Low Life: The Spectator Columns

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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. November 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 Am I just too PC to get the jokes? No. I'll allow any taboo to be broken if the observation is honest enough to be funny – and the best humour is always deeply rooted in honesty. Perhaps the fact that I didn't believe in the characters is why most of it didn't really work for me.

As one of our readers put it at a recent Spectator event, the end of life is a phase that awaits us all – but Jeremy had a handle on it. And that we can all live better, savour life better, because Jeremy lived. That’s how I’ll always remember him. Philip, there’s a man here writing about going to the Cheltenham Festival and messing his pents.’ ‘Very easily done at Cheltenham, my dear. I’ve often wondered why nobody has written about it before.’ Or, ‘Philip here’s that man again, the one who messed his pents at Cheltenham, assisting the ferret-judging at a country show. It’s frightfully interesting. The judge takes so long to judge each class, they drive a car into the tent so that he can judge them in the headlights.’ ‘Does he mess his pents again?’ ‘He doesn’t say.’” TikTok 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 Taking over a legendary column is normally an impossible task. Not so for Jeremy Clarke, whose Low Life column in The Spectator was a triumph over adversity. January 2011:‘Bed was fine. No complaints there. Well, there was one thing, actually. My kissing technique was rubbish. “No tongues!” she’d exclaim crossly, even when she was tied up.’ (Credit: Carmen Fyfe) On cancerClarke’s cancer had spread to his abdominal lymph nodes. That metastasis required more aggressive treatment than the “active surveillance” American doctors often recommend for early stage prostate cancer. 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. The women’s rights campaigner Dr. Moira Woods, who set up the Irish Republic’s first dedicated sexual assault treatment unit.

November 30, 2013: “The delusions began; the usual delusions; my ordinary neuroses writ large, I think. An unshakable 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.” MayfairI might have also suspected that that tagline promised a degree of acerbic social commentary. I might have been wrong about that last bit.

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. 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 For twenty-three years his Low Life column proved that any life, no matter how humble, can be riveting if the writing is good enough. He poured his heart and soul into what he wrote; it read effortlessly but was written with incredible thought and effort. He was able to magnify his own life in a way that makes you reflect upon your own. To say that I was his editor for fourteen years would be to vastly exaggerate my role. I didn’t edit a single word of his: he filed word perfect every week. When I became editor, I actually wondered if he exaggerated his stories. He’d begin by saying: “I woke up on a Leicester Square pavement at 4 a.m.” and you’d think, “No, he couldn’t possibly have done that; he’s using artistic license.” Then you’d meet him and realize: yes, it’s all for real. Hence the unmatched power of his writing. March 2008:‘”Do you smoke?”Only when I’m drunk, I said.“You get drunk?”Of course I get drunk, I said — I’m a journalist. It’s expected of us.“I see,”she said, again finding the explanation perfectly satisfactory.“As long as you don’t smoke inside the cottage,”she said.’ On hotelsThis morning I woke early paralysed with worse pain than ever and I said to Catriona that we couldn’t go on like this. So she trotted down early to discuss my future with Dr Biscarat. My future is this. I will be cared for at home until I die. France will supply nurses capable of hospital-level care. If the pain continues to overcome the oral morphine, I will be fitted with this fabled morphine ‘syringe driver’, which can be turned up to 11 and put an end to it whenever I like. Splendid.