What Am I Still Doing Here? by Roger Lewis

The start of What Am I Still Doing Here? finds Roger Lewis in a state of deep gloom. But then so does the middle of the book — and indeed the end. This, of course, is just as it should be. The last thing one wants from a professional curmudgeon is brimming red-cheeked jollity, and I’m delighted to be able to report there’s nothing like that here.

There are, however, all kinds of other pleasures. In some respects, this comes as a surprise. If happiness writes white — as every creative writing student is told — you might think that churning discontent should come in a similarly unvarying shade of black. But one of Lewis’s great virtues as a chronicler of his own dissatisfaction is the breadth of his range.

He can be lethally catty — ‘My, she’s piled on the weight’, he notes of the actress Cheryl Campbell — and he also has an unfailingly sharp eye for absurdity, reading in his local paper that
Community Safety Manager Laura Walker of the Hereford and Worcester Fire and Rescue service this week held useful courses of ‘Smoke Alarm Advice for the Deaf’.

But almost in the next breath, he’ll do something quite unexpected. I can’t think of anyone else who would observe that Jesus Christ and Peter Sellers shared ‘the same strange desire for self-obliteration; their sense of self-abolishing’.

Physically, as Lewis notes with mordant relish, he is in an appalling state. He has gout in every extremity — ‘including my ear lobes’ — suffers from ‘drenching night sweats’, has teeth so brittle ‘they’re like maize stumps’ and, to top it all, has recently been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes as a result of his addiction to carrot cake.