Sober reflection
Jeremy Clarke
An extraordinary email from theatre critic Mr Lloyd Evans arrived in my inbox last week. He’d written a play, it said, a two-hander, and one of the characters was based on me. He’d based the character on me after we’d met at a Spectator Christmas lunch five years ago. The play was opening at the King’s Head in Islington on Tuesday. If, after seeing his dramatic representation of me, I was minded to sue, it went on, perhaps we could come to an arrangement that benefited plaintiff and defendant at the expense of the lawyers. Meanwhile, would I like a ticket?
I don’t know Lloyd well. At The Spectator, the more sociable contributors turn up twice a year for the Christmas lunch and summer party where we are power-hosed down with champagne for a couple of hours then turned out into the street. So we all only see each another briefly and when drunk.
I remembered the Christmas lunch Lloyd was referring to, though. It was my first. It took place on a restored Thames sailing barge moored in St Katherine’s Dock. I think it must have been a full moon. The noise level grew steadily from pleasant chatter to a sustained crescendo of confused roaring, punctuated by the sound of breaking glass. In the pub afterwards I saw the unlikeliest couples snogging as if their lives depended on it. Because he had a beard, I got it into my head that Lloyd was the sports correspondent Simon Barnes, and it was only much later, after several out-of-focus, bi-annual conversations about football, that I discovered he was the poetry editor, as he was then.
I’d last seen Lloyd just three weeks ago, but only very briefly, at The Spectator’s 180th birthday party. As I was coming in, he was being thrown out, escorted by a phalanx of serious-faced security men, for ‘falling against something big and expensive’, one of them later told me. I had a guess. ‘Was it Michael Heseltine?’ I said. To Lloyd’s email I replied enthusiastically that I’d take a ticket for the opening night.
The play started at 7.30. I arrived at 5.30, perched at the bar and read the programme. Grand Slam, I read, is about English tennishope Madelaine Rochester’s relationship with Cedric, her stand-in minder, during her unexpected winning streak at Wimbledon. The main events of the play are set in the house Madelaine has rented for the duration of the tournament. I made the tentative assumption that it was the character of Cedric that was based on me, and not that of Madelaine, and turned my attention to the far more important subject of what I was going to have to drink.
I’d returned the night before from a ‘Style and Travel’ trip to St Moritz, where I’d been plied with fine wines all weekend and I simply couldn’t face my usual pint of Nelson Mandela. I scanned the optics for an alternative and studied the ‘specials’ blackboard on the wall. Because of the tennis theme of the play, and it being Wimbledon fortnight, the King’s Head is offering Pimm’s No.1 cup at £4.50 per glass, or £12 a jug.
I’d never tasted Pimm’s before, but I’d heard the stories. Pimm’s tastes so innocuous, I’d heard, that you can fling it back all afternoon feeling quite normal, then suddenly you feel like the Grand High Satsuma of the Temple of Inner Loveliness and a police constable is cautioning you for lewd behaviour with a cygnet. In other words, just the job.
I ordered a jug and watched the barmaid make it. She squirted six shots of Pimm’s No. 1 cup into a jug, tossed in chopped strawberry, orange, apple, cucumber, topped it up with lemonade and ice and garnished the whole with a sprig of mint. I drank three jugs in the hour before Lloyd and his friends arrived. Then I bought one to share, and he bought one, and then we had to go in, and I bought one to take with me into the auditorium. I bought another jug during the interval, which we drank on the pavement. And it wasn’t until after the play, after two more jugs, and we were back outside on the pavement, and I was boasting to Sam Spruell, who plays Cedric, that his character was based on me, that I began to suspect I was more or less completely sober.
‘Excuse me, Cedric,’ I said. I went back inside the pub and ordered two pints of Nelson and fired them down. The immediacy with which the peculiar recklessness — I’ve heard it called the Nelson touch — overcame me suggested that more or less completely sober was exactly what I’d been for the last four hours. It was one of the worst things that has ever happened to me. Still, I counted myself fortunate that I’d made the diagnosis with enough time remaining to come from behind.
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