Jeremy Clarke

As my bike had drawn attention to itself by being nicked, abandoned and found, I decided to renew our old friendship by taking it out for a ride. On Sunday afternoon I slung my leg over it and took it for an hour-long, 15-mile circuit that goes up hill and down dale and ends with an exhilarating three-mile freewheel down to the sea, followed by a final killer hill that normally finishes me off completely. I am currently not fit. Tendonitis in my heels means I’ve taken no exercise for two months. During this time I’ve been further enervated by drink and some rotten, highly adulterated drugs. Worse still, I’ve become fat. And when I arrived at the foot of that final killer hill, I felt too out of condition to face it.

For 21 years my bike has leant against the wall just inside the garage door. On Monday morning it was gone. Nicked. I loved that old Dawes Galaxy. But I couldn’t work myself up into a state about its theft. I tried anger, I tried indignation, but without success. Good luck to them, I thought. I might be a fool, but I try not to be a hypocrite as well. Besides, I was elated and humbled that morning because the postman had delivered another packet of your jokes; the biggest yet, containing about 60 letters, emails and postcards; all of them miles too late, unfortunately, to be entered in the competition to win a party invitation. The party had been and gone, and in the minds of those who had any recollection of it, was already a distant memory.

My grandson Oscar, now nearly two, hardly says a word when he and I are out together. It’s like being out with a dog the conversation is so one-sided. He understands well enough. He’s attentive and interested and usually in favour of anything you care to mention. But he barely speaks. Which is strange because his parents are beginning to complain of his loquaciousness at home. ‘You’ve gone all quiet now grandad’s here, haven’t you?’ says his Mum, not without a touch of sarcasm at her child’s new-found gravitas the moment his grandad hoves into view. When Oscar and I went to the zoo last week, he hardly said a word all day.

The book launch party was terrific. To those who put it on, and to everyone who came, I am a beggar even in thanks. A salute, too, to the 200-plus of you who entered the joke competition and to the 15 winners, every one of whom was the life and soul. A special mention in dispatches as well for the lovely Katrina from Paisley, a competition winner, who selflessly assisted when the first casualty came in. This was Sharon. Later I heard reports that the editor had surprised her getting to grips with one of the competition winners on the deputy editor’s desk. I don’t believe it. She was far too drunk for shenanigans.

Before I went to the party, I went to the pub for a pint. The pub was unusually quiet for a Saturday evening. Jay was on duty behind the bar. She leaned across the bar to embrace and kiss me. She had a terrible hangover, she said. I told her to have one herself, and she thanked me and put a pound coin in her tips glass, as she does. I like Jay. There was a stage in Jay’s life when circumstances forced her and her two children to live in a tent for six months. Everything Jay has she’s had to scrabble for. Yet hard times involving tents haven’t politicised her. I’ve never heard her make a moral or a political judgment about anything. After she’d served me, she resumed her perch on a barstool and continued with her texting.

A big mouth, fewer taste buds and a wider gullet than normal means I’m a fast eater. If golloping your dinner was an Olympic event, I’d be knighted by now. Last week I equalled my personal best with a plate of roast pork, apple sauce, roast spuds, mashed swede and runner beans. We were four of us gathered round the table: me, Stanford, my new brother-in-law, and our two old mums, both in their eighties. Stanford and I had spent the morning bleaching and filling in the cracks of an outside wall, prior to whitewashing it. When I looked up from my plate, having polished mine off, I saw that everyone else had barely started. Stan and his mum were making tentative exploratory cuts around the periphery of their respective heaps, still trying to negotiate a way in.

That famous ideal pub of George Orwell’s, The Moon Under Water? Sounds boring to me. There’s no music, every customer is a ‘regular’ with his own chair and it is always quiet enough to talk. The barmaids call you dear (not ducky as they do in ‘raffish’ pubs). If singing breaks out in the Moon Under Water on Christmas Eve, that singing, George assures us, is always ‘decorous’. He’ll be the lanky one in the public bar, no doubt, buying stamps and sipping stout out of his own china mug. My ideal pub is the Black Lion in Plaistow, East London. It’s the pub we go to before the match. George Orwell would probably think it looked quite promising from the outside.

A very sporting publisher has put together a collection of Low life columns and is publishing it in hardback on 3 November. In the evening there is to be a drinks party at The Spectator offices in Westminster to celebrate the occasion. The boardroom can comfortably accommodate around 50 vertical drinkers. Of these 50, the editor has asked me to use this column to invite 15 readers to the party, if 15 can be found. So if anyone wants to risk it, please send your name, address and current favourite joke to The Spectator office. Your joke needn’t necessarily conform to prevailing rules of political correctness. Should fewer than 15 people send in a joke, then everyone can come, and all the more for us.

On Sunday morning we got up early, met the guide, Khalila, on the hotel steps and went on a cultural landmark and shopping tour of Marrakesh. We’d done the Majorelle garden, which we all thought we liked. We’d done the Koutoubia mosque and the Jemaa el-Fnaa square. We’d had a look around an empty palace, former home of a prime minister with 52 wives, didn’t catch the name, now the home of a small colony of feral cats. And we’d strolled between the baked mud walls of the old quarter, where Khalila had pointed out the old synagogue, now closed. And it was about here, in front of this synagogue, around ten o’clock, that the heat from the sun began to tell.

When my uncle was a boy, he said, he was leading a horse down a hill near North Weald in Essex. The horse was pulling a wagon loaded with cabbages, and my uncle had got down, he said, to assist the horse because the hill was a steep one. The war was on. The hill was on a quiet country lane, so he was surprised to see three limousines approaching together in convoy at speed. As the limousines drew level, they slowed to a walking pace so as not to frighten the horse. Seated in the back of the middle car, his face close to the window, and staring out, curious to see what was causing the delay, was Winston Churchill. My uncle was nine or ten at the time, and he found himself staring directly into that famous, pugnacious face.

Somewhat frayed around the edges after The Spectator’s ‘End of Summer Party’ I drove up to Norfolk to visit my country cousins. The corpses on the A143 told me I was getting deeper into the countryside. As well as the usual pea-brained pheasants, I saw a bloody badger, a broken fox and a magnificent, unmarked hare that was bigger than either of these. Normally, I would have stopped and taken the fox’s brush as a present for my grandson, but there was a car up my arse. I stayed with my uncle and aunt on their smallholding and was given my usual bed in a spare room that doubles as an egg-packing station. Quite often I wake in the night not knowing where I am. I sit bolt upright in the darkness in an existential panic trying to figure it out.

The pub was taken over for a meeting. Every chair was occupied. The speaker’s words were being recorded by a sound engineer standing at a portable mixing console. The middle-aged audience was rapt, the atmosphere one of political and moral seriousness. Few were drinking. I mounted the only vacant bar stool and mouthed the word ‘Peroni’ at the young lad behind the bar as though he and I were involved in a dangerous conspiracy. The speaker, a woman aged around 50, was speaking articulately and authoritatively about something called the blood/brain barrier. To sustain it, she said, we need to maintain adequate levels of fatty acids, vitamin D and particularly iodine, which most people fail to do.

My sister got married twice last week, both times to the same bloke, thank goodness. She was married on the Thursday by the state in a register office, and on the Saturday she and Stan stood in front of an Anglican clergyman in a church and asked God to graciously add His blessing to that of the British government. The state affair took place in the same register office as the one at which I fruitlessly gave notice of my intention to marry Cowgirl back in December. I felt such a nit. There were only three of us there to witness the union, so I couldn’t hide in the crowd, but, if she recognised me, the registrar was tactful enough not to mention it and I was grateful.

I took my grandson, Oscar, 20 months old, down to the regatta on the bus, a double-decker, his first experience of one, and we sat upstairs at the front. The bus was far too big for the narrow country lanes and the overhanging branches of trees thrashed against the upstairs windows. We alighted at a bus stop in the middle of the festivities, beside a funfair in full swing. The tipsy bank holiday crowd, the flags, the bunting, the lines of orange police cones, and the bright yellow fixed-penalty notice stuck on the side window of almost every visible parked car, made for a colourful scene. We hadn’t been there more than a minute when a precise naval officer’s voice on the loudspeakers announced the arrival of a Hawker Sea Fury over the town.

In summer the cottage next door is let out to visitors. Each week there’s someone new. I see them coming and going and sometimes circumstances dictate that I get to meet them. Last week a man staying in the cottage came to the door to ask about the television signal in the village. It wasn’t very good, was it? This visitor spoke with a Welsh accent and limped. Reception does vary a bit according to the weather, I said, but our signal seemed fairly strong at the moment. Theirs was fine at the beginning of the week, he said, but now the picture was breaking up on all freeview channels. This morning they’d had to abandon the Jeremy Kyle Show and watch Homes Under the Hammer on BBC1, which they weren’t keen on, to be honest, and now even BBC1 was unwatchable.

I open my eyes. I’m on my back looking up at the neat joinery of a wooden roof. Resting between two of the cross trees is a row of handmade longbows. Green daylight filters through bushes and trees outside the window. I’m half in and half out of a sleeping bag on the floor of a cabin, next to an old-fashioned pot-bellied stove. I don’t know how I got here, or exactly where this is. But I’m assuming it can only be Ted’s place, the hideaway in the woods where he practises and teaches survival skills and makes love to all the ladies who continuously parade through his life. I only know Ted from standing next to him at the bar sometimes, and usually when we speak we keep things on a purposefully superficial level. His preferred topic is always women.

I don’t think any of us were really that interested in being shown over his 14th-century chateau, and very quickly it was clear that neither did he really want to show it to us. But a personally guided tour of his chateau was on our itinerary, and presumably a fee had been agreed, perhaps when he was in a more expansive mood, and the time had come for him to meet his obligation. We decanted from the minibus and gathered under a tree, five of us, on the far side of his courtyard, and after a few minutes he came crunching across the gravel. He was a tallish, broad-shouldered man in a blue, well-tailored shirt, faun slacks and tasteful loafers. He was about 40, his hair had been beautifully scissored and he spoke English better than I do. His handshakes, though, were perfunctory.

A new grandson, and a night in the pub Grandson number two was delivered by caesarean section last week. Nine pounds. A boy. Clynton. He was plain Clinton to start with, but one of their more sophisticated friends suggested the alternative spelling and the suggestion was taken up. Of course the older relatives are either horrified or derisive. Ridiculous, they say, all these silly new children’s names. The world’s gone mad. What’s wrong with a good old traditional English name, like Arthur or George? I’ve been pointing these reactionary spirits in the direction of our parish magazine. In the latest issue a correspondent listed some of the Christian names recorded in the Baptism register between 1836 and 1900. Hocaday, anyone?

‘If you want to get off and walk or run along the towpath, we’ll meet you at the fourth lock,’ the skipper had told us after breakfast. Breakfast was a croissant and two cups of tachycardia-inducing coffee. The towpath was a six-foot-wide strip of smooth asphalt between two grass verges. It was drizzling. The coffee buzz, the level smoothness of the towpath and the overcast sky were ideal conditions for running a mile or two. I stepped off the gangplank and hit the towpath running. The scenery was French. Burgundian. Sleek and contented Charolais cattle were up to their knees in pasture in every other field. A buzzard circled the vines on the hillside. Six magpies were pecking in a field of long stubble. Even the barbed wire seemed somehow more stylish than ours.