Jeremy Clarke

My grandson Oscar, now nearly two, hardly says a word when he and I are out together. It’s like being out with a dog the conversation is so one-sided. He understands well enough. He’s attentive and interested and usually in favour of anything you care to mention. But he barely speaks. Which is strange because

The book launch party was terrific. To those who put it on, and to everyone who came, I am a beggar even in thanks. A salute, too, to the 200-plus of you who entered the joke competition and to the 15 winners, every one of whom was the life and soul. A special mention in

Before I went to the party, I went to the pub for a pint. The pub was unusually quiet for a Saturday evening. Jay was on duty behind the bar. She leaned across the bar to embrace and kiss me. She had a terrible hangover, she said. I told her to have one herself, and

A big mouth, fewer taste buds and a wider gullet than normal means I’m a fast eater. If golloping your dinner was an Olympic event, I’d be knighted by now. Last week I equalled my personal best with a plate of roast pork, apple sauce, roast spuds, mashed swede and runner beans. We were four

That famous ideal pub of George Orwell’s, The Moon Under Water? Sounds boring to me. There’s no music, every customer is a ‘regular’ with his own chair and it is always quiet enough to talk. The barmaids call you dear (not ducky as they do in ‘raffish’ pubs). If singing breaks out in the Moon

A very sporting publisher has put together a collection of Low life columns and is publishing it in hardback on 3 November. In the evening there is to be a drinks party at The Spectator offices in Westminster to celebrate the occasion. The boardroom can comfortably accommodate around 50 vertical drinkers. Of these 50, the

On Sunday morning we got up early, met the guide, Khalila, on the hotel steps and went on a cultural landmark and shopping tour of Marrakesh. We’d done the Majorelle garden, which we all thought we liked. We’d done the Koutoubia mosque and the Jemaa el-Fnaa square. We’d had a look around an empty palace,

When my uncle was a boy, he said, he was leading a horse down a hill near North Weald in Essex. The horse was pulling a wagon loaded with cabbages, and my uncle had got down, he said, to assist the horse because the hill was a steep one. The war was on. The hill

Somewhat frayed around the edges after The Spectator’s ‘End of Summer Party’ I drove up to Norfolk to visit my country cousins. The corpses on the A143 told me I was getting deeper into the countryside. As well as the usual pea-brained pheasants, I saw a bloody badger, a broken fox and a magnificent, unmarked

The pub was taken over for a meeting. Every chair was occupied. The speaker’s words were being recorded by a sound engineer standing at a portable mixing console. The middle-aged audience was rapt, the atmosphere one of political and moral seriousness. Few were drinking. I mounted the only vacant bar stool and mouthed the word

My sister got married twice last week, both times to the same bloke, thank goodness. She was married on the Thursday by the state in a register office, and on the Saturday she and Stan stood in front of an Anglican clergyman in a church and asked God to graciously add His blessing to that

I took my grandson, Oscar, 20 months old, down to the regatta on the bus, a double-decker, his first experience of one, and we sat upstairs at the front. The bus was far too big for the narrow country lanes and the overhanging branches of trees thrashed against the upstairs windows. We alighted at a

In summer the cottage next door is let out to visitors. Each week there’s someone new. I see them coming and going and sometimes circumstances dictate that I get to meet them. Last week a man staying in the cottage came to the door to ask about the television signal in the village. It wasn’t

I open my eyes. I’m on my back looking up at the neat joinery of a wooden roof. Resting between two of the cross trees is a row of handmade longbows. Green daylight filters through bushes and trees outside the window. I’m half in and half out of a sleeping bag on the floor of

I don’t think any of us were really that interested in being shown over his 14th-century chateau, and very quickly it was clear that neither did he really want to show it to us. But a personally guided tour of his chateau was on our itinerary, and presumably a fee had been agreed, perhaps when

A new grandson, and a night in the pub Grandson number two was delivered by caesarean section last week. Nine pounds. A boy. Clynton. He was plain Clinton to start with, but one of their more sophisticated friends suggested the alternative spelling and the suggestion was taken up. Of course the older relatives are either

‘If you want to get off and walk or run along the towpath, we’ll meet you at the fourth lock,’ the skipper had told us after breakfast. Breakfast was a croissant and two cups of tachycardia-inducing coffee. The towpath was a six-foot-wide strip of smooth asphalt between two grass verges. It was drizzling. The coffee

I asserted that my room was booked and paid for by the travel company organising my trip. Maarika, the lovely Estonian trainee receptionist, said the room was booked, yes, but not paid for. I insisted, she resisted, I gave way. I handed over my credit card and signed here, here and here. She handed over

Someone comes to the front door, which is wide open to let in the sunshine, lifts the heavy brass knocker, and lets it fall, once. I’m upstairs, in a dark bedroom, bent over the laptop. I don’t hear anyone go to the door to answer it. The visitor waits patiently, then after perhaps half a