Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 4 June 2011

On the morning of the day that the Elect were scheduled to be whisked up into Heaven in what is known by Christians as the Rapture, I was standing outside a neighbour’s front door holding a piping hot baked potato in each hand.

issue 04 June 2011

On the morning of the day that the Elect were scheduled to be whisked up into Heaven in what is known by Christians as the Rapture, I was standing outside a neighbour’s front door holding a piping hot baked potato in each hand.

On the morning of the day that the Elect were scheduled to be whisked up into Heaven in what is known by Christians as the Rapture, I was standing outside a neighbour’s front door holding a piping hot baked potato in each hand. This neighbour is a tiny woman in her mid-nineties who ought to be in a nursing home, but she’s one of those intransigent souls who would rather die. She lives entirely on bread, butter, eggs and potatoes.

Hers is a clear-glass front door and I watched with mounting impatience her pitifully slow and tremulous approach behind a walking frame. She was coming on at the rate of about a yard a minute.

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