Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 22 June 2016

I was flying back to London to vote ‘out’ as many times as they’d let me

Before dashing out of the door and driving to Nice airport, I gave my eyebrows a quick trim with the electric grooming razor Father Christmas gave me. In my tearing haste, however, I forgot to clip on the length regulator and in two sweeps shaved them right off, leaving two bald white strips.

I was last to board the plane. While everyone else queued in the stifling airbridge while the plane was prepared, I had remained in my comfortable seat in the sunny departure lounge reading Sir Michael Holroyd’s hilarious life of Augustus John. Seat 9F was the aisle seat of a row of three, and the pair of chaps already belted in to seats D and E looked utterly devastated by the last-minute occupation of their empty seat by a casually late arrival with no eyebrows. The guy beside me was wearing decidedly vulgar, shiny tracksuit bottoms. His chubby pal had on short shorts and a polo shirt, and his arms and legs were coated with curling orange hairs. Their dashed hopes of some extra space for the duration of the flight had left them touchingly forlorn. My apology was acknowledged through gritted teeth.

All around were young football supporters heading back to Stansted from the Riviera. ‘Have you both been down for the football?’ I said, hoping to ameliorate my unpopularity by being chatty. They drew themselves up in indignation — two Frankie Howerds affronted by the preposterousness of the idea. ‘No, we have not. We didn’t even know it was on,’ said the tracksuit-bottomed one. ‘But we do now,’ chipped in the hairy one, whose voice was exactly that of the Sixties comic Charlie Drake. ‘We saw the Northern Ireland fans fighting the police in Nice old town.

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