Low life | 12 January 2017

Still depressed, or, as Matthew Arnold put it, ‘the foot less prompt to meet the morning dew’, I got out of bed one afternoon and exchanged the soggy Devon hills for the tower blocks of Canary Wharf. I went at the invitation of Dr Ivan Mindlin, orthopaedic surgeon, Las Vegas casino house doctor during the mob-run era of ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal and Tony ‘the Ant’ Spilotro, and one of the most successful sports bettors in US history. He kindly put me up in an ‘executive’ room at a hotel round the corner from his 18th-floor apartment.

The first night we went for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. We went there on foot. It was like going for a walk in a multicultural concrete-and-glass future. Ivan was enthusiastically welcomed by the Chinese waiters and we were shown to a table beside the window. During the meal one of them spotted something through our window that excited him greatly. He waved colleagues over and together they peered past the reflections and out into the night sky with awe and wonder, like destitute children before a Christmas tree. What could they possibly have seen? A UFO? The northern lights? We turned to look. It was the moon, newly risen, with Venus in bright attendance. ‘Is that the moon?’ asked the puzzled waiter. ‘Yes, that’s the moon,’ we said, heads down, scoffing. I ate mine much too quickly and two hours later I sicked it up into the lavatory bowl of my executive hotel room.

Next morning, after breakfast in the executive buffet in the sky, I went across to Ivan’s apartment in the sky. He had been up since 4 a.m., betting on American football. He needed groceries, so we descended to ground level and went to the Waitrose supermarket at Canary Wharf.