On 26 June there is a party at the Spectator office at 22 Old Queen Street to launch a paperback collection of Low life columns. If you would like to come, please send an account, in about 800 words, to editor@spectator.co.uk by 15 June of your worst or funniest debacle when intoxicated. If more than 12 readers send a story, then the senders of the 12 best stories will be invited. The following, for example, is an account of what happened to me only last week.
At the literary festival bar I ran into a writer I’d met a couple of times at parties. He was perched at the bar and waved me over, asked me what was I having, and appeared so pleased to see me that I felt sorry for him. I asked him whether he was speaking. He was, he said, and signified his despair with a gesture of prayerful Christian penitence. Then a crowd of his friends all turned up at once to pay court and laugh at his misery. When the bell clanged for ‘time, gentlemen, please’, I went over to bid him goodnight. He said, ‘Come and have a nightcap back at the hotel, why don’t you?’
The tiny bar at his hotel was closed. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Come up to the room.’ So we went up to his bower of chintz with a balcony. ‘I’ve got some weed,’ he said, handing me a clear, resealable plastic bag with what looked like a prodigiously large and evil-looking grown-under-lights yellowy-green cannabis bud inside. ‘Skin one up, Low life, and I’ll get us a drink.’ He poured two monster brandies, put King Curtis on his crappy little portable CD player, and when I’d made the joint, we carried it and our drinks out on the balcony and I set fire to the end.
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