Charles Spencer

Until recently I was one of those insufferable prigs who proudly announces, ‘Oh, I never watch television, it’s all rubbish these days.’ But there was little virtue in my self-restraint, and I had no idea whether there was anything worth watching or not. The fact is that when you are out at the theatre four, five and sometimes, curse it, six nights a week, watching stuff begins to feel like work. My smoking habit also meant that whenever I did want to watch something I’d have to keep nipping out for a quick drag, Mrs Spencer having instituted draconian smoking bans long before the Labour government.

As the super soaraway Spectator becomes ever more style-conscious and glossy, I like to think of ‘Olden but golden’ as a monthly oasis for the scruffs, drunks and wasters among the readership. It is, of course, possible to be all these things while presenting a glamorous façade to the world. The smart society hostess may well be a secret Janis Joplin fan who in the privacy of her own bedroom drinks Southern Comfort from the bottle and howls drunkenly along to ‘Ball and Chain’.

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks sharing my life with some malignant bug that has left me feeling weak and pathetic on those relatively rare occasions when I’m not rushing to the loo. It’s not exactly been a barrel of laughs, apart from the long sleeps which have been accompanied by excitingly strange and vivid dreams. They’ve been a bit like being on drugs. Also, the cat Nelson has been a brick, spending much of the time on the bed curled up at my feet, a true friend and companion in time of need. I’ve written before about how music doesn’t seem to work when you are suffering from depression. I’ve now also discovered that it’s not much use when one is more generally unwell.

Back in November, I wrote about the sad death of my old VW Passat on the way down to Dorset. It was gloomily pronounced on all sides to be irreparable, and the poor old thing languished in the car park outside Netherbury Village Hall before Andy, the local garage man, managed to dispose of it for, as he put it, ‘the price of a drink’. With 127,000 miles on the clock I could hardly complain. Until its death rattle at the midnight hour on the A303, it had been a good and faithful servant. I now have a new car, another Passat, for we Spencers are creatures of habit, though I checked in the Top Gear magazine, and the model I’ve chosen received a glowing four-star review.

It was one of those perfect New York days that make you feel grateful to be alive. I’d eaten my favourite breakfast — pancakes with maple syrup and crispy bacon — then salved my conscience with a huge bowl of fresh fruit, and was now taking a post-prandial walk in Central Park. The sky was an eggshell blue, the air was crisp, there were skaters on the ice rink, and squirrels were chasing each other across the branches of the trees like a scene from Beatrix Potter. With that extra spurt of energy Manhattan so often provides, I decided to walk up to the reservoir, further than I’d ever gone before, and when I got there, it looked so beautiful in the late November sunlight that I walked right round it.

We were on holiday last week for half- term and, as so often when I have time off, I started to fret. What on earth was I going to write about in ‘Olden but golden’? Mrs Spencer gets very cross about this sort of thing. ‘If that’s all you’ve got to worry about, you can count yourself lucky,’ she said, before starting to grumble herself about her forthcoming ballet teacher’s exam. But my problem was a real one —though, to be fair, so was hers. The fact is that for the past month, instead of unearthing new delights, I’ve been continually indulging my obsession for classic Blue Note jazz, which I wrote about last month.

This is the way addiction works. A nice man offers you a generous taste at a ridiculously low price; you love it, you go back for more but now the price has risen. But still you go on paying because you like it so much. Soon you find you’re not just liking it, but needing it, and, what’s worse, needing it in ever-larger quantities. That’s certainly been my experience with jazz, so many of whose greatest exponents died young and horribly because of their addiction to far more dangerous narcotics than music. It was back in December 2005 that I wrote here about the amazing offer at the MDC music store on the South Bank.

Listing page content here This column is in disgrace. Last month, with both the deadline and a flight to New York looming, I found myself in the position of the rabbit staring at the headlights of the oncoming lorry. Completely frozen, unable to think, unable to write. I’d been listening to loads of music all month but couldn’t find a word to say about any of it. So I found myself writing about the dead pets of my childhood, filed the copy and caught the plane before anyone could track me down to ask for a rewrite. My wife gave it a glance just before the taxi arrived to whisk me away. ‘If you were writing a column called “My family and other animals” it would be just the ticket,’ she said. ‘As a column about music it’s an absolute joke.

Listing page content here My sister and I never had pets as children, or rather we had them but they didn’t tend to last very long. Indeed, no sooner had some dumb animal entered the house than my mother seemed to be making plans to get rid of it. The raven itself was hoarse that croaked the fatal entrance of Hammy the Hamster under our battlements. Hammy was a rather sweet brown and white creature who spent much of his time sleeping and the rest of it going round and round on his treadmill. It can’t have been much of a life and he eventually escaped; my sister and I, distraught, demanded a replacement. This turned out to be a hamster called Honey, who somehow lacked Hammy’s sweetness of nature. Honey was just dull.

I promise I’m going to come up with some hot musical recommendations this issue, but I must thank those Spectator readers who wrote about last month’s column in which I announced my intention to stop smoking. The letters — all from reformed smokers — were full of kindness, sympathy and practical suggestions, and they have spurred me on. I was especially moved by a letter from a 91-year-old former prisoner of war on the Burma–Siam railway who said smoking had been a lifesaver during that terrible time. He continued to smoke during his working life, and found it a great help, and gave up when he retired at 60. Now he says he finds he doesn’t want whisky, either.

It’s the morning of 2 January as I write, and I’m gloomily contemplating my New Year’s resolutions. Actually, gloomily is hardly the mot juste. I’m having a complete jelly-livered panic attack about them. It’s our family custom to go to the Pilot Boat pub in Lyme Regis for lunch on New Year’s Eve, and to discuss the coming 12 months. It was at the Pilot Boat that we first decided to get a cat, and I now can’t imagine life without Nelson. He’s just greeted me on my solo return from Dorset with a combination of excitement, purring affection and just a suspicion of reproach in his eyes that moved me to tears.

I’m still trying to get on with the blasted novel, over which I have been procrastinating for several years now. Though there are occasional exhilarating hours when it proceeds apace, there are others when I sit at my desk, drinking cold coffee and smoking roll-ups, when I conclude that, on balance and all things considered, I’d rather slash my wrists than try to write another bloody word. Never believe anyone who says they love writing. It’s mostly horrible. After 30 years on the job, I still think I’m going to be found out with every review I write, still feel the terror of what was once the blank piece of paper and is now the blank computer screen. And with a novel, the horrors are multiplied a hundredfold.

It comes as something of a shock to realise that I have known Liz Anderson, this magazine’s admirable arts editor, for almost 20 years. We first met in 1987, as junior sub-editors on the Telegraph’s arts pages, and sat trembling in shock and awe together as the arts page supremo, Miriam Gross, and her deputy, Marsha Dunstan, conducted furious rows over the page lay-out. It was the best spectator sport in town, but attended by the constant risk that some of the fire and ire crackling across the desk might suddenly be deflected our way. We kept our heads down.

Towards the end of his life, John Betjeman was asked during a television interview if he had any regrets. Ravaged by Parkinson’s disease he tremblingly replied, ‘Not enough sex.’ The effect was at once comic, touching and desperately sad — like his best poems, in fact — and his words have haunted me ever since. From what you read in the public prints, you might think that anyone who writes for The Spectator is endlessly at it, that condoms are supplied gratis with each miserly pay cheque, and that once this column is completed I will be taking my pick from any number of admiring lovelies. Not a bit of it.

‘You’re not going to write about them, are you?’ said my wife contemptuously, when I announced that I was going to devote this month’s column to the Grateful Dead. ‘They’re one of the worst.’ As regular readers will know, my wife hates all pop music with a passion, but she especially dislikes the Dead because she has so often been woken by the sounds of their psychedelic classic ‘Dark Star’ playing at maximum volume at three o’clock in the morning. But even people who love rock music hate the Grateful Dead. ‘What does a Deadhead say when he’s run out of dope?’ Keith Richards of the Stones once inquired. The answer to his little riddle was ‘God, this band is shit’.

I’m trying to write a novel at the moment, which means, of course, that I am spending a great deal of time looking for other things to do. It’s amazing how attractive the washing-up seems in comparison with sitting in front of a computer screen, making things up and struggling to find the words to describe them. In fact, I have just managed to waste two hours in a painstakingly detailed examination of my collection of classical music. I only started buying classical CDs about four years ago when I got out of the Priory and started trying to get through life without alcohol. I thought it would be a harmless hobby, and provide the required relaxation when the craving kicked in, but needless to say my addictive personality has turned it into an obsession.

The so-called festive season is the time of year all serious drinkers dread. Their favourite pubs are filled with amateurs, largely consisting of braying office parties. It takes for ever to get served at the bar, and there is the ever-present danger of being sicked over by some daffy young secretary who has been overdoing the alcopops. Then when you’ve finally got your drink — my Christmas cheer used to consist of triple Scotches with a dash of ginger wine and a Guinness chaser — some moron from accounts will lean over and say, ‘Cheer up, mate, it might never happen.’ The trouble, of course, is that it already has.

You’re probably sick of reading about John Peel, the Radio One disc jockey who died of a heart attack last week and whose passing was marked with the solemn, exhaustive media coverage usually reserved for great statesmen. This was, after all, only a man who played records for a living. Andy Kershaw, one of Peel’s protégés and a fellow DJ, went spectacularly over the top in the Independent. Peel, he said, was the ‘most important person in British music since the birth of rock’n’roll’. Come on, Andy, take a grip. More important than Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, David Bowie?