Back on track

Down and out in Cannes, Walsall and London

Armed with little more than an egg sandwich, toothbrush and change of underpants I’m on the train to London. Serried ranks of brown landscape fan out from the track like a never-ending shepherd’s pie. Food is much on my mind thanks to the steroids and innate enthusiasm for lumpy stuff.

View east from Hungerford pedestrian bridge.

The train from Birmingham takes 80 minutes but it’ll be marginally quicker once they’ve completed the super new high speed HS2 link (latest ETA: 2036 at £100 billion, three times over-budget - and spiralling). This folly to grandiose small-thinking will shave 30 minutes off a journey of 120 miles, but instead of ending in Leeds the London Flyer will terminate in a field outside the Midlands town of Lichfield.

I look out of the rain-spattered window and the shepherd’s pie gives way to a vivid vista of pea-green farmland. The organophosphates fill the shoots with iridescence, even in the half-light of a dismal December afternoon.

The underpants and a spare ink cartridge are in my knapsack along with the drugs and Kindle

Last night I was in the Fountain in Walsall to road test my new James Bond spectacles. It can get pretty lairy in there, particularly if those two ghastly old pagans are talking utter cock at 150 decibels. I had Q build hearing aids into the arms of my specs for my forthcoming 65^th birthday, and they are terrific, focusing one’s hearing on the immediate conversation and blocking out the fuckwits.

Wish I’d had these audio specs in the days of writing diaries. Amazing to sit and eavesdrop. Until you realise that people in London are no more interesting than anywhere else.

But there are other things you can do with a quick tweak of the App. I was briefly able to eavesdrop on a conversation in the snug while Roy the mechanic was holding forth on how to tap out the glow plugs in an S-type Jag. I switch focus back to Roy as I once had a beautiful S-type. It was a car of grace and power and was supremely comfortable. My erstwhile French family of Ana, Poupoune and Pierre-Marie said they felt regal and we larged it on the Riviera.

But nothing lasts. I’d driven it from Cannes to Walsall to spend Christmas with my mother and brother and was on my way back to France when I drove through a very deep puddle.

“You mean the English Channel?” piped up Tony the Fascist, in his buffed co-respondent shoes, drainpipe jeans and teddy boy mullet. Anyway, some dashboard lights came on – we’re back on the car again – and things gradually went downhill. It was an early warning of a fatal malaise. I limped into Cannes and spent €1,200 at the garage. A surge of life followed by a rapid decline, then two months later I sold it for scrap. Tony downs his pint and sweeps out.

“Shame yow wore in Walsall,” said Roy. “I’d have got it going again. Best to stick with a mechanical car - there ay nothin yow cor do if yow’ve got a spanner.”

Judge Smith was inclined to agree, and delivered an encomium of praise to the public house in general and The Fountain in particular. He pays for a large round of drinks with his Apple watch then confesses to using cash if he needs a medicinal whisky. “With the watch the missus can see what I’m drinking as I drink it and she doesn’t approve of strong liquor. Anyway, there’s nothing you can’t get done by blokes in the pub – cars, extensions, violins, legal advice and ironmongery, to name but a few.” In comes Steve the AI programmer.

My brother is over from America so conversation naturally gets round to Trump. Tom, working in academia, is wisely circumspect as he doesn’t yet have an American passport. But someone has seen a funny clip on social media in which the American comedian John Mulaney likens Trump’s presidency to a horse loose in a hospital. “It’s never happened before,” says Glen, who’s relating the tale in a tone of mock despair. “No one knows what the horse is gonna do next, least of all the horse. He’s never been in a hospital before. He’s as confused as you are.” Despite the absurd image’s closeness to the bone, we giggle. Nervously.

Smith is learning German on his iPhone 16 on an App called Babbel. Like the Apple watch, he bought the iPhone off a carpet salesman in The Fountain’s bar. He’s got extra-large font so he can read it, and is chomping through German grammar like a rat at a potato.

The language’s complex structure is meat and drink to the retired KC, who is a former classics scholar from the local grammar school, where I too read Latin and Greek but with rather less distinction. “I think I might have another medicinal, just in case.”

The train journey over, I am now in the members lounge of the Southbank Centre, on the 6^th floor of the Royal Festival Hall. The Thames is the colour of brown Windsor soup. I am looking across at Shell Mex House and the Savoy. A couple of hundred metres west the newish Hungerford Footbridge looks like the derrick of a collapsed oil rig, far less elegant than its dilapidated and dangerous predecessor designed by Brunel and favoured by suicides.

I once watched a man top himself as I ate an excellent Chinese meal in the Royal Festival Hall canteen. He took a while to jump but when he did he went to the bottom without resurfacing. They usually re-emerge to the east of Blackfriars Bridge, where God’s Banker Roberto Calvi was found hanging 44 years ago.

Blackfriars Bridge was the erstwhile home of the Express Newspapers, where I once had the pleasure of writing the leader articles and Cross-bencher political column in the Sunday Express when the agreeable Lord Stephens ran the show from a respectable distance. Drunk all week on huge expenses at Westminster I’d totter back to the office to scribble up the tattle, than back home to Scotland on the Friday night flight. What could possibly go wrong? That’s for another time.

I am here on a mission: dinner tonight at the Chelsea Arts Club with the estimable cartoonist, comedy sketch-writer and bon vivant, Guy Venables, and tomorrow night a do at the Kazakh Embassy. More to follow once I’ve had some more fun eavesdropping with my new specs…