Jeremy Clarke

Before going to Venice, we spent two days in Verona. It was my first time in Italy and I got a crick in the neck from looking up at so many amazingly old, beautiful buildings. ‘If you think this is beautiful, wait till you see Venice,’ they said. Our host was David Petrie, a Scottish lecturer of English at the university. David is currently suing the Italian state for discriminating against foreign lecturers, and naturally this course of action hasn’t endeared him to his hosts. He’s been sent to Coventry. He’s been given a smaller office, then given no office at all. He’s been sacked. He’s been reinstated by an order of the court. He’s received death threats via the telephone. He’s been offered bribes.

Wind-driven rain beats on the windscreen. There’s tree debris in the road and standing water in all the usual places when it rains as hard and as long as this. The fuel gauge is resting on empty but I make it to the garage, which is still open. All the pumps are free except one, which has a horse standing next to it. I draw up at the next one and bung in a tenner’s worth. Three people are clustered round this horse. A man in overalls is kneeling on the concrete and doing something to its hoof; a woman in jodhpurs and an expensive hair-do is stroking its head and talking to it; and an oppressed-looking boy with a sharp, upper-class face is standing back and watching the man.

By day Clive drives a tractor. At night he tramps the fields with a pair of greyhound collie crosses called Knocker and Tip and a lamp. The lamp he is currently using is lighter in weight and much more powerful than his old one. To Clive, the almost incredible scientific and technical advances of the last 20 years have manifested themselves chiefly in the invention of the ferret locator and improvements in the hunting lamp. His new one is so powerful, he claims, that he can see into the next county. For someone like Clive, who hardly goes out of the parish, and has never been out of Devon in his entire life, this must be very exciting. Clive and his lurchers catch rabbits and foxes mainly, hares sometimes, and now and again the odd cat.

These days Uncle Jack only comes out of his room once a week, for a bath. The rest of the time he sits in his chair in front of the television, wailing. You can hear him all over the house. It sounds very peculiar, as if we are keeping a tethered discontented beast somewhere in the house. Muffled by intervening doors, the regularity and strangulated tone of his wails sometimes reminds us of the strident bleating of a sheep. Sometimes it does my head in. I go in and say, ‘What’s the matter? What are you making all this noise for?’ And he’ll look up at me with a belligerent light in his eye and say, ‘I’m bored.’ I can’t say I blame him, actually.

I spent last week in south Wales, staying in a cottage near the coast. On the second evening we walked to the local pub to see what it was like. We went across the fields to get there. Nailed to one of the stiles was a notice. 'The bull in this field is a Semmantal bull. He is tame with people he knows, but visitors are advised to give him a wide berth. At the far end of the field you may also come across a donkey. Gunter is unpredictable and has been known to bite people. Visitors are advised to talk loudly as they approach so as to avoid startling him.' The bull, which was lying across the footpath on the other side of the stile, we nearly tripped over. A little further on we startled the donkey, which went berserk but luckily didn't attack us.

Sophia was such a very large lady, the seatbelt of my car, even when fully extended, wasn’t quite long enough to go round her. She insisted on wearing it though, so her lover Ulrika and I redoubled our efforts. After a titanic struggle we found that we could force it around her if we pulled on the strap with our combined might and clicked it into the catch on the driver’s side. The belt cut so deeply into Sophia’s stomach it was lost from view, but she insisted she was happy. She would rather be uncomfortable and safe, she said, rather than the other way round. I’d met Sophia and Ulrika in the pub. This incredibly large woman and this worryingly thin woman had come in and sat at the next table. We chatted. They were very open and frank.

There is very little in the way of conversation at home. Uncle Jack sometimes appears in the hall to ask someone where he is, what he is doing here, or what time of the year it is. The rest of us communicate so rarely we are rapidly losing the power of speech. Occasionally someone might attempt a comment at mealtimes, then forget the word for something, a crucial noun usually, and we all sit there waiting for it, as if we're taking part in a séance. If my mother or my sister is present, exchanges take the form of a parlour game in which players take it in turns to compose simple sentences containing the word 'nice'. But twice a year or so my mother's friend John, a retired doctor, comes to stay for a week. Dr Lovepants we used to call him.

Two tickets, booked over the phone, in row L of the stalls: £87.50. At the box office in the theatre's foyer we were handed our tickets by a condescending, black-shirted woman. An unpleasantly condescending black-shirted girl at the top of the stairs demanded to see our tickets before allowing us to go any further. When I humbly showed them to her she snatched them out of my hand and crossly scrutinised them before grudgingly allowing us to proceed. We had time, if we knocked it back, for a quick drink. In the tiny downstairs bar two more black-shirts were unhurriedly and condescendingly dispensing fantastically expensive drinks. No one in the bar was jolly or even talking much. There was no air of expectation or celebration. Everyone was standing around looking paralysed.

I'm over the limit so I'm driving home down the back lanes to avoid the police. You have to drink-and-drive round here because we're a bit isolated and the decent pubs are all in town, 20 minutes away. Wrong of me, I know. But if I go home the back way it's single-track country lanes with grass growing up the middle all the way, and, more to the point, there are no police. Badgers yes. Foxes occasionally. Police no. I'm barrelling down these narrow lanes with the car radio going full blast. My radio-cassette player was out of action last year. It's one of those 'key code' radios that have to be reactivated if you disconnect them from the battery. This is supposed to deter opportunist car thieves, I suppose.

I was running the Whack-the-Malteaser stall yet again this year. My sister put me on it the first year I helped out at the 'fun day' she organises every summer at the day centre for people with learning difficulties, and I've been running it every year since. This year I asked if I could go on the lucky dip instead, but she said no. Her clients don't like change, she said. Because they are used to seeing me on the Whack-the-Malteaser stall, they expect to see me on it again this year. This is true, I suppose. People with learning difficulties are remarkably conservative. In fact, one could almost say that conservatism and autism go hand in hand. Basically, the Whack-the-Malteaser stall is a wooden table, which I stand behind.

First thing Monday morning I was in court. No car tax. When I eventually found the magistrate's court, it was like the Marie Celeste. No defendants hanging round the entrance smoking, no receptionist behind the glass in the foyer, no ushers, no solicitors briefing anxious clients in the corridor at the last moment, no cleaners, nobody. Hearing muffled voices, I pushed open a heavy door and found myself in Court One. Inside, facing me, were three magistrates, two men and a woman, seated in a row. Below them, sitting at a large table, were a gowned lady prosecutor and a representative from the police in a dark suit. And that was it. No reporter, no solicitors, no witnesses, no other defendants, no stony-faced relatives.

We've moved up from a Festival 30 to a Willerby Bermuda. Or rather my philanthropic aunt has. We knew she was thinking of upgrading this year, but we thought she was going to go for a Festival Super maybe, or at a push an Atlas Fanfare Super 35. Not in our wildest dreams did we imagine she'd get a Willerby Bermuda. When me and the boy and the boy's half brother arrived on Saturday for our annual free holiday in north Cornwall and we were confronted with this spanking new Willerby Bermuda in place of the old Festival 30, our feelings were mixed though. We were sentimentally attached to the old Festival 30.

I hate avoiding people I like just because.

When I got back from Pamplona I hadn’t slept in a bed or washed my hair for a week. There was a red stain around my neck where my sweat had mixed with the dye in my St Fermin neckerchief. I was badly sunburned. There was a suppurating graze on my shoulder and a cold sore on my lip. Also, near the end of the feria I’d been robbed of all my money and credit cards by two, or it might have been one, very small women and I was destitute as well as dirty. Imagine how my heart leapt, then, when I walked in the door and was told that while I was away Uncle Jack had been complaining loudly about pains in his chest and was in hospital for ‘tests’. I’ve not inherited a thing from anybody so far. Not a sausage.

I'm doing 170 kilometres an hour along the motorway from Barcelona to Pamplona. I pass a sign telling me I am now entering Navarre, and passing from Aragon to the Basque country. It's a blue sign, about 20 foot square and riddled with holes. Where I live many of our road signs are peppered with shot, done for a laugh. But these are made by some sort of high-calibre rifle. The motorway is like a racetrack, black, cambered, empty, a continuous line of bougainvillaea bushes down the central reservation. I'm driving a Merc worth 20 grand. My own car back home is worth, for insurance purposes, 150 quid. I'm squirting the Merc around the insides of the bends in quiet and comfort. The outside temperature, it says on the dashboard, is 38 degrees.

Right, that's it. On the morning of the 87th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme I'm lying in bed listening to a news 'update' on our local commercial radio station. Last night, apparently, our latest batch of MPs voted, in an overwhelming fit of moronic vindictiveness, to ban all hunting with dogs, full stop. And if the Lords reject the Bill, it is likely to be railroaded through Parliament, apparently using something called the Parliament Act. I'm stunned. I really can't believe it has finally come to this. Who are these fuckwits? (Am I missing something?) What do they want?

At ten to five the sun rose. Me and the boy were seated in our directors' chairs on the beach, mourning the embers of our dying fire. We were about midway along a five-mile curve of shingle, about 30 yards from the sea. The sun came up, as I told my boy it would, in the east. First a rim, then this big boiling orange orb appeared behind a hill and climbed remarkably quickly into the air. A small hapless cloud that happened to be in the area was burned off. The moon, low and translucent in the west, slunk quickly away. After that the sun had the sky to itself. There wasn't a puff of wind; the cigarette's-worth of smoke from our fire went more or less straight up. The waves collapsing on the shore were piddly.

I hope Prince William enjoys studying Kiswahili. I certainly did. In my mid-thirties I jacked in a job as a binman, did two A levels in a year, passed both, then studied Kiswahili for three years at the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury as part of an African Studies degree. I went to all that trouble because I was fed up with being rained on and broke all the time. A university degree, I imagined, would be a passport to a job, if I wanted one, that paid more for doing less, and doing it indoors. At the time, however, I saw going to university as 'selling out' and was slightly ashamed. I justified it to myself and others with the expression 'if you can't beat them, join them' – a saying which I still don't fully understand, to be honest.