Jeremy Clarke

Two years ago, roughly, for a travel piece, I flew to Delhi and took a southbound train to a dusty railway platform in Rajasthan. There I was met by a smiling man with a gold earring who introduced himself as my driver for the week. His name was Babu. I must be a VIP, he said, because he was the company’s top driver and he always was given the VIP work. From now on, he said, he would be treating me as his god. Then he said, just to make sure, because there was no telling these days, and I didn’t by any stretch of the imagination look the part: ‘Excuse me, sir, but in your country are you VIP?’ I laughed and said certainly not. But he seemed to take my laugh and denial as a sign that perhaps I really might be a VIP. I was English, after all.

In the blue corner, wearing 4oz gloves, is the Ninja. Real name Klynton. The younger of my two grandsons. Also known as Ninge. Aged three. Weighed in at 35lbs. Blue eyes, blond hair. Not yet fluent in the language. Has only one word — juvvy. Nobody knows what juvvy is. Possibly a neologism. The word is now in common and versatile use within the family as a substitute for any noun. Example: ‘What’s on the juvvy tonight?’ Otherwise as mute as a fish. We’ve tried him in French and drawn a blank there also. Once a week his father takes him to Chatter Time, a pre-school group for three-year-olds. The Ninja appears preoccupied by a private world that is even more interesting than this one. He is impervious to physical pain. He is only aware of mental pain.

On eBay car auctions one often reads of all sorts of reasons for cars being sold: birth, death, marriage, divorce, promotion, emigration. But rarely is the car an unwanted gift. Terry124 stated that he was selling his Mercedes E320 CDI estate because it was ‘a Christmas present for the missis, but she hated it’.  After years of scrutinising eBay car ads, I like to think I can distinguish between sellers who have a basic respect for the truth and those who habitually palter with it. But with this one I couldn’t decide. It had a ring of truth, certainly, and it ended on a touchingly plaintive note with: ‘I’m an honest man.

Depressed and demoralised after the defeat of his nation of farmers in the second Boer war, Eugène Marais, an Afrikaner patriot, lawyer, naturalist, poet, lifelong morphine addict and journalist, went to live with a troop of baboons in the then remote Waterberg area of South Africa. He camped in their vicinity and was gradually accepted by them and afforded a place in their society. His books about his experiences, My Friends the Baboons and The Soul of the Ape, have subsequently made his name as the father of the scientific study of the behaviour of animals. In The Soul of the Ape he proposed a theory of the evolution of the human psyche that runs approximately as follows. Man and all the higher primates are in a state of bewilderment. Why?

Another sunny Sunday morning and the phone rings. I pick up the receiver. It’s Frank. I groan inwardly. Frank is a doctor and an old family friend and a great talker. What he has to say is always intelligent and interesting and often funny. He will explain scientific laws or philosophical arguments or biological functions with elaborate care and in the simplest possible terms, so that even a child might understand them. My immune system, for example, is run by soldiers with powers of arrest and internment, constantly on high alert for terrorists. His talk is invariably sprinkled with his favourite Jewish jokes, and bawdy songs, which he breaks into with little or no provocation, his cherubic face aglow with pleasure.

My brother’s three Borders are called Roxy, Ruby and Taz. My one ambition in life is to own a terrier again, or rather three terrier bitches, just so that I can call them Tray, Blanch and Sweetheart. (Lear, mad on the heath: ‘The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me.’) I ask my brother for the latest news of his dogs. He says he recently took Ruby up to Yorkshire, to be served by a well-known pedigree Border stud dog. My brother is a regular customer there. It’s a ten-hour round trip. The moment he draws up in his car, he says, the dog’s owner comes out into the yard and unrolls his ‘mating mat’ and lays it down, and his stud dog goes ballistic with joy, knowing what’s in store.

The catheter stung exquisitely when I lay down. So I stood up. All night I stood by my hospital bed, tethered by my penis to the transparent collection bag hanging off the bed rail, reading Artemis Cooper’s life of Patrick Leigh Fermor. In 1931, not knowing what to do with himself, Paddy walked to Constantinople, as he called it. I rested the paperback on my pillow under the spotlight and walked with him across Europe, much of it still feudal. Our hero had just emerged from a hayrick after having a spontaneous foursome with his Serbian girlfriend and two Hungarian peasant girls they had met in a field, when I made a startling and revolutionising discovery.

I’ve had a medical procedure that is ‘likely’ to leave me impotent. A nurse is coming around dishing out Tramadol, a painkiller of the morphine family. I raise my hand smartly. She steers her drugs trolley towards me and my bed in the corner of the six-bed male ward. ‘Are you in pain, Mr Clarke?’ ‘Absolute agony,’ I say. I’m looking fetching in a pair of white, knee-length tights. I’m hooked up to a drip to put fluids in, and catheterised to take them away. This thickness of the catheter tube and the site of its emergence is hard to credit at first. The fluid in the collection bag looks mostly like blood. I’ve lost all feeling from the waist down. But I’m not in pain. On the contrary I feel quite magnificent.

‘In my opinion,’ says Alistair Webster QC, author of the Liberal Democrats’ internal report into Lord Rennard’s droit de seigneur-style pulling technique, ‘the evidence of behaviour which violated the personal space and autonomy of the complainants was broadly credible.’ I’ll tell you what behaviour that violates personal space is. I was on a Nile cruise press trip: Aswan to Luxor. We were three hacks and a woman from the PR company. We’d done Edfu, Kom Ombo, Karnak, Thebes, the Valley of the Kings. In bed at night, if I shut my eyes tightly, I could see hieroglyphics emblazoned on the insides of my eyelids. Our last night was spent at one of Cairo’s better hotels. The other two hacks were abstemious.

My first ride in a stretch Hummer. I haven’t lived, I now realise. The prodigious, ridiculous thing, tricked out in multicoloured neon piping, drew up outside the pub where we were getting stoked. I was privileged to be invited by Trev to his niece’s 18th birthday celebration in a nightclub. It was very much a family affair and they are a proud family. ‘Who the fuck is that?’ I kept hearing from the younger, micro-skirted, six-inch-heeled element, in disgusted tones, referring to me, and Trev would do his best to explain me to them. Trev thought a ‘punch-up’ inevitable when we got to the club. The women were as liable to start one as the men, in his opinion. I looked around at the state of play as we waited to climb aboard the limo.

I shifted a chest of drawers that hadn’t been moved for years, and found an old photograph lying among the dust and the cobwebs behind it. I picked it up and studied it, fascinated by the alien light of the mid-1980s. A summer meadow. A terrier ring at a dog and ferret show. And there I am, a stranger to my present self, crouching beside a tidy Jack Russell terrier bitch. She has liquid, almond-shaped eyes set in a black-and-tan face. The well-proportioned body is piebald black and white. Smooth coated. Her tail is undocked, the blood-blackened bone showing through the sparse white hairs at the tip. She is looking with calm, confident interest at something off-camera. People often commented on what they saw as kindness in her face.

When the ticket collector asked to see my ticket, I took the opportunity to ask what time my connection left Birmingham New Street. ‘Are you travelling onwards with the Vag?’ he said. ‘Excuse me?’ I said. ‘The Vag! Virgin!’ he said, irritated by my ignorance. I laughed at him. His expression remained official. He touched the screen on his portable machine and presented me with a card printed with the information. Then I went to the lavatory, one of those spacious ones with a curved door that slides back with a hiss at the touch of a button. As I lifted the seat, a voice said, ‘This is Ron Burgundy speaking. Welcome to the train throne, or, as the Brits call it, the privy.’ I looked around in surprise, trying to locate the loudspeaker.

Until a fortnight ago there was a healthy, graceful, 70ft-specimen of Eucalyptus dalrympleana — or mountain gum — in the garden. Now there isn’t. Or rather, the remains of the trunk and branches are lying in sections on the ground. To knock a few quid off the tree surgeon’s bill, I’d grandiosely told them not to bother reducing the trunk and major branches to fire-grate-sized logs. Leave it in rings, I said, and I’ll split them up with an axe. Which they did. The next time I looked out, the men had departed and there were a couple of tons of wood lying in wheels in the sodden grass. The biggest rings, from the base of the trunk, were about two feet in diameter and a foot thick. Not a problem. A joy.

So I go to the all-night house party with my rolled-up yoga mat under my arm. Nice house, middle-class crowd, everybody drunk. Women’s screams coming from upstairs. Looking for the lavatory, I find one vacant at the top of the stairs. I’m in mid-stream when this bloke bursts in and slams the door again behind him. He’s a big bloke and it’s a small lavatory. To accommodate him, I shuffle around the bowl and come at it now from the side. ‘Don’t mind me, pal,’ he says, all business-like. He delicately opens a tiny plastic bag, licks his thumb and shoves it into the powder as if it’s sherbert and he’s ten years old. He licks his thumb lovingly and plunges it into the bag again.

I went from the first yoga session of the New Year to the pub. I felt ever so noble. The place was rocking. There was a bloke at the bar looking at his watch, curious as to how long it would take the pill he’d just taken to affect his brain. I was with a woman who kept excusing herself to kiss this other woman. It wasn’t snogging exactly. Rather it was miniaturist nibbling and lip-licking. Some tongue, too. But it looked a bit theatrical. Look at us, kind of thing. Were we supposed to be surprised? Aroused? This is an agricultural town. Nobody has batted an eyelid at lesbianism or bisexuality for centuries. If they’d put their backs into it a bit more then, yes, jolly good show, and we might have spectated a bit.

Christmas shopping in Waterstones, I came across a memory card game called We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. I snatched it up and almost ran with it to the till, where I paid the woman with the smug attitude of a connoisseur. If I’d had a cavalry moustache, I’d have twirled the ends. I’d intended wrapping it up and putting it in my grandson Oscar’s stocking, but the wait would have been unbearable. So when I got home, solemn with excitement, I simply handed it to him, and we cleared the decks immediately to play, with Grandad still buttoned into his overcoat. Do you know the book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt? No? You haven’t lived. The grandson and me, we read a lot.

It’s a disgrace! I went up to London from Devon, a hick up from the sticks, to Annabel’s in Berkeley Square to a ‘party to start the Christmas party season’, it said on the invitation. ‘Eight till late.’ ‘Champagne, cocktails and old school fun.’ I’d never been to Annabel’s. I’d never dreamed of going to Annabel’s. I was always fairly certain that if I did go to Annabel’s I wouldn’t be allowed in. They’d just laugh. I took a cab from Paddington to Mayfair. It curvetted smoothly to a halt two pavement-slab widths from the discreet entrance.

Can it be that the one single agreeable thing about getting old is that one loses one’s pot paranoia? No. I thought I was going to get away with it, but here it came again like a creeping fog: the terrible introspection, the loss of identity, the psychic disintegration, the paranoid delusions. And here already, I noted, was the paralysing delusion that I am rooted to the spot and somehow tied to the company by a bond of loyalty, to the extent that even to uncross my legs and leave the beer-garden table would feel like a terrible betrayal. It’s horrible. I hate it. My immediate task was to try to drink off the paranoia or the evening would be over before it started. Trev was pulling belated, nauseated faces about there being too little or no vodka in his vodka and lemonade.