Jeremy Clarke

She was dying for a mad night out, she said, so where was I going to take her? I know, I said. If they’re playing tonight, we’ll go and see Society Rocks, the most electrifying covers band I know. Their Facebook page said they were playing in Exmouth, 40 miles away. Society Rocks are a stubbornly local outfit, and I was surprised that they were venturing so far afield. I booked a B&B off Exmouth seafront and off we went. The friendly receptionist at the Dolphin asked us what our plans were for the evening. ‘You haven’t come to see Jake Wood making a special appearance at the Fever Boutique nightclub, have you?’ she said. ‘Jake Wood?’ I said. She looked sorry for me. ‘Max Branning?’ she said. ‘The car dealer in EastEnders?

The fag end of October. Dark evenings. My smelly old Barbour. Chopping and splitting wood. Uncanny stillnesses. Psychedelic maple trees. The thin winter piping of robins. Sodden leaves clinging to the soles of my boots. And Liberty Caps dotting the pastures. Our Liberty Cap is an insignificant-looking thing. A bent, spindly stalk supports a tiny parasol tapering to the distinctive nipple. The parasol is rusty brown when wet, drying in the sunshine to a pale yellow. They grow singly or in small groups. The psychoactive agents are psilocin and psilocybin.   (Therapists in the United States lawfully give cancer patients psilocybin to take them out of themselves and cheer them up.

The bar at the Special Forces club has the marvellous rule for newcomers that they should talk to the person on their right. So I was standing at the end of the bar in the Special Forces club, ordering a round of drinks to take back to a table. The round was a large gin and tonic, a pint of lager and a glass of house red. To all appearances, while the barman was arranging these drinks, I might have been standing on my own, and the chap on my left duly introduced himself. He was about 60 years old and unmistakably a military man. Even the bags under his eyes looked military. The face had seen all there was to see, but it retained a kind of straight-faced conviviality. Blue blazer, blue and white striped shirt, military tie.

We closed the last page of a gruesome, thrilling picture book called The Day Louis Got Eaten and said our prayers. Our prayers are always the same. We ask Jesus to bless as many people known to us as we can remember, taking it in turns to name them. We aren’t sure what the range of consequences might be for someone if we ask Jesus to bless them, but we do it anyway, and the word has a pleasant, incantatory feel to it when repeated. It has been at least a fortnight since we last asked Jesus to bless our list because Grandad has been away. And as we went through the regulars, it occurred to us that a lot had happened to some of these names since we last asked Jesus to bless them, some of it, on the face of it, not so good.

It rained all day long last Friday in Provence, and it rained all night, and on Saturday morning it was still raining. The rain fell out of a lowering, field-grey blanket of a sky. After breakfast and a wash, we assembled in the living room wondering what to do with ourselves on a day such as this. There were four of us: a couple en route for England who arrived in a Land Rover packed to the roof with possessions; our hostess; and me. The ugly breeze-block house with a large tiled terrace was perched on the side of a hill. Fountains sprayed in unlikely directions from leaking joints in the rain gutters. The rain came down faster than the drains could take it away from the terrace, flooding it. The unmade road below the house was a torrent.

I was looking after Oscar, my five-and-a-half-year-old grandson, for the day. We’d played football in the garden, then we’d come indoors and played three games of chess, one game of Battleships, and several memory card games. I lost the football by 25 goals to 11, all three games of chess, saw my entire fleet sunk one after the other by a succession of direct hits, and my performance in the memory card games was irrefutable confirmation of my early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. After that we drove to the leisure centre for a swim. In the pool I was required among other things to crawl about on all fours underwater and be ridden like a horse. Back at home and ravenous after swimming, we ate beans on toast, and while we ate we played ‘I spy with my little eye’.

The staples of my daily alcohol consumption on the cruise were champagne, gin, red wine and Polish vodka. One morning I woke up in my cabin more hungover than usual, also depressed. Turning my head to the side and looking through the gap in the curtains I saw that we were no longer at sea but docked in yet another Mediterranean island port with barren sun-bleached hills above and beyond. Reaching for my daily news-sheet, delivered to the cabin the night before, I read that what I was looking at this morning was Heraklion in Crete. Further reading informed me that if I returned to the ship from the shore excursion early I could go to the ‘Walk-in wrinkle solution’ on deck 9 at 2 p.m. Turning next to the Spectator cruise itinerary pamphlet, I read that, at 3 p.m.

There is something repulsive about the sea, especially when seen from the altitude of the upper decks of a monstrous floating pleasure palace where all intimacy with it, including the sound and the smell, is lost. On the inaugural Spectator Mediterranean cruise I paid attention to the sea but rarely, and usually when speed walking along one of the upper decks in a dinner jacket and bow tie, and late for something, and wondering where the hell I was supposed to be going. Then my stare would stray over the guard rail to the barren wastes of glacial blue flecked with white stretching away as far as the eye could see, like some dreary desert seen from an aeroplane. On some deeper level the sight horrified me, and I’d count the days until I could get off this infernal thing for good.

Last Saturday afternoon, in Venice, 31 Spectator readers, plus Martin Vander Weyer, the great Taki and I came aboard the Cunard cruise ship Queen Victoria for the inaugural Spectator Mediterranean cruise. The first chance we had to get to know one another was a pre-dinner drinks party in Hemispheres, the ship’s nightclub. I was late, and apprehensive about how things would go. The ship’s commodore, a lonely, courtly figure encased in a starched white uniform, was there in the Spectator readers’ midst offering his right hand to anyone who wanted it. I removed a flute of champagne from the offered silver tray and plunged in. The first reader I spoke to said, ‘My name is Fanny and I am bisexual so there’s hope for you yet.

I sprinted through Milan station, speed-read the departures monitor without stopping, and arrived gasping on platform 8 with two minutes to spare. The driver of the FrecciaBianca bullet train was waiting only for the guard’s signal to depart. The guard was standing on the platform beside the open door of the rearmost carriage, fingering her whistle. This short, plump, raven-haired woman was exuding geniality and relaxed informality through her far too big peaked cap and ill-fitting uniform as though it were fancy dress. I was about to fling myself up the short ladder, but had to step aside for lust’s young dream in satin hot pants descending the steps with feline grace. She asked the guard if there was time for a last cigarette. The guard said something like, ‘Why not?

‘How many people have you slept with in your life, roughly?’ she asked. We were lying in bed in the morning. ‘You go first,’ I said, needing time to think of the right answer. She looked at the ceiling and thought long and hard. ‘About 50,’ she said finally. I asked her about the worst experience. ‘Your turn, Low life,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to hear this.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it would take a Professor Brian Cox working with the latest European Space Agency number-crunching software to come up with anything like an approximate figure.’ By a weird coincidence, the next evening I was invited by a friend of a friend to have dinner with Professor Cox at his home.

Toby goes to bed at 10 o’clock sharp every night otherwise he gets irritable. Toby sleeps on the bed always. Toby is too old to jump up on to the bed, so the bedroom footstool should be placed next to the bed to help him to climb up. He is also allowed up on the furniture. Toby’s food bowl should be filled every morning and his squeaky hedgehog toy should be placed in the bowl with his food, or he won’t eat. He is allowed six treats per day from the Silver Jubilee tin on the fridge. Toby likes to be patted but not stroked. Stroking upsets him and he may bite. These were the instructions for my three-night dog-sit. Toby is a 12-year-old, mostly white, very male Jack Russell.

On Saturday my boy had a mini-stroke at home, aged only 26. ‘You’ll have to give up smoking and do a spot of exercising now and again,’ I told him as the ambulance drove away. Smoking is his solace and consolation. ‘Out of the question,’ he said. On Sunday morning I went to church. ‘Your son ought to have taken the option of going to hospital,’ said the vicar before the service. Before becoming a vicar, she was a medical missionary in Papua New Guinea for 40 years and one wonders at the mental adjustment required for dealing with the subtler barbarities of a pretty English village. ‘He’s going to the doctor first thing tomorrow morning. Or so he says,’ I told her. The service was a special Songs of Praise celebration.

After Trev had mugged the mugger in the toilet we moved quickly on to another club. The Double O is frankly a horrible place, but it stays open later than any of the others, and is only a bracing ten-minute walk along the seafront. As was usual on the walk between Mandy’s and the Double O, salt air plus who knows how many house doubles equalled intoxication squared. Halfway there I took off my cashmere and silk charity-shop pullover and gave it to Trev to put on to hide the bloodstains on his shirt. It was several sizes too small for him and he needed my help getting into it. We tried to get his head into an armhole for a long time before realising our mistake. From a distance it must have looked like we were having a set-to.

‘I’ve lost my phone,’ yells Trev. We’re in a club. He’s come charging on to the dance floor to tell me. He’s always forgetting where he’s left his phone and getting in a state. Trev’s phone is old and crap and the screen is the most shattered screen I’ve seen on a phone that still works. Everyone knows Trev’s crap phone. People pinch it for a laugh just to wind him up, then give it back. It’s value to an opportunist thief is less than zero. He generally loses his phone two or three times of an evening. ‘Where did you have it last?’ I shout back. It’s an obvious question, but not one that has occurred to him, apparently. The pertinacity of it stuns him momentarily.

Watching the daily running of the bulls through Pamplona’s narrow streets online this week has given me a wistful pang about not being there again. I once went to Pamplona’s feria three times in four years and ran with the bulls every morning. One year I took Sharon. The day we arrived, she took one look at the streets pullulating with thousands of handsome, drunk young men and did the psychical equivalent of a graceful swallow dive into their midst. I had rented us a room in the town but she visited it only rarely and never slept there. I hardly saw her for the seven days. I should explain that when I went anywhere with Sharon at that time it was accepted that she would bestow her bountiful sexual favours on anyone and everyone except me.

After hitting me with the cancer diagnosis, the urologist offered me the choice of a longer life in exchange for my testosterone production. After some soul-searching, I agreed. I’ve been on testosterone-suppressing injections and tablets for exactly two years. The urologist has fulfilled his side of our Faustian pact. I’m still here. And everyone seems to agree that that’s the main thing. At the same time as I was diagnosed, then agreed to have my testosterone reduced to castrate levels, I asked whether there would be any side effects apart from the obvious. And I’m almost certain that someone, perhaps a nurse, said that I might find crossword puzzles more difficult. In other words, the outer reaches of my vocabulary could become less accessible.

Rachel Johnson, in last week’s Spectator diary, says that her husband says she only writes a book in order to have a launch party. Me too. My thoughts are too disordered to write a book from scratch, but now and then someone offers to publish a collection of these columns and I, fantasising about a party with all my pals there, agree to it. Times must have changed for the publishing industry since Short Books put out the last Low life collection and gave me a terrific launch party, because the publisher of this latest collection stated with finality (once the book was done and dusted) that publishers no longer finance launch parties. I am invited to book launches all the time and was therefore gobsmacked and sceptical on hearing that.

Ninety-two readers (thank you!) sent accounts of their worst debacles on drink or drugs. I printed out each one and clipped it into a ring binder. Last Thursday afternoon I made a pot of tea, opened the file, and settled down for a good read. The first sentence of the first entry was: ‘Priggish as it sounds, I am ashamed of the lesbian orgy I initiated while off my nut on champagne.’ I read that — it was amazing — then I took a restoring sip of Rosie Lee and turned the page. The next one was from a soldier. His first sentence was: ‘Kabul was darker than a Pashtun’s fanny.’ It was a tale of hellish debauchery at a party of South African mercenaries, embassy staff, NGO nymphomaniacs and ‘bemused translators’.