Low life | 4 June 2015

The entries are crawling in on their hands and knees for the ‘drunkest I’ve ever been’ competition to win a place at the launch party for the Low life column collection. Gawd. Reading your accounts makes me feel as sober and upright by comparison as a sidesman in the Dutch Reformed Church, and that I have the Low life position on this magazine under false pretences. What we do have in common however, I think, is that we are terrible lightweights who can’t take drink like others can. For me, a single pint of strongish lager is a shape changer. Pass me a second and I couldn’t give two figs about the future. Three and I’m Gussie Fink-Nottle giving out the prizes or Augustus Carp after several glasses of Portugalade.

Or Evelyn Waugh on his first night out in Athens: we went straight to a nightclub kept by a one-legged Maltese who gave us cocktails made out of odd drugs and a spirit of his own distilling. Later the première danseuse of the cabaret came out and warned us on no account to touch the cocktails. Later still, I drove around the city in a taxi cab on I forget what errand, and then back to the nighclub. The taxi driver followed me back to our table. I had given him as a tip over ten pounds in drachma, my watch, my gloves and my spectacle case. It was too much, he protested. The rest of my visit was rather overshadowed by this introduction to Athenian life.

Or my wonderful friend the late Miss Freda Busby. During the first world war, two soldiers — brothers — were billeted at her family home in High Wycombe. Freda fell in love with one, her sister Olive with the other. The soldiers duly went to France and the sisters corresponded with them until they were duly killed within days of one another.