Jeremy Clarke

Sir Francis Drake died of dysentery while attacking the town of San Juan in Puerto Rico. He was buried at sea in a lead coffin. Henry V succumbed to it at 35. Accounts of the African missionary explorer David Livingstone’s lingering death from dysentery make grim reading. Near the end he was too weak to hold a pencil. He was found dead on his knees in prayer. Tough guy Ernest Hemingway had so many bowel movements in a short time he suffered a prolapse and afterwards went into a physical and mental decline. In Africa it is said to kill hundreds of thousands of children under five annually. The first time I had dysentery, I had the watery, Shigellosis version. It visited me on a three-day hike up Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Dysentery is inconvenient, apart from anything else.

Many years ago I met a woman in a train on the Mombasa to Nairobi ‘Lunatic Express’ line. She was seated opposite me in the compartment, next to her husband. The three of us had the compartment to ourselves. It was early in the morning. I’ve forgotten what the sleeping arrangements had been the night before. I think perhaps the husband and I had bedded down together and she’d rejoined him in the morning. Her husband had then left the compartment to go to the lavatory or dining car, and she and I had begun to talk. She’d met and married the husband after a whirlwind romance a year before, she told me, and they’d opened and run a small restaurant together up the coast at Lamu.

‘Good morning, sir!’ said Wendy: black shirt, green craftsman’s apron. The idea of having a person loitering by the entrance to greet and welcome the customer has spread from trendy California-based clothing-chain outlet Hollister to the DIY megastores. Whereas the Hollister’s fashionable fluffers are nature’s last word on female pulchritude, Wendy’s attraction was that she probably does what it says on the tin, and would be a lot more comfortable to lie on. I was acting chauffeur for two elderly cousins, combined age 174, both unsteady on their feet, listing to port, disoriented, flatulent, myopic, deaf, inarticulate, forgetful, yet hell-bent on shopping for garden furniture.

The barbecue was a sawn-off 40-gallon oil drum with holes punched in the sides. It stood on a rock under the spreading boughs of an oak tree. For fuel we chucked in driftwood logs and clumps of seaweed. The Old Speckled Hen was going down a treat in the evening sunshine, and the barbecue smoke and I were circulating convivially. I was introduced to a young couple who were new to the area. They had recently moved to Britain from Uganda, where they had been farming. We talked about Africa. I said I’d recently seen a BBC news report claiming that the African economy has taken off, and to the extent that the standard of living of the average African was already on a par with that of a BBC executive. Well, it was certainly improving for some, they said doubtfully.

Three miles up the road is a glass-fronted cupboard in a hedge that often contains free-range eggs for sale at £1.20 a half-dozen. It’s a sales point relying on and trusting in other people’s honesty. You slide back the glass, pleased to be living in a still-civilised part of the world, drop your coins in the tin and help yourself. The eggs are flecked with dirt and crap and bits of straw, and one of these boiled for three minutes and eaten with a slice of bread and butter is what I’d ask for if I ever find myself on Death Row on the morning of my execution. Recently I’ve discovered another honesty stall consisting of a rickety table outside a thatched cottage in an unfrequented lane.

On bank holiday Monday my brother and I, and my brother’s three Border terriers, went for a day-long walk on Dartmoor. We weren’t the only ones up there. And I often wonder whether the hardy, reclusive souls who live up there, having endured another long winter, aren’t a little peeved to find their peace shattered by the walkers, cyclists and day trippers who swarm all over the place at the first sign of spring. But to our credit, we at least looked the part. Clown that I am, I was head to foot in lightweight, quick-drying walking clobber, my suede walking shoes made in Germany, and on my back a snug-fitting, 15-litre daysack.

The weatherman had breezily predicted a fine, warm, spring day — and it was. We were on the road early, my grandson sitting beside me on his booster seat, keenly searching the unfolding scenery with his pellucid blue eyes for notable things to report. At three and a half years old his speech and understanding have taken a Great Leap Forward. His days of vacuous innocence are behind him. He has become garrulous and vivacious and imbued with a fervent desire for knowledge and experience. And what better thing could there be to satisfy that desire than to spend a day with his grandfather at the Devon County Show. His life to date has been limited and parochial. It was safe to say that this would be a day of firsts. It was his first time on a motorway, for one thing.

‘Can you manage to plan, start and finish daily tasks?’ said a panic-stricken Simon, reading aloud from the Department of Work and Pensions ESA50 Limited Capability for Work form. He was struggling with Section 2, which was inviting him to describe his ‘mental, cognitive and intellectual functions’ by answering questions furnished with multiple choice answers such as ‘Never’, ‘Sometimes’ or ‘It varies’. While you and I have been enjoying the sight of the political class changing direction like a shoal of spooked sardines, hundreds of thousands of ordinary British people on disability benefits have had only one thing on their minds — form ESA50. Simon has got himself into a right old state about it.

Next morning, Sunday, up early. I must have been the only person at the Butlins music festival minus a hangover. Day three, and I was yet to hear a live musical note or get myself an altered consciousness. I walked into town along the promenade feeling ever so noble. Perhaps I might go to church, I thought, and underline my great goodness. I savoured an image of my new pals, hands on hips, indignantly saying to me, ‘So where were you last night?’ And my answering, ‘I had an early night.’ And them saying, ‘And today? Where were you today?’ And me saying simply, ‘Church.’ The sea was flat and grey. Other festival-goers, cold and crapulent, were slouching grimly into town, as though on a forced march.

The train driver was at lunch. The next train to depart, according to her blackboard, was 13.00. It was now 12.45. The miniature diesel locomotive and the row of blue carriages were empty in the station. Shut in his house on the far side of the lake, the lion, deeply troubled, was roaring his head off. My grandson chose a carriage two from the front. He insisted on being the one who turned the little brass knob that opened the low door. The zoo train’s carriages are open carriages with room for two passengers, one facing forward, one back, knees touching. Our ice creams were starting to melt and drip. I found a paper serviette in my pocket and wiped the ice cream from his chin and hands and then I licked his lopsided ice cream back into shape and returned it.

On Sunday morning early I was trying to hitch a ride home. A big white Mercedes van came haring around the bend. I stuck out my thumb and it swerved violently and stopped beside me. ‘A good night, then, was it?’ said the driver as I collapsed into the passenger seat. A comedian. Young fella. Wide awake. Chewing gum. Loving the life. It must have been my glassy eyes and my crumpled, slept-in jacket that gave me away. I had a think. Not bad, I said. I listed the names of the pubs and the two clubs we’d been to. ‘So did you pull?’ he said. Pardon? I said. ‘Pull. Last night. Did you get hold of anything?’ he said.

Five of us, standing in a semi-circle on a varnished wooden floor facing the yoga teacher, breathing deeply in concert. In through the nose, hold, out through the mouth. Easter Sunday morning. Christ is risen. We slowly inhale and exhale to the sound of distant church bells and the cheeping of a pair of sparrows nesting somewhere in the eaves. We’re learning Kum Nye, a type of Tibetan yoga. An all-day beginners’ ‘workshop’. I feel guilty about learning Tibetan yoga on Easter Sunday morning. Raised a Baptist, as a youth I was warned strongly against yoga. It empties the mind, I was told, leaving it open and unprotected. Satan, a ravening lion always on the prowl, spots his opportunity and rushes in.