Low life | 24 January 2019

My first night back in Blighty, I sat all evening at the kitchen table drinking wine with a charming, courteous English gentleman stricken in years. (I’ll call him Bertie. He enjoys the column and wrote inviting me to visit him at his pile on Exmoor.) I’m partial to old-fashioned English gentlemen, relishing above all their many rare qualities their disinterestedness. Before dinner we had slowly and deliberately drunk a bottle of red wine, and another one after that. He did most of the talking. His body was a calamity, but his mind was completely lucid. The vocabulary with which he expressed his mind was about ten times as large as mine and he wielded it with precision and virtuosity. As he spoke, his candlelit eyes flashed with youthful subversion and delight in his power of expression and in the comedy of the English language.

Fortunately, the poverty of my own thought, vocabulary, understanding and sensibility was established very early on, as soon as I opened my gob in fact, and my obligation to contribute to the conversation, and his to listen, was by mutual consent waived — much to my relief. His talk centred mainly on anecdotes from his long life. He had spent a lot of his time and effort trying to kill first Italians, then Germans, then Chinese. And there was an angry diatribe against personal computers and computer screens and the irresponsibility of the age that has allowed them to corrupt everyone. I crossed my right leg over my left, fixed my eyes on his face and listened carefully to the succession of anecdotes, and the railing against the digital age, while sipping deliberately from my glass at long intervals.