Low Life: The Spectator Columns

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Jeremy Clarke, the Spectator’s Low Life correspondent, has sadly died. His friend Piers Pottinger pays tribute Jeremy’s self-effacement was almost as endearing as his infectious laughter. He was genuinely surprised by the high esteem in which his readers held him and I’m sure this helped him in his battle against his painful illness. There are echoes in the text from the author's personal experience – at least the official version of it that we're given. He is well-educated, has travelled and (presumably) has a son by a relationship that didn't sustain. I don't doubt that he draws on real life for his columns. I just can't help feeling that he has to draw a lot further than Bernard did.

July 2021: ‘I sat between Philippe and the detached French woman. She was quite old. She hadn’t yet got over the death of her lover, she told me, even though she’d passed away a decade before. After telling me this she rested her head against my chest as though exhausted by grief. Offered wine, she sprang to life and filled her glass dangerously close to the brim with red. 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. July 30, 2022: “And I think: is this how it ends? Lying in bed watching TikTok videos? At the weekend I had planned a retreat in a nunnery. Three days of silent prayer and contemplation. But two of the nuns have caught Covid and the technical nun thought it best that we postponed. And at the weekend the tumor pain in my armpit, shoulder and shoulder blade intensified alarmingly. For the first time, the usual dose of the usual painkillers didn’t touch it. An escalation. I have always imagined that when it was time for me to die I would make a serious effort to prepare myself. And now that the warning light is flashing, what do I do? I tap the TikTok app and there’s Bernard Manning saying, ‘A man walks into a pub with a crocodile under his arm.’ Shoot me.” Spectator readersNovember 2013:‘The delusions began; the usual delusions; my ordinary neuroses writ large, I think. An unshakeable conviction, for example, that these confident, consummate actors gathered here in the bar were operating on a higher plane of consciousness than I was, and that they knew something of crucial importance, perhaps about me, that I cannot imagine nor will ever be permitted to know.’ On Mayfair 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 Acid October 12, 2019: “Fumbling outside my door in dripping swimming trunks for my room key, I was hailed cheerily by the maid from a doorway further along the corridor. I hadn’t met her, but her greeting was not without a touch of familiarity, if not intimacy, I thought. The latter, I guessed, must be predicated on the fact of her coming into my junior suite when I was out and restoring it to a holiday-brochure photograph, then arranging my tawdry collection of toiletries into little islands on the marble counter. What she made of my penis vacuum pump, I couldn’t guess. I rather think that while she could only speculate as to its function, she probably imagined it to be the latest Western bourgeois ‘must-have’ gadget. This patronizing thought was based on the way she polished the Perspex tube and deified it and the heavy motor unit by arranging them side by side and centrally on a glass shelf lit by four spotlights. June 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 sidebyside and set fire to them.’ On lower living

April 19, 2014: “The young amateur boxers dash over to their father — their favorite punchbag — climb up on to his chair, and administer a damn good leathering. Their father cowers weakly in his chair as the blows rain down. ‘Good day at the office?’ I ask him. He looks out at me between the blows and I get another one of those desperate looks.”

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My hangover was what the great Kingsley Amis describes in his Everyday Drinkingguide as a ‘metaphysical’ hangover Pamplona 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: