Jeremy Clarke

Music of the Forest on Radio 4 last week was a profile of the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, 1924–1994, who achieved celebrity with his book The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo (1961), which presented such an inspiring vision of a prelapsarian, non-violent, egalitarian society that it became a cult classic of

When I was 32, tired at last, for the moment anyway, of seizing the day, I stopped drinking and gave up smoking and enrolled for two A-levels in one year at the local technical college. My decision coincided with a state decision to expand the middle class and I was awarded a small government grant.

In my late twenties, it was not unusual for me to wake up in a police cell wearing a paper suit. Waking to glazed tiles and a high barred window, and not knowing how one got there, is a bad way to start the day. On this particular occasion, I opened my eyes and pieced

In 1984 I was 27. Since leaving school I had done unskilled manual labour, when I could get any. Then l worked as a nursing assistant and then a trainee nurse in an 840-bed psychiatric hospital at Goodmayes in Essex, formerly the West Ham Lunatic Asylum. It was like a walled town. I ate, slept

I live in south Devon. Last week I went up to north Devon, to visit a friend who was renting a cottage on the coast for a week. Devon is a big county. I decided to go by train to Barnstaple and then by bus. At Exeter the train caught fire, however, and we were

I’ve might have no testosterone. (My production is currently being stopped by injection once every three months.) But what I do have is a Fiat Barchetta, bought for a grand on a whim on eBay. It’s the prettiest little two-seater, an old-school, fun drive, with a lot of growl and it makes people smile. Left-hand

Le tout Torquay was there, cramming into the Princess Theatre with a drink in each hand ten minutes after the show had begun. I pressed in among them. Jim Davidson, in a black shirt, a baggy old pair of jeans and business shoes, was already onstage introducing his show and bantering with people in the

‘Oscar!’ cried Miss Herd as I arrived. She was standing at the classroom door releasing her charges one by one as the parent, or in my case the grandparent, arrived to escort them safely back to their respective homes. Oscar came solemnly out in his navy Academy sweatshirt carrying his red Fireman Sam lunchbox and

They do love a party at The Spectator. I was invited to four in ten days last week: the Apollo Summer party, the Spectator ‘At Home’ Summer party, the annual Spectator ‘Meet the Readers’ afternoon tea party, and our Spectator arts editor, the great Liz Anderson’s farewell party. I hadn’t been up to town this

Tap tap tap at the door. I opened my eyes. ‘Check-out 10.30,’ said a neutral or possibly slightly hostile female voice on the other side of the door. I looked at my phone. As I looked, the clock changed from 10.29 to 10.30. Then I heard what I perceived to be the irritated rustling of

‘I’m wasted,’ said Trev, meaning not that his life is futile, but that his mind was overwhelmed by illegal drugs. He conceded it. It wasn’t often that drugs ruined him, but tonight they had, and credit where credit’s due. We were a disparate post-pub gathering of about a dozen people. At a push you might

On Saturday night I went to Charlie’s 69th birthday party. What a gaff he’s got. The rather snooty description of the Grade II listing sums the place up as ‘a slightly provincial but nonetheless interesting example of an early to mid 18th-century gentleman’s house which has a remarkably complete interior and has not suffered from

After three days tête-à-tête (and sometimes tête-à-pied) I walked into town alone to get some air and see what the town was like and the people in it. In one direction, above the hills, the sky was black. Above the town, however, the sun was shining fiercely through a gap in the clouds. Approaching the

My first time back in the local for eight weeks. The manageress lifts the flap, comes around to my side of the bar and kisses me on the lips. We can’t hear ourselves speak as there is a ska DJ barricaded into a corner behind a waist-high wall of speakers and the bar is small

Then there was the time I took Sharon to the Pamplona bull run. She looked very fetching in the traditional St Fermín costume of white T-shirt, white cut-off jeans, red sash tied around the waist and the red neckerchief symbolising the saint’s martyrdom by beheading. She wore her neckerchief in a big rumpled V at

I was two days alone in the caravan and no signal or reception of any sort. It was like a Buddhist silent retreat, where you have to listen in horrified amazement to your own thoughts. During the day I walked the cliff path; in the evenings I sat on the caravan steps wishing I had

Just when I was beginning to think I’d had enough, I was offered a free week in a caravan. I took it like a shot, threw a few shirts in the boot of the car, and buggered off down to Cornwall. I arrived in darkness and couldn’t find the electricity switch. But I was so

I couldn’t find the house so I called the number again. Instead of the man I’d spoken to previously, this time a woman answered. ‘I’m surprised you couldn’t find the house with all your advanced technology,’ she said. She sounded elderly. A mid-Devon accent — an older version of it. ‘I’ve yet to join the

As Sharon stooped to pour boiling water from the kettle into two mugs, I studied her back and wondered what, if anything, remained in me of the love I once had for her. Was there a residue somewhere? Or a stain? I pictured her back as it had been a dozen years earlier, tanned by

Sharon’s back. As soon as I heard, I went straight round to the house and let myself in. She was standing in the kitchen wearing that deceptively vulnerable look that she has. Also in the room was a little girl aged about three with ruby red hair and a Boxer dog. The Boxer was built