Low Life: The Spectator Columns

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November 1, 2008: “The bottom half of the bed was sodden. Further investigation told me that, although the sheets were soaked, the duvet and the suit trousers I’d slept in were perfectly dry. Strange.” Short relationships My hangover was what the great Kingsley Amis describes in his Everyday Drinkingguide as a ‘metaphysical’ hangover Pamplona October 24, 2014: “But what do I know about art? I don’t even know what I like. And I was feeling so good, so alive, and so in love with London, that I mentally apologized to myself, God and the universe for slipping into judgmental nitwit mode again, and I headed on up the road towards the drumming and the tumults in Trafalgar Square.” My year of drugs June 2005: ‘My friends told me that halfway through the ball they’d gone to look for me and found me unconscious outside, flat on my face on the lawn, next to the naked girl. Someone had taken off my shoes, arranged them neatly sidebyside and set fire to them.’ On lower living

April 19, 2014: “The young amateur boxers dash over to their father — their favorite punchbag — climb up on to his chair, and administer a damn good leathering. Their father cowers weakly in his chair as the blows rain down. ‘Good day at the office?’ I ask him. He looks out at me between the blows and I get another one of those desperate looks.” June 2022: ‘I’ve often wondered whether Her Majesty the Queen glances through The Spectatorfrom time to time. And if she does, I wonder whether her kindly eye lights on this column. And if it does, I wonder what she thinks of what she reads there. April 2014: ‘The young amateur boxers dash over to their father — their favourite punchbag — climb up on to his chair, and administer a damn good leathering. Their father cowers weakly in his chair as the blows rain down.“Good day at the office?”I ask him. He looks out at me between the blows and I get another one of those desperate looks.’ On Pamplona As one of our readers put it at a recent Spectator event, the end of life is a phase that awaits us all – but Jeremy had a handle on it. And that we can all live better, savour life better, because Jeremy lived. That’s how I’ll always remember him. July 2022: ‘And I think: is this how it ends? Lying in bed watching TikTok videos? At the weekend I had planned a retreat in a nunnery. Three days of silent prayer and contemplation. But two of the nuns have caught Covid and the technical nun thought it best that we postponed. And at the weekend the tumour pain in my armpit, shoulder and shoulder blade intensified alarmingly. For the first time, the usual dose of the usual painkillers didn’t touch it. An escalation. I have always imagined that when it was time for me to die,I would make a serious effort to prepare myself. And now that the warning light is flashing, what do I do? I tap the TikTok app and there’s Bernard Manning saying,“A man walks into a pub with a crocodile under his arm.”Shoot me.’ On Spectator readers

Am I just too PC to get the jokes? No. I'll allow any taboo to be broken if the observation is honest enough to be funny – and the best humour is always deeply rooted in honesty. Perhaps the fact that I didn't believe in the characters is why most of it didn't really work for me. August 2005: ‘Once you’ve been doing it for a while, it’s not easy to stop being a low life. There’s nothing people enjoy more than watching someone going to hell on a poker, and they rather resent it if that person suddenly decides he wants to get off. No one objects in principle to an idle, self-centred, addicted life, as long as it ends prematurely in lonely and squalid circumstances and everyone can read about it in the papers. Renege on the deal, like a footballer in mid-contract, and people feel cheated.’ On drugs

But, meanwhile, he was diagnosed in 2013 with prostate cancer and introduced to “the Elizabethan drama of the oncologist’s consulting room – always a door opening and someone coming in bearing grave news”. The habitual joie de vivre of Low Life was thereafter tempered by frequent medical bulletins, sometimes signalling remission, more often something worse ahead. Jeremy Clarke, the Spectator’s Low Life correspondent, has sadly died. His friend Piers Pottinger pays tribute Philip, there’s a man here writing about going to the Cheltenham Festival and messing his pents.’ ‘Very easily done at Cheltenham, my dear. I’ve often wondered why nobody has written about it before.’ Or, ‘Philip here’s that man again, the one who messed his pents at Cheltenham, assisting the ferret-judging at a country show. It’s frightfully interesting. The judge takes so long to judge each class, they drive a car into the tent so that he can judge them in the headlights.’ ‘Does he mess his pents again?’ ‘He doesn’t say.’” TikTok This was my introduction to the Elizabethan drama of the oncologist’s consulting room — always a door opening and someone coming in bearing grave news,” he wrote. So why am I? Mainly because life can be stressful and sometimes I want to read something light and frivolous and funny. The magic colouring book feel of the cover with its scattered sketches of an isolated house, fag-smoking car crashed into a lamp-post, open bottle and spilled glass of vino suggested this was about as frivolous as it gets. It also promised some humour.

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July 3, 2021: “I sat between Phillipe and the detached French woman. She was quite old. She hadn’t yet got over the death of her lover, she told me, even though she’d passed away a decade before. After telling me this she rested her head against my chest as though exhausted by grief. Offered wine, she sprang to life and filled her glass dangerously close to the brim with red.

Iain Johnstone, the film critic and documentary maker who told the stories of stars like Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand and John Wayne. October 2014:‘But what do I know about art? I don’t even know what I like. And I was feeling so good, so alive, and so in love with London, that I mentally apologised to myself, God and the universe for slipping into judgmental nitwit mode again, and I headed on up the road towards the drumming and the tumults in Trafalgar Square.’ My year of drugs From time to time Clarke slips updates on his condition into Low Life, a weekly diary he writes for The Spectator magazine. These bulletins — witty, erudite, self-effacing, and rigorously unsentimental — are about prostate cancer as a tragicomedy. If I’m honest with myself I’ve never completely known or understood what I was doing, or supposed to be doing, every week when writing this column AcidEight years ago the British journalist Jeremy Clarke learned that he had metastatic prostate cancer.

Jeremy Clarke’s last Spectator column, on “the pros and cons of kissing”, appeared in the magazine’s issue of May 6.Clarke’s cancer had spread to his abdominal lymph nodes. That metastasis required more aggressive treatment than the “active surveillance” American doctors often recommend for early stage prostate cancer.