Low Life: The Spectator Columns

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I might have also suspected that that tagline promised a degree of acerbic social commentary. I might have been wrong about that last bit.

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 Jeremy could get on with anyone. One year at lunch he was sitting next to the then Chairman of The Prudential who admired his tweed suit. “Got it from The Oxfam Shop for a tenner on the way here,” Jeremy admitted. The businessman didn’t know he was not joking. 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: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: 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 There will be a memorial service for him, the details of which will be arranged in due course. The Spectator will be paying tribute to him in next week’s magazine. For now, we have his columns to treasure: a legacy that has enriched, and will continue to enrich, the lives of everyone who comes across them. His column was not a study in ‘low life’ drink and debauchery, although there was certainly plenty of that. The theme that I drew from them, especially in his references to Catriona, was about the role and power of love: its ability to magnify and transform the smallest, most seemingly insignificant parts of life. October 24, 2014: “But what do I know about art? I don’t even know what I like. And I was feeling so good, so alive, and so in love with London, that I mentally apologized to myself, God and the universe for slipping into judgmental nitwit mode again, and I headed on up the road towards the drumming and the tumults in Trafalgar Square.” My year of drugs

March 29, 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.” Hotels Jeremy became a friend of mine soon after he had established himself as essential weekly reading. For over fifteen years he would join a party of “rogues and funsters” for the annual Racing Festival at Cheltenham in March. It was an eclectic group who somehow managed to gel over a three, then four, day festival of drinking, gambling, storytelling and, of course, enjoying the racing too. Clarke doesn’t try in his Low Life columns to wrest lessons from his illness. He lets events speak for themselves. Nor does he construct a tight linear narrative of disease progression, as he does here. He describes noteworthy changes in his health whenever they occur — sometimes weekly, sometimes not. He often folds cancer anecdotes into accounts of other dramas occurring in his life, including his move from England to Provence. 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 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.When I read out that final paragraph to her just now, however, she says:“Early doors yet, as they used to say.”’