Lloyd Evans

‘Do you like animals?’ asked the woman at the door, collecting for a zoo. ‘No, I hate them, they keep trying to kill me,’ I said. That got rid of her. I feel a little ashamed of my hostility to animals, which I inherited from my mother. She was raised in rural Ireland and she loathed the countryside and all its non-speaking inhabitants. To her, animals were either predators or ingredients, and she particularly despised geese, rats, mice, squirrels and dogs. ‘Vermin,’ was one of her favourite nouns. And she regarded the word ‘pet’ as a self-deluding fantasy. Which seems reasonable. Animals cannot be tamed but their owners can be deceived. Any beast will turn murderous when cornered. Dog-hate entered my soul. It festers there still.

Zack Polanski enjoyed a cosy conversation with Iain Dale at the Edinburgh festival yesterday. They sounded and acted like old friends. Dale began by inviting Polanski to enlarge on his experiences growing up gay in Salford. His parents divorced when he was 11 and his wayward behaviour at school attracted a special monitoring regime, ‘full report,’ which obliged teachers to give a written assessment of his conduct after each lesson. As a teenager he was inspired by the Channel 4 series, ‘Queer As Folk,’ written by Russell T Davies.  ‘I realised I should be unapologetic about who I am. And there’s so much power in that,’ said Polanski. ‘To sum up,’ added Dale, ‘Davies gave you licence to be a slut.

‘Altogether Elsewhere.’ The title page of an unpublished travel book caught my eye during a recent clear-out. The author, Matthew Leeming, was a character who deserved to be famous but somehow never made it. He was imaginative, witty, fearless and greedy – wonderfully greedy. He inherited his father’s ceramics company and ran it for years with great success. He loved being rich. ‘Money,’ he used to say wistfully, ‘eases the pain of being alive.’ To pique women’s interest, he claimed to be off-limits. ‘I’m training for the Catholic priesthood,’ he confided He invented businesses out of thin air.

How does Tower Hamlets spend my council tax? I’ve been shovelling cash at them for 19 years so I strolled along to the new town hall to find out where the money goes. The new town hall cost a packet, clearly. Carved out of the Royal London Hospital, the spacious lobby looks cool, stylish and reassuringly anonymous, like a private bank in Zurich. Glass doors swish apart and I enter the debating chamber where the councillors sit at a curved mono-desk opposite the public gallery. Everything is slick and hyper-modern. The pristine floor glows beneath the recessed lights. I had expected an ordinary meeting but I seem to have stumbled on an important debate.

The bishop hit us in the face. That was the best thing about confirmation. When I was 12, along with every other boy in the school, I was formally prepared for the sacrament that marked our passage from infancy to adulthood. Confirmation lacks the festive atmosphere of a bar mitzvah where families enjoy booze, dancing and speeches along with the exchange of gifts. For us, it was a cheerless affair held in the vast, under-heated parish church where 200 fidgety 12-year-olds waited to receive the appropriate blessing from the bishop. He was called Cyril. We were familiar with his name from Sunday Mass when he was cited as an appropriate subject for our orations. ‘We remember our Bishop Cyril in our prayers,’ said the priest.

Edward Gibbon was troubled by a swelling in his lower abdomen. I have the same condition. ‘Wow. That’s huge,’ said my GP as he gazed at the affected area. ‘Huge?’ I said, trying to sound nonchalant. ‘I wouldn’t know. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen.’ My cyst has been expanding steadily for decades and I was told a few years ago that its intentions were peaceful. My new GP was trying to scare me, obviously. I don’t blame him. It’s dull work staring at sick bodies all day and he was trying to amuse himself with a spot of scaremongering. ‘You’ll need a scan within two weeks,’ he added. ‘Cancerous perhaps?’ I asked. He nodded with a sly grin.

What will you do if it all goes wrong? I have a back-up plan. Working for Amazon. Its Luton warehouse offers tours to the public, and I went along to see what my future may hold. The vast hangar sits in a field of mega-sheds near the M25 where built-up London peters out into scrub and green farmland. I arrived at a bright-yellow security gate where I was greeted by Amin and Sophie who seemed thrilled to welcome our party. Six in all. Sophie asked us – or perhaps ordered us – to deposit our phones in a locker whose key she retained during our visit. Amin explained the rules. Follow me. Walk within the blue lines. Ascend staircases on the left. Use the handrail. Off we went.