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

July 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 tumour 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.’ On Spectator readers The naturalness of Clarke’s writing belied the sweat he put into it, often spending two whole days on an 800-word column and still worrying that he had failed to find a resonant last phrase. But the ending he achieved in a broader sense – recording until he could write no more the agony of advancing tumours, the kindness of nurses and neighbours, the solace of books, birdsong and morphine, and the loving care of Catriona, the partner he married at the last – was high art indeed, followed with admiration and rising dread by a legion of readers. Fans of the column – he's described as a cult columnist so there must be some such – will no doubt welcome the chance to reacquaint themselves with past episodes. Newcomers like me may have no idea what to expect. 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 Jeremy Clarke’s last Spectator column, on “the pros and cons of kissing”, appeared in the magazine’s issue of May 6.

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 When I read out that final paragraph to her just now, however, she says:“Early doors yet, as they used to say.”’ 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. I might have also suspected that that tagline promised a degree of acerbic social commentary. I might have been wrong about that last bit. Iain Johnstone, the film critic and documentary maker who told the stories of stars like Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand and John Wayne.

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. The women’s rights campaigner Dr. Moira Woods, who set up the Irish Republic’s first dedicated sexual assault treatment unit. A fellow reviewer read an earlier compilation of the Spectator columns: I came away a little more impressed than she did.

Rita Lee

November 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.’ On short relationships 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 August 20, 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-centered, 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.” Jeremy, with his fellow columnist, Taki, in 2015 Drugs