Jeremy clarke

By jogging from the railway station to the grim concrete underpass outside the arrivals terminal, I caught the last courtesy bus from bus stop K to the budget hotel with seconds to spare. Cheapskate that I am, I was glad to be spared the humiliation of being charged £20 by a cynical cab driver to be taken the long way round the one-way system to a destination less than a mile away. Which is what normally happens to me at Gatwick. I was tired after a long journey and the issue had assumed an importance in my mind that was perhaps disproportionate. So my euphoria at seeing hotel bus number H2 cantering between the concrete pillars towards me was probably also disproportionate. The driver was genial; his bus like an empty cavern.

My boy and I were standing together outside the front door of his partner’s house while he smoked a cigarette. Since my boy’s first (and his partner’s fourth) child was born, they haven’t smoked inside the house. Fine drizzle was swirling in the orange glow of the streetlight. In comfortable silence we stood and contemplated the view of the council estate where he lives. A tradition has grown up for dumping ‘problem’ families here from across the county, so this particular slough of despond is notorious for drugs, petty vandalism and domestic violence. The most pathetic of last week’s crop of court cases reported in the local paper was that of a 19-year-old man charged with possession of 0.

This old tin miner’s cottage that I’m now living in is normally uninhabited in winter. The remoteness, incessant foul weather, guaranteed frozen pipes and impassable roads make the place unattractive for short-term tenants. ‘See how you get on,’ said the owner dubiously, when I offered to pay up front. ‘It might not be easy. You might hate it.’ I didn’t tell her that a little hardship, a little masochism, some exposure to the elements, is exactly what I am looking for. There is no running water at present. The pipe taking water from the stream and delivering it to the inside taps is still frozen, so I’m collecting my cooking and washing water in a feed bucket and a white china teapot. The water, when you see it in the teapot, is brown.

A kindly old charge nurse once took me aside after I’d appeared before a psychiatric hospital’s disciplinary committee accused of drunken behaviour. ‘Get yourself a good woman, old son,’ he counselled. ‘That’s what I did. Then you can take her to the pub, have a nice conversation, and learn to drink in a civilised fashion.’ Cow Girl enjoys a drink in a civilised fashion. She likes wine and knows a bit about it. When I’d told her, prior to our first meeting, that I was a pint of lager sort of a person and didn’t much like wine, she said she’d educate me. So whenever we’ve stayed at the hotel we’ve gone to the bar in the evening and I’ve had a lesson.

The registrar opened a screen and clicked and typed her way down a list of questions. I was ‘giving notice’ of our intention to be married after a statutory 15 days had passed. It was the day before Christmas Eve. ‘Has either of you been married before?’ she said. (She was tired and distracted. So many elderly people had died in this recent cold snap, she’d told me earlier, she was run off her feet.) ‘No,’ I said. ‘Your partner’s full name?’ she said, fingering her mouse. For a split second, before it came to me, my mind was a blank. The registrar eyed me speculatively as she touch-typed. ‘And her date of birth?’ Cow Girl was Pisces, I knew that much.

I weighed myself in India. There were scales in the hotel bathroom and I stepped up out of idle curiosity. I’d lost weight. In the three weeks since I’d met Cow Girl on a dating website, I’d lost three-quarters of a stone. I hadn’t even noticed. I weighed myself in India. There were scales in the hotel bathroom and I stepped up out of idle curiosity. I’d lost weight. In the three weeks since I’d met Cow Girl on a dating website, I’d lost three-quarters of a stone. I hadn’t even noticed. Later I rang her to report a conversation I’d overheard in the hotel gym. A perspiring English banker was telling the polite gym attendant how marriages were arranged in pre-industrial Japan.

Cow girl, my first encounter on the dating website, said she wanted to see me again, so the next weekend we met at the same hotel for another portion of the same. During the week she sent an email saying she couldn’t eat, and I’d assumed she was joking. But when she sprang out of her VW Golf to greet me she was visibly thinner, which was surprising, as she hadn’t had an ounce of fat on her to speak of to start with. She’d lost 5lbs, she said. Even more surprising was the admission that she’d been off her grub because she’d been in an emotional turmoil over the future of our relationship. The email about her not eating also included a link to a YouTube comedy clip taken from the TV series Green Wing.

I keep reading these heart-warming pieces in the quality press about sad and lonely people’s lives being utterly transformed by internet-dating websites. This person says her sex life has gone from zero to something resembling the stampede at a Harrods sale. That person says he thought his life was effectively over and has now found the person of his dreams, and their union is shortly to be blessed with issue. Anecdotal evidence, too, suggests that internet-dating sites have something for everyone. One of the chaps I go to football with, Pie and Mash Pete, is always talking about this friend of his with whom he goes fishing.

I’ve two convictions for drink-driving and I might have had a third a couple of years ago when I hit a bus. Fortunately, I was injured and taken unconscious to hospital so there was no opportunity for me to blow in the bag. The rule back then was that a person had to be awake enough to give his or consent to having a sample of blood removed for analysis at the police laboratory. This rule has since been changed, I believe, and a police doctor can help himself to a syringe of blood from your inert, unconscious body. I must have been out for several hours because when I came round the copper and the police doctor were looking pretty appalled at having had to hang around for so long.

I made her acquaintance in the ladies’ lavatory towards the end of a fantastic birthday bash held in the upstairs room of a north London pub. I was incoherently drunk, and I think she was too, because I can’t remember either of us managing anything more than gestures or monosyllables. She was a committed, even violent kisser. And because she seemed keen to wrap me up and take me home straight away, we left without saying our goodbyes. Outside on the pavement a cab with its light on appeared right on cue, and 20 minutes later we were back at her apartment where she shoved me backwards on to a low divan, tore off both of our clothes and sexually assaulted me. In the morning, after stirring awake, we spoke sensibly, it seemed to me, for the first time.

Before we buried her in the cemetery, we attended a brief service in the church hall opposite. When she was alive, my mother’s cousin had enjoyed the kind of faith that is pretty much indistinguishable from cast-iron certainty. What we were lowering into a hole after the service, she’d have wanted us to think, was merely the husk. The evangelical pastor, an austere old sort with a cruel face who addressed us as ‘dear ones’ or ‘beloved’, clearly concurred with this view and trotted us quickly and unsentimentally through the service, starting with the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’. An old man with a comic’s face faced us from behind the keys of a portable electric organ.

My car overheated in slow-moving traffic so I rang the local garage and the man said bring it in on Monday and he’d have a look. I was anxious to find out why my car was overheating because if the head gasket was blown, it would cost more to fix than it was worth and I’d have to throw the car away. ‘What time shall I drop it round?’ I said. ‘Quarter to nine,’ he said. I remember that, his being specific about a time. I dropped the car in on the dot and on the Friday I went round to collect it, assuming he had forgotten to ring to tell me that the car was ready. But it wasn’t ready. He hadn’t even had time to glance at it, to be honest, he said.