Low Life: The Spectator Columns

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August 2005: ‘Once you’ve been doing it for a while, it’s not easy to stop being a low life. There’s nothing people enjoy more than watching someone going to hell on a poker, and they rather resent it if that person suddenly decides he wants to get off. No one objects in principle to an idle, self-centred, addicted life, as long as it ends prematurely in lonely and squalid circumstances and everyone can read about it in the papers. Renege on the deal, like a footballer in mid-contract, and people feel cheated.’ On drugs April 2020:‘She reached down and slid open the bottom drawer of her desk, showing about 100 vodka miniatures. I nodded complicity. She emptied four into two plastic water cups. “Have you got anything to go withit?” I said, which wasn’t very Low Life-like of me. She reached down and pulled out the lower drawer of her neighbour’s desk and rummaged in it, emerging eventually with a medicine bottle of kaolin and morphine.’ Communists and fascists

If I’m honest with myself,I’ve never completely known or understood what I was doing, or supposed to be doing, every week when writing this column On dancing This was my introduction to the Elizabethan drama of the oncologist’s consulting room — always a door opening and someone coming in bearing grave news,” he wrote. May 2023: ‘When Marketa leaves, Treena supervises the cleaning of my gob. On the bed table she lays out a hand towel, a tooth mug with warm water in it, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste and three paper towels to spit into. She also places upon the table an anti-fungal mouthwash. Mouth fungus, apparently, is an inevitable side result of these cancer treatments. Unfortunately, by kissing her too frequently and too passionately, and vice versa, I have passed mine on to Catriona.November 1, 2008: “The bottom half of the bed was sodden. Further investigation told me that, although the sheets were soaked, the duvet and the suit trousers I’d slept in were perfectly dry. Strange.” Short relationships June 4, 2022: ‘I’ve often wondered whether Her Majesty the Queen glances through The Spectator from time to time. And if she does, I wonder whether her kindly eye lights on this column. And if it does, I wonder what she thinks of what she reads there.

If any kind of social commentary is intended, I simply failed to spot it. Or perhaps I'm just on the wrong side of the political divide to appreciate it. Either way, if a point is being searched for, it won't be found among these covers. There are few I know just what you mean moments, and yet nothing obnoxious enough to be offensive.

But Clarke was not, as he feared, a short walk from the gallows. He learned that new drugs and immunotherapy treatments meant that most men with prostate cancer were alive 10 years after the diagnosis: June 2022: ‘I’ve often wondered whether Her Majesty the Queen glances through The Spectatorfrom time to time. And if she does, I wonder whether her kindly eye lights on this column. And if it does, I wonder what she thinks of what she reads there.

So why am I? Mainly because life can be stressful and sometimes I want to read something light and frivolous and funny. The magic colouring book feel of the cover with its scattered sketches of an isolated house, fag-smoking car crashed into a lamp-post, open bottle and spilled glass of vino suggested this was about as frivolous as it gets. It also promised some humour. April 15, 2023: “I’m going downhill fast. The numb fingers of my left hand are barely strong enough to unscrew the cap from a tube of toothpaste. And the morphine dose occasionally still fails to mask the pain, which achieves an unsurmised, unimaginable, unsupportable level. It makes one wonder what role in nature that level of pain is supposed to be playing. ‘Treena,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I want to live any more.’ Then I swallow a big short-acting morphine dose and after half an hour the pain subsides slightly, and I have a sip of tea, and I can hear a choir of village children singing over at the school, and a soppy dove almost flies in through the open window, and life has interest once more.” The end He passed only two O-levels, however, and his next phase of development was neatly summarised on the flyleaf of a Low Life anthology published in 2011:And the new, improved penis vacuum pump (combined with a tolerant partner — ‘Hold on a minute, love…’) means sex is no longer totally out of the question.” June 18, 2005: “My friends told me that halfway through the ball they’d gone to look for me and found me unconscious outside, flat on my face on the lawn, next to the naked girl. Someone had taken off my shoes, arranged them neatly side-by-side and set fire to them.” Lower living April 2023: ‘I’m going downhill fast. The numb fingers of my left hand are barely strong enough to unscrew the cap from a tube of toothpaste. And the morphine dose occasionally still fails to mask the pain, which achieves an unsurmised, unimaginable, unsupportable level. It makes one wonder what role in nature that level of pain is supposed to be playing.“Treena,”I say.“I don’t think I want to live any more.”Then I swallow a big short-acting morphine dose and after half an hour the pain subsides slightly, and I have a sip of tea, and I can hear a choir of village children singing over at the school, and a soppy dove almost flies in through the open window, and life has interest once more.’ On love

I told him I thought I was more or less finished. Gilles wasn’t having any of that kind of defeatist talk. At rest, his slanting French eyebrows oppose one another like one acute and one grave accent. As he manoeuvred our way out of the enormous hospital they became tautly horizontal as he made an impassioned speech about never giving up, about fighting on to the beaches, about not thinking of myself in this fight, but of those who love me. The heartfelt outpouring lasted several minutes. I didn’t know where to look. When we approached the village where we both live, I commented on the variety of tree blossom and the advancing season. The eyebrows stood smartly to attention. He too was a man who noticed such things. In mid-March this year, he found strength for a short journey to the local mairie, where he and Catriona were married. The following morning he returned to hospital in Marseilles, where nurses decorated his bed with wildflowers. “Catriona’s dear face appeared around the door,” he ended that week’s column. “She’s here now, beside me… I am enveloped in kindness. I feel tons better.”

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If he never quite achieved that ambition, he was certainly an intellectual manqué, whose secret vice during his roughhouse youth was an unquenchable thirst for reading.