Jeremy Clarke

Still depressed, or, as Matthew Arnold put it, ‘the foot less prompt to meet the morning dew’, I got out of bed one afternoon and exchanged the soggy Devon hills for the tower blocks of Canary Wharf. I went at the invitation of Dr Ivan Mindlin, orthopaedic surgeon, Las Vegas casino house doctor during the mob-run era of ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal and Tony ‘the Ant’ Spilotro, and one of the most successful sports bettors in US history. He kindly put me up in an ‘executive’ room at a hotel round the corner from his 18th-floor apartment. The first night we went for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. We went there on foot. It was like going for a walk in a multicultural concrete-and-glass future.

On the Monday before Christmas, the black dog came around again and I couldn’t get out of bed. I lay all day staring at the wall. Depression has little to do with sadness, I think. It’s blankness. The same thing happened to me about 15 years ago. I was like a prize gonk for the four or five weeks it took for the Prozac to work, which it did, and since then I’ve managed to foster and sustain all the illusions I need to keep me buoyant. I couldn’t get out of bed on the Tuesday either. I was adrift in outer space. But I knew I must pick up the phone and make an appointment to see someone with a prescribing pad. It’s easier said than done, though, getting an appointment to see a doctor during the festive period.

I drew back the curtains. Yet another absolutely still, sunny day. Early-morning mist lying in the valleys. An echoing report of a distant hunter’s rifle. Another day in bloody paradise. But I was leaving it. After breakfast I was driven to the bus station. ‘Would you like to do me?’ said the young woman behind the desk in the ticket office. (My single word of French greeting had been enough for her to nail me as an English speaker.) Realising her error, she and her colleague at the next window corpsed. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t got much time,’ I said. The bus ticket to Nice cost hardly anything. The airport coach pulled in dead on time. Ligne Bleue employs only reigning beauty queens to drive their vehicles, it seems. This driver was no exception.

We’re driving east, destination Grasse. Hairpin bends circling oak-clad hills. Autumn gold and scarlet. Exciting cambers. Blinding winter sunshine. The radio tuned to France Musique. A virtuoso Latin jazz trumpet. A bit poncy but it’s better than nothing. We’ve been talking and not talking. Now we’re talking again. She asks me if I like the social class I was born into. I like it very much,I say. ‘You didn’t rebel against your parents as a teenager?’ she says. I might have against my parents but not against my class, I say. I thought everyone was lower middle class. And when I was old enough to recognise other social classes, I was pleased to be lower middle class because it seemed to be the funniest class. I didn’t stop laughing.

My mother is a bore magnet. They travel from miles around to sit in the chair opposite hers and tell her every last detail of their lives in a protracted monologue and then they leave. It’s like a surgery. One after another they appear at the door, bursting with a narrative of their incredible lives. If they can’t get there in person, they ring her up and talk about themselves on the phone for hours on end. I suppose it must be a kind of innocence to find the minutiae of your daily life so consistently remarkable that you simply must tell it to a third party. Perhaps I should envy them. I walked in the open front door the other day to find my mother and one of her client bores standing in the hallway.

Six months ago I bought a garden chair on eBay. When I went to the address to pick it up, the bloke drew thoughtfully on his fag and said did I want a child’s folding snooker table, balls, cues and a little brush for a tenner. At the time, my six-year-old grandson was watching a snooker championship on the television and keeping me up to date with the progress of Ronnie ‘the Rocket’ O’Sullivan, for whose lightning skill and slightly raffish persona he had developed an appreciation. ‘Absolutely,’ I said to the bloke, and we chucked the table in the back of the car as well. The table measured four feet by two feet. The balls were half-size. When I leant over the table to cue, everything was in miniature. The geometry was the same, however.

The day after the American people applied a very welcome touch on the brakes to the Enlightenment juggernaut, I went for a walk with my brother, who the day before had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Which is a crying shame because three years ago, after I had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, he had conscientiously toddled down to the doctor to have himself checked out with a PSA (Prostate-Specific Antigen) blood test, in case it ran in the family. But the doctor had thought the precaution unnecessary for a man of his comparatively young age (47) and vetoed it. A fortnight ago he couldn’t pee and went again to the same doctor. This time the doctor agreed to a PSA blood test. When the result came back, his PSA score was 112.

I didn’t fancy the hotel breakfast, so I wandered into Arles old town looking for a café. The weather and the season had changed overnight. The day before had been hot, golden and still. This morning an icy wind was yanking the last of the dying leaves from the plane trees and my thin canvas jacket was no defence against it. Choosing a café at random on the Place du Forum, I pushed through the glass door and took a seat in the warmth of the café’s conservatory. Three other customers were inside, lingering over their coffee. I chose a bench seat, from where I could look south across the square. A big, blowsy, all-action waitress cantered up. I asked her for a cup of coffee, a croissant and a glass of orange juice.

‘Look at them, they’re all fat,’ he said. I’d slowed the car to allow four children to cross the zebra crossing. One of them secretly signalled thanks on behalf of them all as they trooped across. Polite. But they were all indeed a little on the plump side. ‘Even in France they’re getting fat now,’ he lamented, leaving unsaid the conclusion that if the French were getting fat, then that’s that, game over. ‘Of course it’s the working classes who get fat first,’ he explained. ‘Eating all that sugar and salt.’ I thought I detected blame and took exception. ‘Well, if anyone is to blame,’ I said, ‘it’s you.

There were six of us round the table to celebrate Trafalgar Day. We ate the same dinner served to Her Majesty the Queen aboard HMS Victory for the bicentennial: smoked salmon with two sauces (lumpfish caviar and dill); roast beef on a bed of cabbage with Dauphinoise spuds; and plums poached in red wine. We drank gin, home-made red wine, white Burgundy, Madeira and Marsala. Our host, chef and chief inspiration wore the HMS Jupiter T-shirt presented to him on his voyage from England to the first Gulf war. Our hostess wore an unprecedentedly slinky black cocktail dress. Catriona’s hair was in plaits. Tom and Tessa, whom I had not met before, were dressed casually and youthfully.

In 1999 I went to the doctor about the impotence. Don’t worry, he said. I have good news for you. He prescribed a new drug called Viagra to get me over the psychological hump. It worked; spectacularly. In 2001 I went to the doctor mumbling about depression. Don’t worry, he said. I have good news for you. He prescribed a new drug called Prozac to lift me out of it. Within three months I was back on the poop deck of this ship of fools with the wind in my hair and salt spray on my face. In 2013 I went to the doctor because I couldn’t pee. A blood test showed I had cancer. Don’t worry, he said. I have good news for you. These days we have so many effective new drugs against cancer, it might not kill you. Three years later it still hasn’t.

Six months ago Sally was living in a third floor flat in Glasgow. Then she was thrown into the back of a car, drugged, and driven down to Provence. Since then I had watched with interest how she has adapted herself from life in a Scottish city to the heat, light and alien smells of deepest Provence. Sally is a small to medium sized chocolate brown mongrel with the grey hairs of old age showing on her muzzle. Her brown eyes are calm and intelligent. What she is comprised of is hard to say. Her head, jaw and teeth are from some sort of terrier; her deep chest suggests that she has some whippet in her. She is a compact, evenly proportioned dog, and sprightly for her age, which is 11. Her nature is unobtrusive, quiet and polite. Modest, you might say. She never asks for food.

The first and only time I went to a meeting of Sex Addicts Anonymous, this chap stood up and gave a blow-by-blow account of his sexual history. He had started life as a heterosexual, he said, and became hopelessly addicted to pornography and prostitutes. Then he decided to give gay sex a try and soon became addicted to encounters with multiple partners in public parks. I forget how many times he said he was having it off every day, but it was heroic. He was out there day and night in all seasons and in all weathers and would go without lunch and dinner. In winter, he said, he was sometimes covered in snow. Then he caught pneumonia, then HIV. HIV became full-blown Aids. Finally, he decided enough was enough.

I stood in front of the mirror in the £61-a-night hotel room in Paddington, buttoned my polyester dinner jacket and straightened my bow tie. The last time I’d worn a dinner jacket was nearly three years earlier, I remembered, at the Cigar Smoker of the Year. What a night that was. I dug through the pockets in case there was any MDMA still hanging about. I found a dog-end and a 100mg tablet of Indian-made Viagra. I took a selfie in the mirror, picked up the gift-wrapped birthday present and card, switched off the studio-quality strip light, and closed the door behind me. As I tripped down the front steps of the hotel into the velvet September evening, headed for Taki’s 80th birthday party at Loulou’s, life felt pretty good. ‘Fancy a nice time, dearie?

One side of the hostel overlooked Waterloo station’s 22 platforms. Trains departed and arrived at the rate of two or three a minute. Another side abutted a Victorian cast-iron girder bridge over which suburban trains arrived and departed with rolling thunder, to which was added that fingernails-dragged-down-a-blackboard, pigs-screaming-at-feeding-time, metal-on-metal noise as the trains negotiated a bend whose curve was at the very limit of what was geometrically feasible for fixed, in-line bogies. On the remaining side of this discordant triangle was an arterial road hazy with diesel particulate through which heavy traffic accelerated and braked between traffic lights. I arrived here mid-morning after a Spectator party wanting only to lie down and die.

Last week in Ladakh I went panting from one Buddhist monastery to another. Culturally, racially and historically, Ladakh is Tibetan, and the type of Buddhism practised there is Tibetan Buddhism. With a knowledgable local guide we visited the great Ladakhi monasteries at Basgo, Likir, Thikse, Alchi and Lamayuru. At each one we climbed the steps, took off our shoes and paid our respects in the inner temples. Once our eyes had become accustomed to the dark, we examined the carved, gaudily painted statues of Buddhas, deities, personifications, guardian spirits, Bodhisattvas and whatnot that we found within. The guide conscientiously explained these representations’ various functions and positions within the Buddhist cosmology.

Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir   This morning I was woken just before daylight by the clear ‘ting’ of a meditation bell. The owner of the house was attending to his religious devotions in the little private chapel across the courtyard from my room. He is an ‘Amchi’, I’ve been told, which is a Ladakhi word for the village herbal-medicine man and astrologer. I’ve been staying at his house for two days, acclimatising to the thin air and doing nothing much except looking out of the window at the turbulent confluence, below the house, of the Zanskar and Indus rivers, and at the mountain ranges beyond. I’ve encountered the Amchi just once so far. We passed on the stairs.

A new footpath from the village down to the beach opened earlier this year to a great fanfare. It was cut through virgin woodland using JCBs and furnished with stout wooden National Trust gates, fences and handrails. At one point the path is lined with gigantic exotic plants, escapees from the ‘lost’ tropical garden of a long-since demolished old cliff-top house. What they are God only knows, but they are thriving magnificently beneath the shelter of the cliff. ‘It’s like going for a walk in bloody Africa,’ observed reactionary old Grandad to Oscar as we trotted down this path for the first time the other day. One of these triffids was over seven feet tall; the tip bowed over by the weight of its buds. Oscar and I have been playing football every day.

Next week I’m going to Ladakh for a travel gig. Me neither — never heard of it. So I heaved out my Victorian world atlas and found it at the apex of India, northwest of Kashmir, and sharing a border with Tibet. Then I went online to find books about the place. Choice was limited. I bought A Journey in Ladakh by David Harvey (‘Extremely entertaining, a classy travel book and a palpitating fragment of a spiritual autobiography’ — David Mitchell, New Society); I bought Ancient Futures by Helena Norberg-Hodge (‘The book that has had the greatest influence on my life...

I took the only spare chair on the terrace of the Modern bar, one of four bars on this Provençal village square. By repute, it’s the bar where the least snobbish of the villagers meet and drink. Rough, some might say. Old-fashioned ideas of masculinity and femininity are more clearly marked here than at the posher bars up the road. It was market day. Sixty or so locals, plus one Englishman — moi — occupied the steel-framed wicker chairs arranged around the trunk of a plane tree. At the next table a sweet little girl in a pink kimono embroidered with flowers had a balloon attached to a small bat by a string. She was batting her balloon in a desultory, bored manner. She reacted to my loving smile by scowling and looked away.