cognoscenti looking askance at one another. Mirroring this trend were this year’s bookings for the holiday let attached to our house. For three consecutive weeks in July, the flat was vacant, yet from now till the middle of November it’s fully booked. I’m not allowed to approach the visitors in the cottage in case I say or do something controversial.

I was looking for the Palace of the Kings of Mallorca, and lost my bearings in the maze of narrow side streets that comprises the old quarter of Perpignan. In a street so narrow I could span it with outstretched arms, a youth on a motorbike roared past me doing a wheelie. Further up the street, a man relaxing in the doorway of a stationery shop was happy to direct me. ‘English?’ he said, wanting to talk. I admitted as much. He nodded towards a portable TV set on the counter just inside his shop. On the screen, in glorious sunshine, the band of the Grenadier Guards was marching down the Champs-Elysées playing ‘Rule Britannia’. It was the annual Bastille Day parade and the Guards had been invited, presumably, to mark the centenary of the Entente Cordiale.

There is a Japanese concept known as ma. A loose translation of ma might be ‘the space between things’. In Kyoto, at the temple of Ryoan-ji, is a famous Zen garden. It is a dry garden of 15 rocks positioned on a surface of raked gravel, symbolising clarity and openness. (One of the 15 rocks, however, is always hidden from any human vantage point on the ground.) The exact opposite of ma would be the 15 or so fixed weight machines crammed into the small and stuffy space that is our local council-run gym. From the moment you drop your sports bag on the pile of other sports bags, under the eye-level notice advising you that it is a ‘Snatch Point’, you are entering a ma-less environment.

On Sunday, fielding in the gully, I passed some of the time between balls calculating how many pints of bitter I could allow myself when it was our turn to bat and drive home without being wildly over the limit. The arithmetic was fairly simple: the number of pints consumed, multiplied by two for the number of ‘units’, minus one unit metabolised for every hour we’d been playing. The delicious egg-and-cress sandwiches we’d stuffed down our throats at tea allowed me to massage the final figure slightly upwards. Though it behoved me, too, to take into account that I’d put one or both of my contact lenses in inside-out that morning and the world was a blur drunk or sober.

Personally, unlike some, I’ve nothing against the holidaymakers who flock to this part of the world as soon as the primroses are out. They liven up the place. In winter, the geriatric ghettoes dotted along the coast hereabouts are too unnaturally quiet. Owing to the infirmities of age, artificial joints, strong winds, blindness, deafness, incontinence and fear, the indigenous inhabitants that do venture out of doors tend to creep from A to B slowly and tentatively, keeping to the shadows, pausing often to renew their strength. In winter it’s like living in Madame Tussaud’s after normal business hours. There’s no gossip about sexual infidelity or reproduction in our village because no one is young enough to be indulging in any of it.

Under ‘large floral patterned chamber pot, used once, slightly damaged, £5 ono’ I came across ‘Abmaster stomach exerciser, boxed, unwanted gift, £10.’ I’d been looking out for a stomach exerciser in the small ads for a long time, so I dialled the number. A small inarticulate child answered. Was the Abmaster still for sale? There was the sound of laboured breathing, then she went away, and after a while an adult male came to the phone. I repeated the question. There was a long contemplative silence. He didn’t know nothing about no Abmaster, he said, then he too went away. Next a woman came to the phone.

In my experience a long coat on a man is often a sign of mental instability. Frankie’s brown woollen overcoat was so long he kept stepping on the hem and treading it into the mud. Jim did the introductions. Frankie took no notice of my name, calling me ‘laddie’ instead. Then he said he’d got the kettle on and led us into the house. His hunting dogs had the run of the ground floor and there were little piles of their excrement on the bare floorboards. In the kitchen a tractor tyre was leaning against a wall, and there was a chainsaw leaking oil on the kitchen table. We took our coffees outside and drank them standing up in his backyard. In the backyard, a tanned, dark-haired man was sitting on a log splitting hazel poles lengthways with a machete.

Me and the boy are regulars at the weekly car auction near us. We never bid for anything. We just like to go and sit and watch the cars coming and going and seeing what they fetch. We don’t even comment on an excessively high or low price. We talk only about the soup. We always sit in the same two seats at the back of the steep little indoor grandstand, and we always buy a cup of soup each from the mobile caterer in the carpark beforehand. We’ve tried all the soups on sale, but I’ve now settled on the chicken and vegetable, and my boy generally has the minestrone with croutons. In addition to our interest in the prices fetched by the cars, and the soup, I also like to observe the second-hand car dealers’ faces animated by greed.

I don’t watch a lot of telly these days because I’d rather read. But when I was going out with my boy’s mother, she and I watched it all the time. It was all we ever did. I’d come home from work and we’d sit on the sofa and watch the telly until it was time for her to go to bed and for me to go home. She was living with her family at the time and we’d all watch telly together in their tiny front room. There’d be me, her, her mum, her dad, her gran, her older sister and her younger brother in three inward-facing rows, night after night. Her dad was a cowman and the house smelt of cattle, and we sat around an open log fire — otherwise the situation was remarkably similar to that portrayed by the TV sitcom The Royle Family.

Before going to Venice, we spent two days in Verona. It was my first time in Italy and I got a crick in the neck from looking up at so many amazingly old, beautiful buildings. ‘If you think this is beautiful, wait till you see Venice,’ they said. Our host was David Petrie, a Scottish lecturer of English at the university. David is currently suing the Italian state for discriminating against foreign lecturers, and naturally this course of action hasn’t endeared him to his hosts. He’s been sent to Coventry. He’s been given a smaller office, then given no office at all. He’s been sacked. He’s been reinstated by an order of the court. He’s received death threats via the telephone. He’s been offered bribes.