Battling Id and Ego
Jeremy Clarke
Iknew I would take a drink at the lunch. I hadn’t had one since The Spectator Christmas party and it was now 20 January. Since The Spectator lunch, I’d also given up class-A drugs, smoking and going out with Sharon. I gave up alcohol to help me give up the fags and I stopped going out with Sharon to help me give up the alcohol, fags and class-A drugs, particularly amphetamine sulphate, on which our relationship is founded.
Of course I’d been hoping to give it all up for life. Already I was fitter, calmer, wealthier and squarer across the shoulders. But as I walked along the south bank of the Thames towards Westminster, I was aware that my Id wanted a drink and was holding intense negotiations with my Ego about it. I wasn’t party to the content. No doubt my Id was reminding my Ego of Raymond Chandler’s remark: ‘Giving up alcohol is easy, but what have you got left?’ Then persuasively arguing the case that health, wealth and happiness aren’t necessarily everything. And finishing, probably, by appealing to my Ego’s fragile sense of its own masculinity by stressing the importance of an occasional bout of alcohol abuse in the way of the warrior.
It would have been no contest. In terms of power on the one hand and credulousness on the other, the relationship between my Id and my Ego closely resembles that between the United States and Britain. If my Id wants something badly enough, my Ego will usually acquiesce feebly if it can justify it to the electorate. I got the verdict as I was passing Westminster Abbey. It was all arranged, I understood. For undisclosed reasons pertaining to my welfare, I should not only take a drink at the lunch, but also I should drink to get drunk.
The lunch was in honour of an 18month-old greyhound called Market Trustee. I’m part of a syndicate of businessmen and journalists hoping to enter her for this year’s running of the blue riband of hare coursing, the Waterloo Cup. From The Spectator magazine, Oborne is on board, also Dominic Prince. The dog’s smooth progress through the eliminators is already beginning to have a quietly miraculous feel to it. Lunch was held at the old Westminster Library, now the Cinnamon Club, and our host was Cinnamon Club owner and fellow syndicate member Iqbal Wahhab.
I was an hour early and shown into a comfortable, book-lined room with a small bar in the corner. My first beer for nearly a month, a long glass of ice-cold Cobra lager, was brought to me on a silver tray by a discreet, immaculately dressed, professional barman. Someone once said that the hardest thing about being a barman is trying to work out who is drunk and who is just plain stupid. This one entertained no such snobbisms. While I browsed the bookshelves, he served the drink with the kindly unctuousness of a devout priest dispensing a communion wafer to a repentant backslider. Sipping at the heads of a succession of Cobras, browsing the Cinnamon Club’s bookshelves, and being waited on by this Platonic Form of a barman, I spent one of the pleasantest hours of the year so far.
Then lunch. I was summoned to a room in which syndicate members were standing around necking champagne and getting to know one another. Oborne was there with his flies undone. Dominic Prince was handing out digital images of Market Trustee, a beautiful, smiling, café-au-lait-coloured animal. A man making a film for BBC2 called The Last Waterloo Cup introduced himself and I bummed a roll-up off him my first fag since The Spectator Christmas lunch. All I had to do now was score some speed off someone and start fantasising about Sharon, and I’d be back to where I’d started. Would I do an interview to camera here and now, said the filmmaker? Before I could refuse, he began to rig me up with electronic gadgetry.
Difficulties arose with some of these gadgets. And when we were invited to sit for lunch, these difficulties were as yet unresolved. So I sat down at the table sporting wires and microphones, though the interview was postponed till after lunch. The food looked absolutely delicious, but I didn’t eat any of it because I was enjoying the lager so much. And then I was sick on the marble floor outside the cloakrooms and didn’t feel like eating anyway. Some of the sick also became embedded in the fine mesh of the microphone clipped to my shirt front.
After lunch, we did the interview. The film-maker was sloshed also by then. I could tell he was sloshed because he picked up the camera, clumsily shut one eye and put the camera eyepiece over the eye he’d just closed. I travelled home by Tube still rigged up with wires and microphones, but didn’t become aware of it till the following day when I finally woke up, fully clothed, face down on the bed.
This is what happens when your Ego fails to stand up to your Id in important matters.
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