Jeremy Clarke

‘Busy in here tonight,’ I observed. ‘Hello, stranger!’ she said. ‘We’ve got a band on later. Didn’t you know?’ I didn’t. Eight pints of Foster’s, ten Silk Cut, and a game of pool had been the upper limit of my ambition for the evening when I looked in the mirror before coming out. I told

On Saturday night the hotel management threw a party for the guests. A Summer Party. We kicked off at 6.30 p.m. with tall drinks and canapés on the terrace. While we quaffed and nibbled and chatted, a singer sang to us. She sang her heart out to our indifferent backs and sunburnt necks. It was

Once a year I turn out for Peter Oborne’s cricket team, the White City All-Stars, for their annual cricket weekend at Horningsham, a ludicrously pretty village next to Longleat House in Wiltshire. I can’t bowl, I’m hopeless with a bat, I can’t catch or throw. I try to make myself useful, however, by offering around

His shop was empty. There was no waiting. The barber delightedly welcomed me into his chair. Was I Iooking forward to the start of the new football season? Who did I support? Was it them over there? (He pointed with his head to the football stadium just across the road.) He was a Manchester United

I was in the Groucho Club swapping self-satisfied greetings with leading hacks when the urge for nicotine became insistent and I stepped outside for a fag. The door hadn’t stopped swinging behind me when I was pounced on by a range of even more heartless, shameless characters. They were literally queuing to con cash out

Last week I’d had all I could take of the idiotic moral criticism levelled at me by those who profess to love me, and I fled and took refuge in a Premier Lodge. Or was it a Travelodge? I always confuse the two. Even as I checked in I wasn’t sure with which of the

There’s an obscure corner of me that relishes pain and physical injury. It doesn’t want permanent pain. But an occasional sharp reminder of the reality of pain exhilarates it. So when I foolishly unscrewed the cap on my car radiator and a fountain of boiling water erupted, scalding the underside of my forearm, this masochistic

My old BMW failed its MOT on a bald tyre and no spare. On this particular model the tyres are metric safety ones costing £200 each new, and that’s if you can find any. However, I eventually found a set of five on eBay, in used condition, with plenty of tread left, and won them

Siren’s call ‘Looking for love?’ said a junk-mail invitation to join an online dating site free of charge. They’d hit the nail on the head. I signed up and followed the step-by-step instructions to compiling and posting my profile. First I had to describe myself in at least 28 words. Then I had to tick

My last day in Australia I spent in Sydney. In the afternoon, under a blackening sky, I took the ferry out to Manly, sat on the beach and wrote a letter to my boy, enclosing a sample of Manly sand between the pages. Then I returned by ferry to Sydney, and on the way back

Journey’s end After visiting Digger in Kalgoorlie, I drove his old ute across Australia. In Australia, ute is short for utility vehicle — or what we Poms call a pick-up truck. Digger had recently bought himself a secondhand Toyota Landcruiser, with double fuel tanks and an extended cab to accommodate a massive fridge behind the

I met Digger 30 years ago in a plastics factory. We put in 12-hour shifts on adjacent injection moulding machines, which is a good way to get to know somebody, and we knocked about together after work, mainly in pubs, for a year or so, and then I went away and we lost contact. Six

Kalgoorlie, Western Australia Yesterday my friend Digger and I spent the afternoon touring the brothels of Kalgoorlie, an old gold and nickel mining town in the middle of nowhere. In more prosperous years Kalgoorlie had as many as 18 houses of ill-repute, but now there are just three. The global economic downturn has dealt Kalgoorlie

I’m virus aware. For example, I don’t touch door handles in public lavatories. If they’ve got in-swinging doors, I time my exit to coincide with someone else and let them grasp the handle. And I never, ever, touch the rubber handrail on Tube station escalators. Imagine what hundreds of thousands of commuting fingertips deposit on

Another soulless office in a bank: another ebullient robot in a dark suit in the chair opposite. This one wanted me to invest a small inheritance in one or both of two investment funds. With these in mind, he showed me a laminated diagram of an equilateral triangle illustrating the correlation between risk and financial

On the Eastern Airways flight from Bristol to Aberdeen I spotted a shiny £2 coin lying in the aisle. The businessman in the seat opposite saw me lean down and retrieve it. ‘Toss you for it — heads,’ he said. It came down tails. I trousered the coin and returned triumphantly to the complimentary copy

There’s a young girl at our gym who has recently burst into flower. She’s so extraordinarily beautiful she’s like a sport. Here’s one, you think, that even Nature herself is slightly surprised at. I can’t bear to look at her, either directly or obliquely in the mirror. If she enters my line of vision, I

I’ve come into some money. Twenty grand. Nice. Best not to shove it straight in my permanently overdrawn current account, though, I thought. My laptop is riddled with computer viruses. It would be just my luck if, after holding off for years, the hackers strike the moment I go into the black. So I decided

I thought no one else was going to turn up at the crematorium to wave Terry off. But as the seconds ticked closer to the appointed time, knots of ashen-faced mourners began to trickle in from the car park and congregate around the chapel doors. Then Terry arrived. He arrived in a cardboard box inside