Low life | 19 April 2018

A week ago I plucked my eight-year-old grandson Oscar from the bosom of his rumbustious young family and took him on an orange aeroplane to Nice, and from there up into the hills of the upper Var to spend 11 days in our breeze-block shack. His second visit. On his first, last August, the temperature hit 45 degrees Celsius and we were roasted alive. This one, though, was relentlessly cold and wet and the mop and bucket were in constant use in the living room. Confined to barracks, we played Dobble, a card game akin to snap, but more complicated and requiring sharper wits. Several games of Dobble revealed beyond all argument that grandad’s dementia was much more advanced than had previously been thought.

The rain and grandad’s dementia did not, however, prevent us from going out to dinner one evening. Boring for an eight-year-old, potentially, I thought, but perhaps a useful introduction to the social classes existing an ear-poppingly four or five levels above his own. Over drinks and nibbles the hostess privately asked me to guess where her political sympathies lay. I guessed that they could be summarised as Corbyn God, Trump Satan. Wrong. She was not only a Brexiteer but also a fan of President Trump. On hearing this, I nearly fell over. She was the first middle-class or above person I have ever met to frankly admit it. I felt like a tattered and exhausted Mungo Park coming across a lonely gallows on the Upper Niger and shouting for joy because it meant he had reached civilisation at last.

We trooped into the dining room and sat down to eat. These days what normally happens at dinner parties where people haven’t met before is that some nitwit will check via a throwaway but calculated comment that we are all going to heaven and Lord Adonis is of the company.