Money was the thing. I’d run out of it, and Mr Henry never would. Well, not unless people stopped drinking beer.
Living with Henry and Clarissa, I felt a bit like that bloke who went to live with those rich people in Brideshead Revisited. I was amazed and as amused as he was, (only I thought of myself as being a bit more outgoing than the boring young coot played by Jeremy Irons).
Of course it wasn’t long before I was driving the Lotus, usually because Clarissa wanted to go somewhere and didn’t want the chore of parking near the wine bar in Central London where she had regular meetings with her “wine adviser”. This bloke fancied her and she fancied him. But it never went anywhere further than a wine bar. They’d both get so pissed that only the fantasy was real.
Meanwhile Donkey Boy was angling to get his equipment tangled up with Sophia Loren’s while Jack tried to look like this wasn’t going to bother him, Henry being his boss and all that. Rude Jude dispensed liposuction and free sexual advice in equal proportion to anyone who came near, Julie was increasingly making the application of her lipstick into a sexual art form worthy of a one-woman show at some fringe theatre and Dawn showed everyone just what it meant to clean in a dirty manner.
Every weekend there was a party, and sometimes in the week too, and all of these people would be there, plus many of Julie’s girlfriends, all of whom were stunningly beautiful but who also had the distinction that if you added all their ages together I was still old enough to be at least their father. One of Henry’s business acquaintances visiting from Texas drawlingly said, “Henry, old man, you’re living in The House of Babes”.
Those weekends were bonkers. Imagine all the free drink you want, free cigarettes, as much food as you could eat and loads of women, some of them young enough to be my daughters and all of them experimenting with sexual lipstick and wearing as few clothes as possible. If the devil had a house on earth, this was it. Debauchery didn’t even begin to describe it. Everyone there had just a couple of things on their minds and they weren’t what the weather would be like tomorrow or whether United was going to win the cup.  
Of course I started drinking far more than I’d ever drunk before and I took up smoking again, though this time instead of Embassy Regal which I’d smoked when I was 17 because they weren’t as cheap and nasty as Player’s No 6, (Regal were just cheap but a fine smoke nevertheless, if you’re looking for some guidance on which species of the weed to imbibe these would be, as they say in Australia, the go), I was now on Lucky Strikes because they tasted good and Henry got them for free from the brewery and I had no idea how much they cost.
Like just about everything else, the Lucky Strikes came each week on a big brewery truck.
So, there I was, no money, no obvious future, no place I could call my own, but living it up in The House of Babes, smoking for the first time in 12 years, drinking like I was the owner of a brewery, a new liver and a new pair of kidneys, and having a damn fine time just looking out for the truck every evening and flirting with girls.
As we drank we talked and as we ate we talked and laughed and said the most stupid things of course, and the more alcohol we drank the more stupid it all became. It was really funny at those events, or at least that’s what I thought, and the drink flowed and the cigarettes were smoked and the food was eaten.
Only, as even Emperor Nero must eventually have realised, there is only so much of this type of living you can take. I mean, every day I was waking up with a hangover and not just a nagging one either. The type that tells you your liver is going to seriously object any day soon and that perhaps one day you’re not going to wake up at all.
One night I ended up in bed with Kristy, who by then I was sure I’d actually seen in Topless Tenerife Tearaways, and I was giving her back a massage in the dark and I drunkenly asked her to roll over on to her back so I could get my drunken hands on those breasts of hers and there was a long silence and then she said, “I am on my back,” and before I could think I said, “So what happened to your breasts then?”, and she said, “you’ve been kneading them so fucking hard for the last half an hour I thought you were making bread. And you didn’t even know! Jesus H Christ!”
I had to do something. One winter’s morning after they’d all gone to work, I sat there in a cane chair on the patio, smoking a Lucky Strike, wrapped in my overcoat, collar up around my neck and wearing one of Henry’s fedoras (he had a collection of 44), watching the horses frolicking in the field, the iced grass crackling like newspaper under their hooves. I knew I had to get out of this place and stop smoking and stop drinking and stop living this false life and try and get some sense and proportion back into it all. And in one of my increasingly rare moments of lucidity and sobriety I remembered The General. And I smiled because suddenly I began to have the germ of an idea.

Henry and Clarissa’s wedding was a lavish affair, held at a Kent hop farm in amongst the heady smell of old English ale. I believe this was Henry’s idea, I think so that he wasn’t too far away from copious amounts of freely available alcohol.
It all went off without a hitch. The bride and groom looked resplendent, as they say, and all was milk and honey on that perfectly balmy English summer’s day. They drove off in Henry’s open-topped Porsche, waving delightedly to us all, and we knew they were embarking on a carefree, mortgage-free, stress-free life. God, it was annoying.
The thing was this. Clarissa married Henry because he was rich, owned a brewery, drove a Porsche 911 and water-skied, and her rationale was in that order. I know this because before they married she said to me, “I’m worried that I might be marrying him because he’s rich, owns a brewery and drives a Porsche.”
“Hmm,” I said, “have you anything in common?”
“Well,” she said, biting her lip, “we both like water skiing. Is that a good reason to get married?”
“Well,” I said, “at least you’ve got that in common.”
“Oh well then,” she said, brightening up, “that’s okay.”
Of course it wasn’t okay at all.
They went off on a super honeymoon - where exactly I can’t remember, but surely it must have been somewhere truly exotic where the warm waters of one ocean or another gently lapped pristine white sands and where the lazy lifting of a finger was enough to summon a scantily clad man - for her - and a scantily clad woman - for him - laden with ‘free’ drinks, plus delicacies plucked from the surrounding silky-watered ocean, and a menu for that evening’s grand meal. After that they would retire to their individual bungalow where the only sounds would be the wind softly moaning in the palm trees and Clarissa softly moaning as Henry had his rather large way with her.
See, Henry and his school friends each had nicknames. There was Toad, Blodger, Binko, Buffo and...Henry. He was known as Donkey Boy.
Now, Clarissa’s least favourite pastime happened to be sex. I think it had something to do with her favourite pastime, which was horse-riding, a sport she spent all her waking hours indulging in (well, when she wasn’t drinking or smoking).
Now, I have never understood the joy of horse riding. I’ve been on horses and to me riding a horse is like travelling on the hard steel roof of a car, with no suspension, across a rutted field in winter...except that in a car you have some control over where you end up. A horse does what it wants to do and that means at any moment during your ride without warning you may be thrown through the air and land on your arse, or your head, and usually the horse will then land on you too. This can happen for any number of reasons, none of which are good reasons: the horse does not like the look of that fence coming up, or the ditch, or there’s a small mouse crossing the road up ahead. To me horses are really stupid. If they weren’t why would they let someone an eighth of their size climb on their back, hit them with a whip and then tell them where to go, come rain or shine? Doesn’t make sense when you think about it. Also, they tend to step on your foot and sometimes they bite you and if you’ve seen the size of their hooves and their chompers you just know this is not an animal you want biting you or stamping on you.
Now, Clarissa, well she didn’t mind a big horse, in fact the bigger the better, but she just couldn’t take Donkey Boy. Oh not at all.
The upshot of this was that once married and ensconced in the new family home, a sprawling manor of a house at the end of a long and winding private road, Clarissa tried to avoid spending too much time alone with Donkey because if she did it would have meant having sex, however occasionally, and it would also have meant discussing their lives. Neither of these things could she face. Like a lot of English people Clarissa thought that if something wasn’t talked about then it just went away. Of course it never does, it just becomes a massive unspoken problem that grows and grows and becomes as big as the empty house next door; it’s silent but it’s definitely there, and you can’t avoid it.
In a roundabout way this is where I came in.
Now, I’d reached pretty much rock bottom. I didn’t have any money. Not a penny rattled in my pocket, and the rustle of a crisp fiver was fast becoming a distant memory. I owed the taxman, the VAT man, the milkman, you name it, I owed everybody in England something, and probably a few in Wales and Scotland too, not to mention the Isle of Man.
Clarissa said I should come and stay with them for a while so I could sort out what I was going to do. She said they had plenty of room. She said that Henry wouldn’t mind. This is also what she’d said to all of the other people who were staying there...
There was Julie, a wayward 14-year-old girl. With her long wavy auburn hair, dark, beguiling brown eyes and a figure to complement it all, she could, and often did, pass for 17. Julie also had a passion for our four-legged friends and simply appeared one day and asked if she could help out in the stables. Now, Clarissa’s only real manual work was engaging the Range Rover’s four wheel drive so she could climb the kerb outside Harrods, so getting Julie in seemed like a good idea. She could do all the mucking-out and other horsey stuff.
Kids grow up quicker these days, at least that’s what Julie said, and that must have been why she applied lipstick like a woman, smoked cigarettes and drank copious quantities of wine. Julie’s parents lived down in the village and they’d given up. They had three other daughters and to my mind it was only a matter of time before they too were moving in at Clarissa’s and behaving like women.
Along with Julie, many of her friends often came to visit and they were similarly vivacious, similarly flirtatious and far too young to be let out alone.
Then there were the adults.
There was Rude Jude. She was married, in her mid-forties, blonde, had a small but perfectly formed figure, and a big, loud mouth. She had this habit of coming up to you - this was people she didn’t know, mind you - grabbing your head with both hands (actually your ears, so you couldn’t get away) - and plonking her lips on your lips and giving you a great noisy sucking kiss that pulled all of the air right out of your body. The first time it happened I thought it was some surgical procedure. I figured maybe she’d seen something on my face that needed removing quickly and this was the only way she could do it. But no, this was her standard greeting. If she really liked you her tongue soon joined yours too and wrapped around it so tight it wrung the saliva out.
Rude Jude rode horses and, so rumour had it, many a man, hence the moniker. I’d see her through the window, skin-tight jodhpurs on, mounting Clarissa’s big brown horse and I’d draw a sharp breath which when I let it go, as her arse slapped the saddle, fogged the window pane.
Rude Jude wasted no time telling you her husband was having an affair and that she was going to kill him. It didn’t happen when I was there, but it probably has by now.
Rude Jude had a vivacious friend called Dawn who came to the house to dust and sweep. For some reason she preferred to do this in her underwear, which was nothing if not scanty. I heard that she also liked to whip her boyfriends and liked to be watched when she had sex – the bigger the crowd the better, apparently. I could believe all this because the way she handled a feather duster down on her hands and knees certainly made many a man’s heart beat dangerously fast. It was even rumoured that Henry had a copy of a very incriminating video shot in the back of a horsebox. That was probably the only one of his voluminous pornography collection that I never got to see. But that was all right, there were lots of others to keep every man, woman, and his dog busy (busy watching, I mean).
At first I found it somewhat disconcerting that whenever I walked into a room on Tuesdays there was Dawn with her tight silk-knickered arse pointing in my direction, bobbing up and down like an actress in one of Henry’s porno films. After a while, of course, it simply became normal.  “Morning, Dawn,” I’d say without even looking at her tightly encased buttocks swaying back and forth as she hoovered and I sat and read The Telegraph (out of choice I’d have had The Guardian but, you know, no money and all that - so I had to read Henry’s newspaper. He never read it himself of course because he thought all journalists were the lowest form of life, though he hastened to add that he didn’t mind me, and in any case, he said, I wasn’t earning any money from writing so I didn’t really count. Hmm.)
Then there was Kristy, an old school friend of Clarissa’s. A natural blonde with flawless golden skin, cornflower blue eyes and breasts which announced her arrival with the aural equivalent of a lustily yanked train hooter. When I first met her she was working at a real estate agents. Apparently she’d worked her way through every man there, and several of the customers too. It was said that interest rates climbed steeply when Kristy was showing someone round a house for sale. And when she walked around Clarissa’s in her skin-tight riding jodhpurs, well even the birds stopped twittering.
Of course, Mr Henry soon saw her potential and offered her the job as Marketing Manager at the Brewery. As you do.
One day we were all at some boring horse trials thing – Jackie and several of her school friends, Rude Jude, Dawn (fully clothed, just this once) and Jack and Nina, (whom I’ll mention in a moment) – and by lunchtime Clarissa had only been thrown off her steed twice, so it was judged to be a good day indeed.
Henry and I were leaning on a wooden fence railing watching Kristy warming up her own mount and Henry said, looking at her with squinted eyes, “You know what? She reminds me very much of Kinky Stuff. You know the one with –”.
“Yes I do, What is it?” I said. “Is it her eyes?”
Henry looked at me. “You know I don’t think I’ve ever seen Kinky’s face at all. Huh. Maybe once in that film they shot in Tenerife, the one with the guy and the two enchiladas.”
“Wasn’t that Mexican Inferno?”
“No, no, no. Not at all. Definitely Topless Tenerife Tearaways, the one where they all tore their clothes off and had bumpy sex as they rode motorbikes across the sand dunes.”
“Ah yes, you’re right,” I said, bowing, as always, to his superior porn knowledge.
“Anyway,” said Henry, squinting, “it’s not her eyes, it’s something else. Something to do with the way she holds herself, methinks.”
“Yes,” I said as we both turned back to watch Kristy’s backside move up and down at an ever increasing pace as her horse started to gallop across the field, “you could be right”.
The thing was, Kristy wanted nothing more than to be Mrs Henry. Not that she wanted to take Donkey on in all his braying glory (everyone knew about Donkey thanks to Clarissa’s inability to keep anything to herself; short of a photograph of the offending part I reckoned I and everyone else had a pretty clear idea of size, appearance and even ability, plus knowledge of several unique and “difficult moments”. These were events when Clarissa had refused to accept the beast into her inner lair and an argument had ensued, usually resulting in Donkey Boy storming off, presumably nevertheless being careful not to step on or trip over his pride and joy as he left the room.... Anyway, Kristy wanted the money, the brewery, the cars, the horses, the house and Mr Henry’s name - probably in that order.
And finally, Jack and Nina. Jack worked for Mr Henry but because he drank as much as his boss they’d become firm friends. Presumably they helped each other stand up when the booze made them want to fall over and kiss the floor.
Jack was the opposite of Mr Henry - if you follow. He was nicknamed Pencil, by his wife. Nina was gloriously, most definitely sexy, in a smouldering Sophia Loren type of way. And she had Sophia’s body too. No, not the one the actress has now, the curvy one you could hold onto, the one she had when she was 22. The thing was, Nina just didn’t know it. Nina had only ever been out with Pencil so she thought that a slim sexual organ was normal and this not unnaturally frustrated her immensely.
This often came up at the dinner table, as it were, where all of these people were frequent guests and where copious amounts of beer and wine loosened tongues and inhibitions. Whenever Nina talked about Pencil’s lack of sexual prowess, sighing her disappointment that he could never satisfy her, and really were all men this pitifully arrayed and yes she would have another glass of wine and, “oh please do fill it right to the brim because it’s the only thing I’ll have tonight that is full to the brim, that you can be sure of,” and the room would become quiet save for the clinking of wine glasses, the gulping of their contents and the exhalation of clouds of cigarette smoke. Meanwhile, under the table, I fancied I could hear Donkey Boy stirring.

to be continued...

Imagine this if you will. His father owns a brewery, a big brewery, and he’s got this multi-million pound house in Kent and he drives the latest model Range Rover. His chauffeur generally drives but on the weekends he tools around in it himself. That’s when his young blonde wife’s not using it to tow her double custom-made horsebox. Never mind if she is though, he can always hop in the Porsche 911 convertible or even the classic Lotus that both sit in his triple-car garage.
Of course if he doesn’t want to go out and decides to have a drink at home instead he just lifts the phone and gets the brewery to send a truck around laden with booze.
These are the people I ended up living with when my life fell apart. And they were having an even worse time than I was...
Well, it’s all relative, but at least I wasn’t a middle-aged recovering alcoholic who couldn’t stop drinking his own beer, and I didn’t have an 85 year old father who still ran my life as well as the brewery, and I didn’t have a wife who wouldn’t sleep in the same room as me. And, oh yes, she was also on the verge of sleeping with a wine salesman who specialised in spicy German whites. And also, I wasn’t addicted to porn by satellite.
Henry was a true porn connoisseur. While some men can close their eyes, listen, and then tell you a Humber Snipe MkII is coming up the driveway, Henry could listen to a porn movie with his eyes closed and tell you it was Tiffany Bonk coming with Kurt Shagger. If pushed he’d keep his eyes closed, and frowning as he thought hard, he’d breathe deeply and say that yes, it was Naked Liaisons 5 filmed in Bermuda and directed by Randy Stuff. He could also tell you the plot, but that bit was easy because there never was any plot, this being porn. If he’d gone on Mastermind - this is Henry and his chosen subject is the international pornography industry and its stars - he’d have walked away with the top prize, no problem.
Now, Henry had an attic and it didn’t exist.
Well, of course it did, but not unless you were Henry. There was a set of lightweight metal stairs, which silently, almost magically, dropped down when you flipped a small switch hidden in a nearby clothes cupboard. The attic had more electronics in it than a branch of Dixons or Harvey Norman. When you walked up the stairs you could hear a muted hum. When you stepped right up in there you felt like James Bond at the moment our man enters the master criminal’s lair, such was the array of softly blinking lights. Henry knew a man in Cobham who did a dodgy line in computer smart cards, so he’d got a custom-made piece of plastic with a computer chip embedded in it which allowed his satellite to roam around the world, searching out porn from every corner of the globe. So big was the satellite dish that I believe he could have picked up naked aliens from Venus, assuming there were any of course. This motorised satellite dish had been delivered by four men from the brewery who arrived in a big truck with a crane on the back. The dish was hoisted up and hidden from prying eyes by careful positioning on the multi-gabled roof, neatly fitting into an invisible valley where two roof slopes met. Henry’s wife Clarissa was out at a riding event when all this took place and she was never the wiser. At night when Henry was scouring the heavens for new porn, you could just here the faint whirr of the dish’s motor, which could often be mistaken for a breeze in the eaves.
On one memorable occasion he was upstairs watching porn on a TV in his bedroom and Clarissa and I were watching TV downstairs. She heard the sound of the motor and asked what I thought it could be. “Just the wind in the eaves, I should think,” I said, not wishing to unsettle their already precarious marriage any further.
Later that evening Henry obviously became confused with his array of infrared remote controls and all of a sudden there was Kinky Event (her big break came in Rising Inferno, also starring A. Nal Retention and Claude Balls) giving some guy’s todger a right seeing-to. Fortunately this was just a glimpse as upstairs Henry surfed the channels. Clarissa wasn’t even sure it had happened, it had been so quick, but clearly there was more on the way, courtesy of the motorised satellite. I made my excuses and strolled out of the lounge then sprinted up the stairs and burst into his room. He had his hands full. With remote controls. He threw them all up in the air and let out a small scream. “Henry,” I hissed, “you’ve got the bloody channels all mixed up. There’s porn downstairs!”
“Fuck!” he said.
“Exactly,” I said and softly closed the door behind me.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with this TV,” said Clarissa, frowning, as I rejoined her. “One minute Mrs Mangle on Neighbours was talking to Buck and then all of a sudden there was some naked guy giving it to some girl from behind. I swear there was. And then it just went back to Neighbours.”
“You sure it wasn’t Neighbours?”
She snorted. “They don’t have sex doggy-style on Neighbours. Or any sex for that matter.”
“God,” I said, “You know what? I’ll bet it’s those TV people. Probably running some porn film for their own self-gratification and it got all mixed up.”
“Hmm,” she said and settled back in the sofa to watch people performing badly in a land Down-Under.
The thing was this. I’d known Clarissa for years since she worked as a sales girl at a publishing company. She’d always known she’d marry a rich man. Really she had to...
She’d been brought up in this wealthy family with high expectations. Daddy had worked for years for a big multi-national company, selling his soul on a daily basis and in return getting an elevator lift up the ranks until he was earning the really big bucks (no sitting in the corner for him, reading a book).
Clarissa had been to school in Hong Kong and the US, and travelled the world from an early age. When the company was eventually taken over, Daddy left with a bagful of redundancy money, plus a hefty pension. Even when he no longer had anything to do with the company he’d phone his old secretary every year and get her to book some special table for them in a Hong Kong harbourside restaurant so they could enjoy the first oysters brought ashore that year, or something like that. I pictured them all waiting, salivating at the table while some chaps on an old Chinese junk fished oysters up out of the foul smelling harbour and sent them along to the restaurant where the old English man and his family would eat them at great expense.
Daddy didn’t like me on account of the fact that once when I was round at their place I cut the Stilton the wrong way. Apparently one is supposed to cut it along the side of the triangle, not from the end. Of course, he never said anything to me, just asked his daughter, with a lazy drawl in his voice, where I had been brought up. What a tosser.
The funny thing is – well, not so funny for him – years later he had a bad fall and suffered brain damage. While he was in hospital, his wife discovered that they were deeply in debt, despite the black and white timber-framed Tudor house in Kent and holidays on the Cote d’Azur and Hong Kong. She delved a little deeper and found out that he had been spending money hand-over-fist on prostitutes! Today he’s in a mental hospital and Clarissa refuses to have anything do with him or even to see him, which must be a wrench for her because he was always the man she looked up to. Funny how your dreams can sometimes come crashing down around your ears...anyway, serves him right for going on about the Stilton, if you ask me.
Anyway, Clarissa had been sent to the most expensive public schools but rather like the British Royal family no amount of money lavished on private education could make up for the fact that there was very little between her ears for the teaching staff to work on. Consequently, dear girl that she was, the only answer was to wed a rich bloke. After she left the publishing outfit she managed to get a job at the brewery selling wine and soon discovered Henry, this balding but amiable man who was very much in his father The Chairman’s shadow, but who would one day inherit the brewery - all of it, lock stock and very many barrels.
The brewers really were an interesting family. The Chairman was the eldest of three brothers. He ran the ancient stone brewery with a rod of iron but there were several other equally old brothers who also supposedly carried out ‘specific management tasks’. I never figured out what those tasks were and in fact I never found anyone, Henry included, who could even begin to point me in the right direction on that one.
There was Seamus who brewery staff referred to as Mr Seamus. Seamus had a rambling attic-type office in a tower at the brewery and at one stage he decided he would build a Spitfire. Not a model of the World War II fighter plane, but rather a full-sized-chocks-away-Corky Spitfire. The real McCoy.
Bit by bit he gathered all of the pieces from far and wide and bit-by-bit he painstakingly put it all together. It took a couple of years and during that time he devoted very little time to the brewery, apparently just turning up for board meetings once every couple of months, presumably to show he was still alive. Aside from these rare appearances he was only very occasionally seen and when he was sighted he was usually dressed in a boiler suit of the type made famous by Winston Churchill during World War II. Like the great man he even chomped on a Churchill-sized cigar and was known to flash the two-fingers at people, though I was assured by several long-time staff who knew him well that it wasn’t the victory-salute.
Eventually the Spitfire was finished and stood there in all its glory. There was not a soul in the brewery who didn’t tread the attic stairs to see this marvel of engineering that their very own Mr Seamus had built.
Seamus was so pleased with the end result that he contacted some people at an aviation museum down in Cornwall and they were beside themselves with excitement at the thought of exhibiting this amazing flying machine. There was just one problem - Seamus’s Spitfire took up most of his office and could not be removed. In fact, he had to duck under one wing to get to his desk. There was only one answer. If they were to get the plane out of Seamus’s office, a wall had to come down.
So, two days later workmen came along with their truck and crane and whirred the jib and hook up to the tower where other workmen had already removed all of the bricks on one side of Seamus’s office, leaving it open to the biting south London air. Once safely attached, the Spitfire was pushed to the edge and then gently eased out. There were tears in Seamus’s eyes as the mighty warplane flew once more, albeit on the end of a brewery crane, while down below the assembled brewery workers looked up in awe and hummed the theme tune from the film, 633 Squadron.
Another brother - Didius - Mr D to the staff, lived in Egham and drove a brand-spanking new Range Rover.
This Range Rover had every conceivable extra and was the love of the old fellow’s life. One weekend he parted company with it, locking it up in his garage so he could jet off to do some skiing in Courcheval. When he returned home it was gone. He called the police and they arrived and interviewed the neighbours to see if anyone had noticed anything suspicious.
“Oh yes, indeed I did,” said the old lady next door. “I saw some fellow driving away in the big vehicle. You know I thought it must have been Didius.”
“Did you get a good look at him madam?”, asked the policeman.
“Oh yes,” she said.
“And you thought it was Mr D, I mean Didius?”
“Yes, I did. Though now I come to think about it, I’m not sure.”
“Why’s that madam?”
“Well, you see, the chap driving it was a rather large black man.”
“Didius is a white man,” said the copper tightly.
“Yes, I suppose he is. Though since his skiing trip he does look rather tanned you know.”
“But he doesn’t look like somebody from the Caribbean, now does he?”
“I’m sure you’re right, but I really wouldn’t know. I rarely travel further than Weybridge.”
The policeman snapped his book closed. “Thank-you so much for your help madam.”
“That’s no problem,” she said. “Do you think you will find Didius’s vehicle?”
“Well,” said the copper tersely, “one of my colleagues claims to have found Lord Lucan.”
“Oh good! I don’t so much mind if a Lord took Didius’s car. Even if he is a black man.”

to be continued...

I drove down the M4 motorway, away from London. I’d first done this drive in reverse 11 years earlier in my little white Mini. I wondered what I’d got to show for all that time in the big city. Of course there was plenty, but at that moment I couldn’t think of anything.
As the darkness came down the dogs huddled close together on the back seat, sitting bolt upright against each other. Normally they’d have gone to sleep, curling around each other for comfort. This time was different. Maybe they felt something coming off me, a sense of utter despair maybe.
The motorway was quiet. Most people were still on holidays, sharing the Christmas cheer with their families. I turned off the motorway and into the Cotswolds and drove down deserted country lanes in complete darkness, only my car lights moving out there. Sometimes I’d pass through a small village and see a pub with its lights glittering and people moving and jostling in there in the warmth, swapping stories and jokes, telling gossip, drinking local ale, having a good time.  
When I pulled up the dogs tensed in the back, sitting upright, pressing against each other. I felt like I was delivering them to Dachau.  
I got them out the back and Ronald met me. You’ll remember, this was the bloke who’d sold me these two dogs five years ago when they were pups. He’d been down in Cornwall then, living by himself. His wife had left him. It’s either me or it’s the dogs, she said, so Ron threw her out. Fortunately for him, he soon met someone else. Because he used to go to all the dog shows and prance around with his pure bred Bernese Mountain dogs he caught the eye of this similarly divorced woman. I’m sure that at these dog shows there are always people looking at the dog handlers bouncing alongside the dogs, rather than actually looking at the dogs themselves. If you think about it, if you’re a dog lover and you’re on the lookout for a like-minded partner it makes sense to get along to as many dog shows as you can handle. This woman who Ron moved in with happened to run a Bernese Dog rescue centre, so all in all Ron was in dog heaven. I knew all this because I’d kept in touch with him over the years and he’d followed Mitchell and Benson’s progress from pups (or pupsters, as he liked to call them) and laughed along with me about their ridiculous antics. The time Mitchell took my wallet out into the garden, pulled the credit cards out with his teeth and then buried them. Perhaps it had been his way of saying, whoa there! No more spending! Either way, in a garden in a house in Reigate there is an American Express Gold card. This will amaze and astonish future archaeologists who will wonder what the hell was the purpose of this piece of bright shiny plastic. I sometimes wondered that myself.
Then there was the time Benson ate a whole bag of apples. Yes, a whole bag, plastic and all, and when they eventually came out the other end the digested glop was still very neatly packaged. Another time Mitch made me swerve off the road by biting my ear and I hurtled into the front of a fruit and veg stall, much to the dismay of the owner. It was weeks before I’d removed all of the grated onions out of the front grille of the Citroen and months before I stopped crying onion tears every time I drove more than five miles. Once I drove down to my parents in Wales and couldn’t stop my eyes crying for three hours. Even when I put my head out the side window it didn’t clear. It must have looked a sight, me and two large dogs, all of us with our heads out separate side windows, driving at speed down the M4.  Ron howled with laughter at that one and when I told him about Benson running away from other dogs, even the chihuahua he met one day in the park, Ron sighed and said, “he is just such a sensitive boy”.
But this time we didn’t say anything. I handed their leads over and they both looked at me at the same time, swivelling their big shaggy heads around and then tilting them like they were asking me a question. Like, what’s going on here then, skipper?
It was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.
It might not seem important. People told me they had to go, you couldn’t afford to keep them. Okay, but I lived with these guys for five years and they were often the only ones I had to talk to. Without them I probably wouldn’t be writing this now, so it was an indescribably painful decision to make. It was like I’d killed someone and in a way I had. I’d just gone and thrown away my two best friends.
I got in the car and drove away. A grown man taken down to this. No job, no house, no prospects, dogless, nothing. Rock bottom. The pits. I’ll be damned if I know how I drove, what with all the crying.
And this time it wasn’t the onions.

to be continued...

I was walking Mitchell and Benson in the park and they ran up to these little kids who were playing with their father. I didn’t have any kids and along with everything else on my mind I was giving that some thought too and asking myself how come I’d never got in a position where I could have them. (I don’t mean a sexual position. You know what I mean). And I was thinking that I never would get to have kids, what with time marching on so fast and everything looking real depressing.  Oh yeah, also I wasn’t going out with anyone, which made it difficult to produce children.
When the running dogs got to the kids in the park they pulled up short, skidding in the mud. I said to the man, “Sorry, they don’t really understand kids.”
“Me neither,” he said and trudged off after the nippers into the drizzle.

****

I spent Christmas by myself. Well to be truthful, with the dogs. I can’t honestly say it bothered me too much. All this business about you’ve got to be with family and friends. But when you’re by yourself you can watch what you want on the TV (well, if I hadn’t sold it I could have), you can eat when you want - assuming you’ve got anything to eat of course - and you can drink what you want, when you want.
It’s also good to be by yourself if you just want to sit down and cry.
And sometimes if you just want to hit a wall with your fist, it’s also good.

******

After Christmas, and just before the start of the New Year, I got in the car, shut the door and looked out the side window at the house. Then I turned around in the seat and nodded at the dogs in the back. They didn’t nod back. They just looked at me. I turned the key and fired up the Peugeot 306 that I’d borrowed from a friend. I slipped it into gear and took off.
Down the road I pulled into the council office car park, which was completely deserted, on account of it being the festive season. I stepped out and the dogs got all excited because they thought it was walk time. I didn’t say anything, just picked the envelope up off the passenger seat and walked to the building. The wind was biting cold. There was no rain; there hadn’t been any snow. Not even a frost. So it was cold and dry and the heavy dark clouds seemed only inches above my bowed head. I pushed the envelope through the Bailiff’s letterbox.
They’d let me know just before Christmas that they were coming to repossess my house on behalf of the mortgage lenders, so I’d just put the key in the envelope with a note which said, “and a happy New Year to you too”. Sometimes it just becomes all too much. Sometimes you just have to walk away.
Or drive if you can. It’s quicker, and you can go further.

to be continued...