27 November 2024

The only things still in good repair in my life are my friendships

But everything else is falling to bits.

Photo by Jonathan Stead/Millennium Images

Three layers on the body, two on the duvet, and underneath it I can still tell it’s cold out there. The windows stream with condensation. The steel watch bracelet feels like ice. At 11, I crack and put the heating on, bugger the expense, then back to bed, like Oblomov. My friend A— came down from Scotland for a visit and brought the weather down with him from Grangemouth; it seems to like it here. He was visiting friends in London but he made time to come to Brighton, which was very decent of him.

We went to the Prince Albert, which he loved, particularly the Titanic Plum Porter, which he lamented would be unavailable in Scotland. (We went on a little Flann O’Brien riff – “A pint of plain is your only man”, and such like.) But being Scottish, he needed whisky after a while and asked if the Albert had a good gantry. I had never heard the term before but from the context I guessed it was a term for “selection of Scotches” and I was right. The Albert has a fine selection of ales but its whiskies are barely fit for purpose. So it was off to the Hole in the Wall, ten minutes away in the rain, which has both excellent beer and lots of delicious (if expensive) drops of the hard stuff.

A— used to be able to put two bottles away in a day but then it all went wrong and he is much more restrained now. Relatively, that is. We were mildly steaming when we went into the Hole in the Wall and when he saw the Bunnahabhain 12-year-old, his eyes lit up like a child’s on Christmas morning. Then there followed an unseemly struggle as to who was going to buy the round. Contrary to each of our stereotypes, each of us was insisting on paying. In the end we settled on having two rounds of doubles and now we have no more money.

That was on the Monday. Tuesday was a write-off for some reason but more or less normal service has been resumed. I wondered if A— had been the most far-flung of my friends to visit me, but then I remembered K—, who said she was going to be coming to London from Perth with her boyfriend. That’s Perth, Australia, not Perth, Scotland. She turned up alone and I asked where her boyfriend was and she said, “Oh, I was lying about that,” and then she dragged me off to bed. One does not argue with an Australian woman whose mind is set on something. I suppose they have this in common with the Scots. But that was 17 long years ago. K— is now a wife, a mother, and also, rather more importantly, a very good and successful author. We’re still in touch and she calls me “Nikolai” which no one else is allowed to.

I am glad that I keep my friendships in good repair because everything else is falling to bits. A few months ago one of the screws holding the plate that fixes the handle to the kitchen door fell out. It was a tiny screw and I couldn’t find it on the floor anywhere. This wasn’t so much of a big deal; all that happened was that the handle hung on at a distressing angle, like a limb that had been broken, but it was nothing that couldn’t be lived with. Then a few weeks ago the other screw, which had been having to do twice the work it was designed for, also disappeared. This means that getting into the kitchen involves a procedural complexity that I suspect you don’t have to put up with when you want to make yourself a cup of tea, and which I certainly didn’t have on my Bingo card of life for my seventh decade. You can’t leave the handle in the kitchen because, when you shut the door on leaving, it becomes even harder to enter again. You have to involve the screwdriver attachment to the Swiss Army knife or, on one occasion, when that was locked inside as well, my Vision Express glasses case.

Other people do not live like this. Sometimes I see how they live and I wonder where and how I went wrong. The other day, on a social media platform, a friend posted a photo of an extremely beautiful long-case clock that he had bought for a non-trivial amount of money. It has contemporary sailing scenes painted above the dial. Frigates from the Napoleonic Wars, if I am not mistaken. For some reason this unmanned me utterly. The idea of possessing such a thing is, for me, beyond fantasy. Other people are posting photos of their snowy gardens which, of course, makes them look even more desirable. Everywhere I see wood panelling, comfy sofas, and tasteful artworks. I have to remind myself that I am grateful I have a roof over my head and I am not in the kind of fix other, less fortunate friends are. One is sharing a house with two crackheads, “a Cuban refugee and a very odd guy who has conversations with the furniture”. Another one is in a hostel surrounded by heroin addicts. As a recovering addict herself, she finds this very vexing.

So I count my blessings. I have my health, or something close enough, touch wood. There are aches and pains but they come and go as the mood pleases them. I’m hanging on. The secret, I am beginning to think, is to stay in bed. Oblomov had the right idea.