Jeremy Clarke

Opinion behind the counter in the busy, family-run Silver Grill fish and chip shop was sharply divided. The grieving Leicester City supporter who ran the place thought that Portsmouth had every chance of pulling it off. In the betting shop next door they were offering 33–1 on Pompey winning 1–0, he said, riddling the chip cage. Ridiculous odds. They are an experienced team and they won’t mind mixing it. If they rise to the occasion, Chelsea won’t have things all their own way, you mark my words, he said. But his nephew — baseball cap, beard and his arms so densely tattooed that at first glance it looks as if he’s wearing a purple and black cardigan — rolled his eyes at his uncle’s romanticism.

My boy and I have fallen out. It happened like this. He decided to drive his newborn son, his partner and his partner’s three kids up to the Outer Hebrides, where his partner’s mother lives. The mother wanted to see the baby, and my boy and his partner were keen for her to see him. They wouldn’t all legally fit into my boy’s saloon car, so he tried to hire a seven-seater for the journey. But the car-hire companies won’t hire to the under-21s (even the under-25s have to fork out a whacking great premium) and my boy is 20. Why not buy an old seven-seater for the trip? I said. If you aren’t worried about the state of the bodywork, I said, you might pick one up for less than it would cost to hire one for a week.

I used to see Tom now and again at the local gym. I’d be on the treadmill and he’d be in front of the mirror lifting weights. He was already big then, but he was all chest and shoulders and no legs and the disproportion looked ridiculous. Broad at the top, he seemed to taper down to a point. Also, his shoulders were too high, too level and too immobile. One day this inverted triangle with blond hair flopping over a spotty schoolboy face spoke to me. He appeared on the next treadmill and said he’d just been outside to do some sprints on the football pitch, but abandoned the idea because there was too much dogs’ excrement underfoot. His soft voice and careful enunciation surprised me.

Here is a middle-aged man lying in bed in his black and green striped pyjamas. The bed is a single bed and he is reading a book. On the bedside cupboard is a 1970s Grundig Elite Boy portable radio tuned to The World Tonight. Next to that is a photograph of his 17-year-old son in a cheap frame. His son is looking annoyed with the person holding the camera. Slippers, much stained, rest east–west in parallel alignment beside the bed. On the wall above the man’s head is a framed colonial map of the Nyasaland Protectorate. On the floor, but within easy reach, a pile of books nearly two-feet high. As he reads, he is absentmindedly fingering a place on his chest, high up near the collarbone, where lately a gristly little spot has appeared.

I saw three films at the cinema last month. The first was a French-made job, with subtitles, called A Prophet. It was awarded the accolade of ‘best film’ at Cannes in 2009 and I drove the 20 miles to the arthouse cinema full of optimism. In the café beforehand for a cup of green tea and a slice of carrot cake (I know, I know — ponce), I asked the woman behind the counter if she’d seen it and what it was like. The still-handsome, slightly intimidating woman in a green apron must have been a real stunner when she was young. She looked at me carefully before answering, as if deciding whether I was worth an honest opinion or not. She’d seen it in London, she said. What had stood out for her was the violence. It was a violent film from start to finish.

I was standing in line in front of the container truck-sized skip designated for waste metal. Each Sunday, the local council puts three of these huge skips — one for wood, one for metal and one for gardening refuse — on one of its old storage sites, calls it a civic amenity centre and invites householders to bring along recycling waste that is too bulky for the fortnightly collection. It also supplies a static dustcart for rubble and cardboard and three workers to supervise, assist and keep an eye out that nobody abuses the service by sneaking in old tyres, tins of paint or asbestos. Ten years ago, we would have all been filling a trolley at the garden centre or DIY megastore on Sunday afternoon.

Joe always went ‘potty’ when there was snow on the ground, said Marjory. He would clamour at the back door to be let out to play in it, and once outside he’d rush around in frenzied circles, barking at it. Not that it snowed much during his lifetime, she added. Twice, she thinks. But each time, Joe’s excitement had made it a memorable event. When it snowed this year, he went spare as usual, she said. When she let him outside to play in it, he became so excited he had another epileptic fit, then a heart attack and he died, lying on his side in the snow, on Christmas Eve. Old Joe was a likable chap, and because Marjory was becoming frail, I used to take him out for walks.

The advert said: ‘1991 BMW 740i. Owned previously by an elderly couple. Fully serviced. Fully loaded. New front windscreen. This car is immaculate. Quick sale required.’ In other words — at least, one sincerely hoped so — the vendor was in dire financial difficulties and forced to let his cherished motor go for a song. There was a photograph of the car. It might have been taken professionally for a full-page advertisement in a lifestyle magazine. In gleaming gun-metal grey, the executive saloon appeared to be in showroom condition. It was parked on rose-coloured brick paving outside a steel-and-glass luxury apartment block.

I arrived late and perspiring at the novel-writing workshop. Four would-be novelists and the tutor were seated around a table. I apologised for not being punctual and received amused, forgiving or complicit smiles, reminding me that it was art that we were about today, not commerce or industry. Two rows of paperbacks divided the table. The tutor said that these were what she considered to be exemplary novels taken from her bookshelves and that we might take a note of the titles. I switched my phone off, took out my pen and notepad and looked eagerly along the rows. Three Tracy Chevaliers, two Jeanette Wintersons, two Virginia Woolves, an Alice Sebold, a Dodie Smith, an Emily Brontë and an Angela Carter.

When the relationship ended a week before the Christmas before last, she’d already bought my Christmas presents. Instead of posting or burning them, she stored them under the desk in her office, resting her exquisite feet on them during working hours, until three weeks ago, when we finally met again over a tapas in a Spanish restaurant off the Edgware Road, and she managed to hand over, after some 14 months, the carrier bag containing her parting gifts.  One was a hardback copy of Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis. I read it straight off when I got home and loved it. It’s a boozer’s manual, informative and funny. The chapter on hangovers I found particularly fascinating.

On most days of the year there is a guide-led walk on Dartmoor. These walks, advertised in the Dartmoor Visitor, are ideal for a lazy person like me who enjoys tramping across the high moor from time to time but prefers someone else to do the map-reading and the worrying about not getting lost. Each walk listed in the Visitor is given a title, such as ‘Peaks and Pixies’ or ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’, and an Ordinance Survey map reference. The map reference tells you where to meet and usually refers to a car park. Whenever I go on one of these walks, I often get off on the wrong foot, as it were, because I’m improperly dressed.

I’d booked sleeping berths to Fort William, onward tickets for the scenic passenger line to Mallaig, and a double bed in a country-house hotel. But at the last moment she said she couldn’t come. So on my birthday I woke from a drugged sleep in an upper bunk on the Caledonian sleeper and there was one less person in my romantic Scottish Highlands sleeper-compartment fantasy than planned. I climbed down the ladder, released the window shutter and looked out. We were travelling slowly across a frozen bog. In the far distance, mountains; their snowy peaks glowing orange in the weak early-morning sunlight. Between the strand of barbed wire demarcating railway property and these far-off peaks, not a single sign of human endeavour could be seen.

The Junior Common Room of the School of Oriental and African Studies is a noisy, tatty, paper-strewn room with a curving wall at one end like the stern of a small liner. Tall windows let in plenty of wind and sky, and when I was studying there I used to imagine I was sailing steerage class on a slow voyage across Bloomsbury. My train was due to leave Euston station — just up the road — in an hour. My old college was as good a place as any to wait on an afternoon of bitter cold. I took my packet of tangy-cheese-flavoured Doritos, my carton of cappuccino, and my subsidised copy of the Guardian newspaper and found a comfortable berth on a battered old sofa under one of the tall windows. A plain white T-shirt was laid out on the table in front of me.

Choosing frames for my new varifocal lenses was like choosing a new personality. Each pair I tried on projected something slightly different. What kind of person should I pretend to be from now on? Philosophical? Whacky? Left-leaning? Post post-modernist? It was an unexpectedly exciting moment. The young assistant stood with me at the display and offered her professional opinion. In quick succession I popped on a couple of dozen different frames and looked into her eyes and tried to be serious. She knew immediately whether or not a particular pair of frames suited my face. If they did, and she liked them, she shook her fingers as though she’d just burnt them on a hotplate.

After tea on Saturday I had an argument with myself about whether to stay in or go to the pub. The timid side of me listed several valid reasons for staying in, including the 20-mile round trip on icy roads. These my intrepid side sarcastically dismissed one by one, insisting that they merely added up to the single fact that I’ve become a bore. I decided in the end to stay in and read an improving book. Slightly regretting the decision, I chucked another log on the fire, took another sip of green tea, and focused my concentration on Bernard Crick’s jaunty introduction to Machiavelli’s Discourses. After half a page my mobile rang. It was Tom. He was speaking from a noisy pub and slurring his words. ‘Jerry, I’m looking for horse,’ he yelled. ‘Horse?

‘Do you want a dance?’ she said. She stood there smiling at me with her hand held out invitingly. I’d already decided I wasn’t going to get caught up in the dancing. But this woman — well, you should have seen her. She was about 19; as full of health, life and potential fecundity as point-of-lay pullet. And yet a vulnerability in her smile gave the impression that she’d had to pluck up the courage to ask. I said to my friend, and my friend’s friend — we’d been deep in conversation about the perilous state of a football club dear to our hearts — how could I possibly refuse and would they excuse me for a moment? They nodded curtly and returned to their football and I offered her my hand. She grasped it firmly and hauled me away.

My first grandson, Oscar, born just before Christmas, has an elder brother and two elder sisters, all aged under six. Including his mum, whom I’ve only recently met, this meant five extra presents to be chosen, wrapped and delivered on Christmas Day. As I’m still a stranger to the majority of this family, I wanted to make a good impression by handing out good-quality, competently wrapped presents. On Christmas morning I went round to their house bearing a gold paper sack containing the results of considerable thought and effort. The sitting room was ankle-deep in wrapping paper. Oscar’s brother and sisters were out of control with excitement.