A very sporting publisher has put together a collection of Low life columns and is publishing it in hardback on 3 November. In the evening there is to be a drinks party at The Spectator offices in Westminster to celebrate the occasion. The boardroom can comfortably accommodate around 50 vertical drinkers. Of these 50, the editor has asked me to use this column to invite 15 readers to the party, if 15 can be found.
So if anyone wants to risk it, please send your name, address and current favourite joke to The Spectator office. Your joke needn’t necessarily conform to prevailing rules of political correctness. Should fewer than 15 people send in a joke, then everyone can come, and all the more for us. If more than 15, the jokes will be read out to whoever at 22 Old Queen Street is most in need of cheering up that morning, and the best ones will win an invitation. As it is a Low life party, please feel free to submit jokes which are puerile or offensive.
For the remaining 35 places, my allocation is 30 people. For years now I’ve been prone to an egotistical fantasy in which I win the lottery and throw a party for everyone I’ve ever known. In my mind’s eye there’s a free bar, a live band and a crowd of around 500. Not the least pleasurable part of it is the incongruous mixing together of people from different walks of life. A street cleaner is raising a glass with an aristocrat, a football yob with a social worker, a female Eritrean ex-Marxist guerrilla with a vicar. It’s a Utopian rather than socialist daydream. The self-proclaimed socialists I know are all far too class-conscious to truly relax at a party as eclectic as this.
But between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. Never mind 500; a quick tour of my phone book tells me that I might have trouble finding even 30 takers for my big party. I rang Sharon, for example. I hadn’t spoken to her for about a year. ‘Do you want to come to a party at The Spectator to celebrate my book?’ I said. ‘What book?’ she said. ‘A book of my columns.’ ‘Columns?’ she said. ‘What do I want to come to that for?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘for one thing because quite a few of the columns are about you.’ ‘About me?’ she said suspiciously. ‘What do you mean, about me?’ ‘I’ve a confession to make,’ I said. ‘I’ve been writing columns about you, on and off, for over ten years.’ No longer suspicious, she laughed. I was pulling her leg, obviously.
Sharon condescended to try to come, finally, mainly because it was her 40th birthday the following week, and she intended celebrating it in style. So she could begin the celebrations early, at my silly party.
Some of the columns collected in the book are about Trev, Sharon’s ex-boyfriend. I next tried him. Trev knows he features in this column from time to time and is mildly flattered by it. When we’re out, and if trying to impress a woman, he might jerk his thumb at me and say, ‘See this bloke here? He writes about me.’ But he has zero curiosity about what I’ve written, which only adds to the esteem in which I hold him.
He said, ‘So where is this party, then?’ ‘It’s at The Spectator,’ I said. ‘You know, that magazine I write for.’ ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right.’ He wasn’t remotely interested. He’s got a new girlfriend at the moment and no doubt for the time being he’s only interested in being with her.
I continued on through my phone book, calling up friends and inviting them to the party, but the reaction was on the whole lukewarm, occasionally even hostile, and it looks as though I’m going to struggle to fill my quota. Even my good friend Tom, who has broken nearly every bone in his body, and who rings me up when he is in bed with a new girlfriend, to describe her to me, and then put her on the line; even Tom said he might not be able to come because he’s appearing in court that day and his solicitor says there’s a good chance he won’t get bail. If he’s set free, though, Tom would love to come. He’ll let me know one way or another. After Tom and I had spoken, he texted over a joke as an afterthought. It went like this:
I really couldn’t believe it when my own mother had been caught stealing from her lollipop lady’s job, but when I got home all the signs were there.
Uncharacteristic of Tom, that one. But I like it. I laughed. I really hope Tom can make it. You’ll like Tom, those of you who get to the launch party.
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