Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 10 January 2019

Even our host stripping off failed to get us in the party mood

issue 12 January 2019

We were eight for dinner on New Year’s Eve: four men and four women with a combined age, I would guess, of around 500. A quarter of the company — two of the men — had been officially diagnosed as suffering from one form or another of dementia. We whose brains still neatly fitted the inside of our skulls were instead prey to all the usual anxieties, delusions, depressions and addictions typical of those wealthy, late middle-aged English people who exist in the strange limbo of expatriation. We sat there facing each other across the dinner table on the last day of the year, knackered, it’s true, each drifting aimlessly in a private universe of his or her own devising. Meanwhile, the two chaps diagnosed with dementia were the only ones who could be said to be truly present in the current realities. They were calm centres, wholly admirable in the way they were able to take circumstances at their face value.

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