Low life | 10 January 2019

We were eight for dinner on New Year’s Eve: four men and four women with a combined age, I would guess, of around 500. A quarter of the company — two of the men — had been officially diagnosed as suffering from one form or another of dementia. We whose brains still neatly fitted the inside of our skulls were instead prey to all the usual anxieties, delusions, depressions and addictions typical of those wealthy, late middle-aged English people who exist in the strange limbo of expatriation. We sat there facing each other across the dinner table on the last day of the year, knackered, it’s true, each drifting aimlessly in a private universe of his or her own devising. Meanwhile, the two chaps diagnosed with dementia were the only ones who could be said to be truly present in the current realities. They were calm centres, wholly admirable in the way they were able to take circumstances at their face value. In fairness, we with our still flourishing minds recognised this, were grateful, and deferred to them as our superiors.

I’d bought to the party a Chinese-made plastic glass dome which, when plugged in, threw swirling coloured lights over the walls, ceiling and our faces. The lights would have danced and changed colour in time to the beat of the music but the music had been turned off while we ate. So they, too, drifted aimlessly, now this way, now that, dotting our faces in blue, yellow and red circles and crosses. The ceiling was a high one, perhaps 20 feet above us. I can’t explain why, but I find that the higher the ceiling above my head, the drunker I like to be. Three weeks earlier, for example, under the wonderfully high, ornate ceiling of the Naval and Military Club, I’d really gone for it.