Jeremy Clarke

Last weekend we stayed in a cottage at Madron, an ancient granite village in west Cornwall. A church has stood at Madron since 500 AD and there is a holy well nearby. More recently Madron and the surrounding landscape was commemorated in the poems of W.S. Graham (1918–86), who spent the latter half of his life there. By an odd coincidence I’d brought with me a poetry anthology, snatched in haste at random from a shelf, called 100 Poems by 100 Poets, edited by Harold Pinter and others, and we were surprised to find one of Graham’s poems, ‘I leave this at your ear’, included. And then we were even more surprised to read in the introduction that the anthology was conceived by Pinter and friends on a journey from London to Madron to attend Graham’s funeral.

Back in July I booked a cottage in its own wood for the last week of the school summer holidays. I was fondly thinking of my boy and his partner’s five kids, aged between one and nine, and what larks they would have running free in Nature. I was, I suppose, romantically casting them as the innocent characters in books such as Five Children and It and Swallows and Amazons, and bestowing on them the same idealised kind of camp-making, fire-lighting opportunities as I enjoyed at their age. Let me introduce them in descending order of age. The eldest three’s father, my boy’s partner’s ex, is a mild and gentle man, rather spaced out, addicted for many years to heroin and alcohol, and one of the all-time greats of the arcane world of small-town shoplifting.

My car is at the garage so often for repairs, the mechanics invite me to their Christmas parties. This year I was also invited to the World Speedway Championship, which they go to every year. I’ve never been to speedway before, I protested, but that didn’t matter, they said. It was easy to follow and in any case the speedway was really just an excuse for a massive booze-up in Cardiff. Everything was booked, they said: hotel, trains, speedway tickets. All I had to do, they said, was get my arse to the station for 8.15 a.m. on Friday with beer for the journey. There were 16 of us going, they said, drinking lager, mostly.

Then she rented us a luxury apartment at Penzance in Cornwall for a week. Sightseeing was not high on our agenda. Bring cable ties, she’d said. I’ve been a naughty girl. She went down by train; I drove. I drove due west for three hours through a rainstorm of tropical intensity. My new phone’s blue light winked text messages from her all the way down. One said: ‘Lost my musth. It’s completely gone. Menopause?’ The apartment was called Stanhope Forbes, in homage to the leading light of the Victorian era Newlyn artists’ colony. Stanhope Forbes’s paintings of bustling late-Victorian fish quay scenes, with lovely girls in virginal pinafores, decorated the apartment’s whitewashed walls.

Cider was her drink. Pint of. She was a reserved, deliberate, thoughtful woman, aged about 40. She went out hardly at all these days, she said, because she was raising a toddler. On the rare occasion when she did go out, nobody seemed to be having fun any longer. It wasn’t like the old days.  What’s happened to everybody in this town, she said? It used to be a party town full of interesting characters having fun. Where did they all go?  Then she saw me at that party, she said, and she thought, well, at least there’s one person left having fun, keeping the spirit alive, which is why she’d made a note of my details and then called. ‘Another one?’ I said.

I was staying on Dartmoor at an old farmstead in an overgrown meadow next to a fast-flowing river. We built a fire by the river and sat around it on kitchen chairs drinking and talking. There was no phone signal, no radio, no internet, no telly, nothing. We didn’t even have music. For two days and nights we heard only the sound of rushing water and sometimes wind in the trees. Wonderful it was to leave the tyrant iPhone on a windowsill to gather pollen and a cat’s dusty paw print. I was so relaxed by the end I was horizontal. On the third day, a Saturday, I’d promised to lend a hand at our village fête by doing a stint behind the bar. The organisers had said I should be there in the festive field for 12.30.  But at 12.

I was on my back on the operating table for my long-awaited minor op. Three lesions had to come off under local anaesthetic: two on my chest, one on my shoulder. A Dr Mukopadhyay wielded the scalpel. This slight, shy, otherwordly man surprised me at the outset by diffidently placing a comforting, perhaps healing, perhaps textbook hand on my shoulder and leaving it there until I ducked my shoulder away in embarrassment. Once he’d begun cutting, Dr Mukopadhyay kept at it for over an hour with all the care and concentrated attention of a master watchmaker. When he voiced an instruction, he did so softly and humbly. As Dr Mukopadhyay is a bit of a mouthful, the nurses dancing attendance on him, one male and two females, called him Dr Muk.

Well, I found the Adulis restaurant and my online date was there. She didn’t muck about, and neither for once did I, and when we parted at noon the next day, I was very tired. So I was relieved to be checking in later at a spa hotel on the north Cornish coast called the Scarlet, to write a travel piece about their two-day organic wine-tasting break called ‘Naturally into wine’. It was the perfect opportunity to recuperate, I imagined. A gentle swim, perhaps, a stroll on the beach, then a glass or two of Peasant’s Varooka in the evening to see me out. A cheerful woman called Cherie checked me in. Should she put me down for the beach yoga class, or perhaps the transformational dancing, before breakfast? ‘Transformational dancing!’ I said.

I came up and out of the underground station into the busy Brixton Road. It was 9 o’clock on a humid, overcast summer evening. As well as being a bustling place of departure and arrival, the precinct in front of the station seemed also to be a preferred place for the locals to meet and sit and socialise. I was looking for an Eritrean restaurant called Adulis. Here I was to meet a woman I’d met two days ago on a dating website. This new dating website is proving amazingly fruitful, which surprises me not least because it was the first time I’ve been truthful on one. So far we’d exchanged messages, this woman and I, mainly learned ones about books we liked and different kinds of fountain pen ink.

I’m at home watching the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ ‘Man on Fire’ video on the laptop. Talk about uplifting. I’m watching with my earbuds in, and loving America, when the phone rings twice and stops.  This means my boy hasn’t credit on his phone and wants me to ring him back. I stop the video and call him. He’s bidding on a car on eBay, he says. Would I have a look at the description and tell him what I think? There’s a minute to go, he says. So I go to the auction site and look at the listing and immediately my inspired mood evaporates. My boy and I have bought plenty of cheap cars on eBay over the years. Some turned out to be good ones; with others we were completely done over. We’re experienced.

In her profile photo she was curtseying prettily in a floral dress. In her written profile she described herself as a ‘nice lady, with a nice and open soul, and with common sense’. Not what I was looking for at all, but she lived quite near, and, with petrol the price it is, I was willing to overlook things. I also admired her advice to any chaps contemplating sending her a message. Our profiles should not tell her that we like good food ‘as if you are living to eat’. Nor should we say that we liked to laugh, because ‘everybody does this’. Finally, we shouldn’t claim to be happy, because ‘all serious profiles from dating sites are sad’.

After the launch party of Harry Mount’s How England Made the English, there was a second, impromptu, diehards’ party at a flat belonging to a book reviewer called Molly. Here I fell into conversation with a publisher who, while making a lunge for our hostess, invited me to another book launch slated for the following week.  An official invitation arrived by email a few days later. The book was called The Irresistible Mr Wrong. It was written by a notorious old roué, I vaguely remembered the publisher saying, who in his prime had married a string of celebrated beauties, seduced countless others, and was so fabulously well endowed he had a giant pepper pot named after him.

I was already braking before I realised that it was Tom standing by the side of the road with his thumb out. Tom loves me. He got in and leant across and wordlessly clasped me to his bosom. He’s one of those small guys whom God made small because He is a compassionate God and He wanted to limit the damage. Small but hard, Tom is, and with huge hands. In a clinch he feels as if he’s made of steel plate. He stank of Stella. His stubbly chin on my neck felt like 80 grain sandpaper. ‘Where to, chief?’ I said. He was hitchhiking over to his ex-wife’s new place to see her and the kids and give them all a treat on Father’s Day, he said virtuously. Maybe he’d do a bit of tiling in the bathroom while he was there, he added.

At midday, what must have been more or less the entire village gathered around the steps of the village hall (1952) to raise a flute of champagne to Her Majesty, give three ragged cheers, and sing the National Anthem. Then we were herded into the adjacent parish church car park for the parish Diamond Jubilee commemorative photograph.

Our Scottish visitors, man and wife, came bearing lavish gifts: a beribboned fruit cake in a Union Jack cake tin; a bottle of Bollinger; a bottle of Bailie Nicol Jarvie old Scotch Whisky (their favourite tipple); a bottle of nubile white Burgundy; four ‘Katie Morag’ children’s books; The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, which made them both laugh in bed; a heavy, 19in high relief sculpture of Eos, Titan goddess of the dawn (she of the rosy fingers); a circular plaster plaque featuring a bust, in relief, of their jaw-droppingly beautiful middle daughter Sophie, clad in a toga, her head informally decorated with thistles, olives and olive leaves. And for me a T-shirt. White cotton. He designed it himself, said the man.

After a party the night before, those who had stayed the night were staggering around among the debris in a state of shock and disbelief trying to piece together what had happened. The headline news was that someone had driven his Land-Rover through a fence and abandoned it teetering on the edge of a cliff. The herd of bullocks being contained by the fence had all hoofed it and the farmer was displeased, apparently. The other news was that the beautiful young mother of the two beautiful little girls was still semi-paralysed and throwing up in the garden, and the Low life correspondent of The Spectator had been sick in a permeable wickerwork wastepaper basket.

Listening to the BBC news and current affairs programmes, you’d think that Britain is a socialist republic. Which is odd because my entire extended family, on both my mother’s side (smallholders) and on my father’s (urban lower-middle class), is without exception monarchist conservative. From time to time there are rumours that somebody or other has cast their vote for the LibDems, or is thinking about doing so, but we laugh and put this down to an excess of sublimated sexuality rather than political conviction. We have a short branch of the family which is staunch Hitlerite Nazi, but no party’s manifesto, certainly not the BNP’s, ever comes anywhere close to expressing their exciting vision for Britain, so presumably they don’t bother to vote.

The day after her 96th birthday, and three days before she died, my next-door neighbour told me she wanted Jimmy killed and put in her coffin with her. She knew then she hadn’t long to go. The only thing I could do for her, she said, was put fresh milk in Jimmy’s saucer, making sure that the milk was fresh. She was very anxious about this. She’d hate Jimmy to be offered milk that had gone off. I was jubilant. Her wanting Jimmy put down was the best news I’d heard for ages. I’d have offered to do it myself with my bare hands if there was even half a chance she’d be amenable to the idea.

I arrived at the hilltop crematorium an hour early. The car park was empty and there wasn’t a soul about. Behind the low crematorium building the sky was black and threatening. I found the door to the gents’ lavatory to be unlocked, however, and the water in the tap above the hand basin unexpectedly hot. I used the facilities and as I washed my hands I leaned forward and stared at my face in the mirror. I’d been to a party the night before. It was one of those depressing parties where the illegal drugs are taken secretly by a select few in a bedroom, and to be invited in is like being offered a seat in the House of Lords by a committee. I wasn’t invited in. My staple all night was lager.

About once every six months I drive to a house to pick up a box of six sealed tubs of aloe vera juice. These tubs are not, I hasten to add, for your do or die low life correspondent. No doubt I have lost enough credibility already with last week’s cake forks. If I confessed to trying to prolong my low life by taking top spec aloe vera juice, it would probably and rightly be the end. For this is what the advertising pamphlets of this pyramid selling company brand hints at. Without actually coming out and wildly promising it, the subtle impression created by the PR firm responsible for these pamphlets is that drinking the stuff will energise and lengthen your life. It will also grant you serenity of mind.