Low life | 19 February 2011

The phone rang. (My ring tone is the crowd in the Bobby Moore stand at West Ham singing ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’.) I was lying on a mattress on the floor. Early morning sun was streaming in through tall windows. A cat, one of those skinny, sharply intelligent-looking ones, was vigorously grooming itself near my feet. I found the phone on a nearby table, next to an unfinished glass of whisky. I took a sip of the whisky and caught the call before it went to answer phone. Trev.

‘Hey, Dude!’ he yelled, clearly in cracking form this fine morning. I hadn’t spoken to Trev on the phone or in the flesh since last year. It was marvellous to hear his voice again. ‘I’ve got a favour to ask,’ he yelled. ‘You know I have a bit of trouble spelling sometimes?’

He does and he’s more self-conscious about it than he should be. ‘Trev, you listen to me,’ I said, now mentally accoutred with the chainmail, surcoat and shield of a Crusader knight. ‘Don’t you worry about spelling. Spelling pedants are dicks. Punctuation is a hundred times more important than spelling. So how can I help, mate?’

‘How do you spell “more”?’ he said.

I took another sip of whisky and shuddered as the stuff went down. My shoulders shook as though I was doing a shimmy on the dance floor. ‘More?’ I said. ‘What’s the sentence?’ ‘Well, she’s texted: “I want to come over right now to hug and kiss you,” and I want to say: “And I want to hug and kiss you more.”’

‘M-O-R-E,’ I said, overcoming my initially strong reservations about his entire sentence. ‘Cheers, Dude!’ he said, ringing off with almost indecent haste to resume his ardent text-message conversation.