Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke on his Low Life I was looking at trail running shoes in a specialist running shoe shop, intending to buy. The young woman who sprang forward to assist was fit, lean and agile. She exuded tiptop mental and physical health. Helena she was called. She was Czech. I, on the other hand, was crapulous and reeked strongly — even to myself — of the odours of the tavern. ‘How far do you think you will be going?’ she said. ‘Between 50 and 100 miles,’ I said. ‘Running?’ she said, impressed. ‘Walking,’ I said. ‘Along long-distance footpaths in the south of England with a rucksack.’ She looked disappointed.

At the end of the affair she gathered together everything of mine that was lying about in her flat, packed it all into the suitcase I’d left behind, and left a message to tell me to come and pick it up. I didn’t return the call. When we finally met again last week, at The Spectator’s 180th birthday party, we hadn’t spoken for eight months. After the party I went back to her flat to pick up the suitcase. It was standing ready to go, just inside her front door. But we found we had a lot to say to each other, a lot of catching up to do, and I stayed on for three delightful days, including a miraculous afternoon in the Arcadian Kent countryside that finished with a ham and cheese roll on a grassy knoll beside the lake at Lullingstone Castle.

Bank holiday Saturday afternoon and I’m standing in a jam-packed railway carriage bound for Cardiff in Wales. If I lift my head, my face is in my nearest neighbour’s face, so I’m contemplating my feet. A Welsh woman somewhere is holding a long and intimate telephone conversation in a voice loud enough for all in the carriage to follow it. ‘My little one-stop shop? Is that what he called me? I’ll kill him. If I’m his little one-stop shop, then he’s Kwik Fit — and you can tell him I said that.’ I’m going to Cardiff to look at a Citroën Picasso. I’ve just looked over one at Southampton, but it wasn’t any good.

Every day that I can, I take an elderly, obese, arthritic collie called Joe for a walk. I take him out because he’s a likeable old chap, and his owner, Margery, is too frail and bent with arthritis to take him out herself. Margery lives in a house on top of a 300-foot-high cliff and depends on her home help, Edna, who has even worse arthritis, for everything. Edna says that Margery is driving her ‘slowly round the bend’. When I knocked on the door to collect Joe last week, Edna had gone home and Margery eventually answered it. She was wearing a grey ‘hoodie’ with the words ‘Air Patrol. We never die, we just go to Hell to regroup’ printed across the front. I complimented her on it. Edna had bought it for her in Peacocks, she said.

I turned the key in the ignition. Nothing. I switched on the radio. Nothing. Flat battery. Even the clock had stopped. I checked the switches to see if I’d left a light on. Nothing. I rang the AA. ‘Someone will be with you in up to 80 minutes,’ said the controller after he’d taken down a few details. The car was in the station car park, nose against the railings, facing the platforms. I sat in the driver’s seat and contemplated the litter-strewn railway tracks and the abandoned, partially dismantled milk depot behind. I smelt vomit, which I traced to a dash of dried vomit on the lapel of my suit. I got out of the car and leaned against the railings.

The woman hired by the National Trust to see that nothing is pilfered from the upper floor at Clouds Hill, and to answer the visitors’ questions, knew almost nothing, she told me, about Colonel T.E. Lawrence, whose house it was from 1923 until he died as a result of a motorbike accident in May 1935. She was new to the job, she said. It was only her second shift. But she’d recognised already that for many visitors Clouds Hill was a shrine, and for their sakes she was determined to become as knowledgeable about Lawrence as possible. She and I were alone in the simply furnished room.

Dartmoor, said the box ad. One-bedroom cottage. Five hundred pounds a month. I called the number and an elderly woman answered.  I’m interested in renting the cottage, I said. Is it still available? Are you single? she said. I am, I said. You don’t have a girlfriend? Sadly not, I said. This was good, she said, because the house is suitable for one person only. She didn’t want partners living there as well. If I found myself a partner during my tenancy, they could stay overnight, but only occasionally. Are you certain you don’t have a girlfriend? she said. You’re not gay, are you? No, I’m not gay, I said. I’m just on my own and more or less celibate. I have no sex life. I touch myself occasionally. That’s about as far as it goes.

It’s half-past four in the morning and I’ve been sitting in the casualty department since two. I’m alone in the waiting room. Behind the glass partition two receptionists, one male, one female, are playing a video game on one of the computer screens.  Earlier, when I was on the verge of losing it because we’d had so long to wait, the bloke said, ‘Sir, I can understand that you don’t want to be here,’ as if he’s been taught to say it to defuse people’s anger. Then the woman had backed him up by saying that if I went and sat down for her, she’d bring me a cup of coffee. But I’m calmer now. The place is a tip, newspaper and blankets and empty vending-machine cups everywhere, and half of the seats have been mutilated.

I have a recurring nightmare. I’m driving or walking or cycling, I’m not sure which, up a winding, muddy country lane. At a sharp, uphill bend, I’m overwhelmed by terror of what lies beyond and can go no further. Freudians, I imagine, would interpret this as a psychic utterance of repressed homoeroticism. I know exactly where this bend in the lane is, oddly enough, though I haven’t seen it for 35 years. When I was at school, the family home was briefly on the outskirts of an Essex village right on the edge of London. (Although our house was surrounded by fields, and felt sufficiently rural, after dark the western sky was apocalyptically ablaze with energy and light from the metropolis.) The bend in the lane was on the bus route on the way home from school.

At the local swimming-pool, various sessions throughout the week are reserved for the exclusive use of women, schoolchildren, naturists, beginners, GP referrals, naturist GP referrals, youths, water-polo players and early risers. Because I happen to be none of these things, the only sessions open to me until recently were the so-called public swimming sessions, which can be a bit like Clacton on an August bank holiday before the war. It’s been many years since a birthday conferred extra rights and privileges on me. But now that I’ve turned 50 years of age, I qualify to enter the pool during a lunchtime slot in the new swim timetable called ‘50 plus’. Naturally, I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.

I can go for fortnight without a drink — three weeks at a push. After that I begin to feel disconnected. I try to ignore the feeling, hoping it’s a symptom of Seasonal Affective Disorder, or the onset of a cold, or overdoing it at the gym. But it persists and, after several days, changes into a consuming, impotent rage, at which point the penny drops and I know that it’s time for a drink. And then comes that tremendous, slightly nerve-wracking moment when I present myself again at my favourite bar, reacquaint myself with the lovely young ladies loitering behind it and settle in for an evening of self-medication. The rage subsides about three quarters of the way down the first pint of lager.

‘Whatever happens,’ said a bloke on the team at the next table rancourously, ‘we mustn’t let the students win.’ I’d not taken part in a pub quiz before and I’d always imagined them to be polite, melancholy affairs. This one, when we arrived ten minutes before the start, was noisy, chaotic and overcrowded. The students were staying at the field-study centre on the outskirts of the village and were out celebrating the end of a project. The locals were annoyed with the students for monopolising most of the tables. Also, perhaps, for being younger, better-looking and better-educated.

Thinkers living in the nearest market town are anxious about something called ‘Peak Oil’. Last week they held a public meeting on the subject: To Fly Or Not To Fly? The venue was a centuries-old meeting room beautifully decorated in the Tudor style, with an elaborate moulded plaster ceiling and monumental stone fireplace. About 30 people turned up. It wasn’t particularly cold outside but, to judge by the layers of fleece and fibre, and the number of hats, scarves and gloves being tugged off as they made their entrance via a heavy velvet curtain, many were as concerned about the temperature of themselves as they were about that of the planet. Before we got down to business we played a game. A cheerful-faced woman described the rules, which were as follows.

What a depressingly sunless month January was, here on this rainswept Devon peninsula! No sun, and purple sprouting broccoli for lunch every day as there’s a glut of it and not much else. The entire village is suffering from seasonal affective disorder and tortured by flatulence. And we’ve still got February and possibly March to go before we can even think about casting a clout.  On Saturday, though, this interminable succession of dark days was punctuated by a Christian festival; 2 February was Candlemas Day, when candles are lit in the Anglican, Catholic and Greek churches to commemorate the 40th day after the Nativity, when Mary went to the Temple to be ceremonially purified. The law given unto Moses states that after giving birth a woman is unclean for seven days.

Tom proudly showed me a video clip on his mobile phone of his latest girlfriend doing a striptease. Confident girl. The tattoos must have cost a fortune. ‘So who’s this one?’ I said.  ‘The first time I woke up beside her, I thought, “Oh no! What’s this?” But I’ve got to hold both my hands up,’ he said, holding both his hands up, ‘she’s grown on me and now I want to spend the next 45 years with her. Jerry, you must meet her.’ Tom is a self-employed painter and decorator. The last time I met him he’d moved in with a customer, a Swedish businesswoman who lives in the sort of Devon cottage one sees depicted on the lids of shortbread biscuit tins.

Jeremy Clarke reports on his low life The Methodist church hall could have been a bit warmer. I chose a seat at the end of the row. Because I’d been kept awake for most of the previous night by rats scratching in the attic, I felt slightly more paranoid than usual. Scratch, scratch, scratch: whatever it was the rats were doing up there they were very determined about it. I’d lain awake staring up at the ceiling torn between indignation and profound admiration for the work ethic. About a dozen had turned up on a wild night to hear ex-MI5 agent David Shayler promote his 9/11 Truth campaign.

The only comfortable place to sit in my local pub is at this one particular table that is closeted on three sides by high-backed pine pews. Last Saturday lunchtime, when I popped in for a quick one, this cosy nook was bathed in winter sunshine. Trevor was there with his feet under the table, his right arm wrapped tightly around a girl of about 18 — not bad going, I reckon, for an overweight, balding 46-year-old. He was serious about this one because instead of the lascivious smirk one normally expects from Trev when he’s pulled a child, he was gazing with apparent sincerity into her eyes.

On the last day of the year 22 of us turned up at the car park. We’d come for the ranger-led walk advertised in the Dartmoor Visitor Guide as an opportunity to watch the sun go down on 2007 from Hound Tor. Hound Tor is reputed to be the inspiration behind Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous ghost story The Hound of the Baskervilles. The title has in turn inspired the owner of the burger van in the car park. He’s called it called The Hound of the Basket Meals. Feeling a bit peckish, I joined the queue. The chap in front of me was holding a matching pair of surprised-looking llamas on short leads. He’d just taken them for a walk to the abandoned medieval village and back, he said.