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Monday 13 October 2008

Seeking civilisation

Jeremy Clarke on his Low Life

I turned the key in the ignition. Nothing. I switched on the radio. Nothing. Flat battery. Even the clock had stopped. I checked the switches to see if I’d left a light on. Nothing. I rang the AA. ‘Someone will be with you in up to 80 minutes,’ said the controller after he’d taken down a few details.

The car was in the station car park, nose against the railings, facing the platforms. I sat in the driver’s seat and contemplated the litter-strewn railway tracks and the abandoned, partially dismantled milk depot behind. I smelt vomit, which I traced to a dash of dried vomit on the lapel of my suit.

I got out of the car and leaned against the railings. If he’d said someone would be along in 80 minutes, I could have gone for a stroll along the river or found a café. But ‘up to’ 80 minutes meant I had to stay near the car. Fortunately, my brain was as flat as my battery. Boredom was the least of my problems. I got back in the car and sat there like the Buddha for 80 minutes.

I knew 80 minutes had passed because the AA controller rang me to tell me it had. It was his duty to tell me, he said. It was also his duty, he said, to tell me I was going to have to wait for another 25. ‘You’re in a safe place, sir, I hope?’ he said. I thanked him and stared at the railway tracks and at the empty platform opposite. Almost my entire life has been spent contemplating Victorian railway architecture, it seemed to me at that moment. In its day it must have appeared very fine — amazing even. But now its civic-minded grandeur serves only to remind us of the purposeless of our consumerist lives and of what a nice idea civilisation was.

I thought about civilisation, and how wonderful it must have been to be on the receiving end of it. Then I remembered. I had done something civilised once, and quite recently, too. Just before Christmas, the editor of the ‘Style and Travel’ section of this magazine sent me on a week-long package tour of Guyana’s rainforest. (The resulting article was in last week’s issue.) The latter part of the week was spent at a ranch on the Rupununi river, close to the Brazilian border, belonging to the naturalist Diane McTurk. For our last evening, she organised a provisioned excursion downriver specifically to see the opening of a flower. And that, if I may say so, is what I call civilised.

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