My joints were aching suddenly and unaccountably — fingers, wrists, elbows, knees, toes — so I cried off the dinner invitation, volunteering instead to pick up Catriona and her lovely daughter, who was staying for a week, at around 11 p.m. At ten, Catriona rang. Had I forgotten? She sounded a bit squiffy. No, I hadn’t forgotten, I said. We’d said 11, hadn’t we? Well, they were ready to be picked up now, she said. When I arrived, the front door was open and I let myself in. The four of them were still seated at the dining table, chatting and drinking over the remains of the meal. I accepted a gin-and-tonic from the host, Andre, and pulled up a chair.
‘So how did you spend your evening?’ Catriona said.
I gave them chapter and verse. I lit the fire, I said, and made myself a meal of sausages, oven chips and a tin of marrowfat peas. Then I had a bath, a tepid bath, as the hot water was used up, and I was dismayed at how difficult it was to raise myself up out of the tub. Then I listened to the Moral Maze on Radio Four on the subject of grammar schools. An education adviser to Tony Blair, I reported, had said that one of the purposes of children’s education, in his view, was to inculcate a belief in ‘diversity’. (Here I maintained a straight face, but in my secret soul I thought it incredible.) In support of a line of inquiry, one of the Moral Maze questioners had cited a controversial study of human intelligence, The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray, in which it is stated that 50 per cent of any given population is of below average intelligence.
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