Jeremy clarke

I’ve two convictions for drink-driving and I might have had a third a couple of years ago when I hit a bus. Fortunately, I was injured and taken unconscious to hospital so there was no opportunity for me to blow in the bag. The rule back then was that a person had to be awake enough to give his or consent to having a sample of blood removed for analysis at the police laboratory. This rule has since been changed, I believe, and a police doctor can help himself to a syringe of blood from your inert, unconscious body. I must have been out for several hours because when I

I made her acquaintance in the ladies’ lavatory towards the end of a fantastic birthday bash held in the upstairs room of a north London pub. I was incoherently drunk, and I think she was too, because I can’t remember either of us managing anything more than gestures or monosyllables. She was a committed, even violent kisser. And because she seemed keen to wrap me up and take me home straight away, we left without saying our goodbyes. Outside on the pavement a cab with its light on appeared right on cue, and 20 minutes later we were back at her apartment where she shoved me backwards on to a

Before we buried her in the cemetery, we attended a brief service in the church hall opposite. When she was alive, my mother’s cousin had enjoyed the kind of faith that is pretty much indistinguishable from cast-iron certainty. What we were lowering into a hole after the service, she’d have wanted us to think, was merely the husk. The evangelical pastor, an austere old sort with a cruel face who addressed us as ‘dear ones’ or ‘beloved’, clearly concurred with this view and trotted us quickly and unsentimentally through the service, starting with the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’. An old man with a comic’s face faced us from behind the keys

My car overheated in slow-moving traffic so I rang the local garage and the man said bring it in on Monday and he’d have a look. I was anxious to find out why my car was overheating because if the head gasket was blown, it would cost more to fix than it was worth and I’d have to throw the car away. ‘What time shall I drop it round?’ I said. ‘Quarter to nine,’ he said. I remember that, his being specific about a time. I dropped the car in on the dot and on the Friday I went round to collect it, assuming he had forgotten to ring to