April 2014: ‘The young amateur boxers dash over to their father — their favourite punchbag — climb up on to his chair, and administer a damn good leathering. Their father cowers weakly in his chair as the blows rain down.“Good day at the office?”I ask him. He looks out at me between the blows and I get another one of those desperate looks.’ On Pamplona April 2020:‘She reached down and slid open the bottom drawer of her desk, showing about 100 vodka miniatures. I nodded complicity. She emptied four into two plastic water cups. “Have you got anything to go withit?” I said, which wasn’t very Low Life-like of me. She reached down and pulled out the lower drawer of her neighbour’s desk and rummaged in it, emerging eventually with a medicine bottle of kaolin and morphine.’ Communists and fascists This morning I woke early paralysed with worse pain than ever and I said to Catriona that we couldn’t go on like this. So she trotted down early to discuss my future with Dr Biscarat. My future is this. I will be cared for at home until I die. France will supply nurses capable of hospital-level care. If the pain continues to overcome the oral morphine, I will be fitted with this fabled morphine ‘syringe driver’, which can be turned up to 11 and put an end to it whenever I like. Splendid. My hangover was what the great Kingsley Amis describes in his Everyday Drinkingguide as a ‘metaphysical’ hangover Pamplona

Jeremy became a friend of mine soon after he had established himself as essential weekly reading. For over fifteen years he would join a party of “rogues and funsters” for the annual Racing Festival at Cheltenham in March. It was an eclectic group who somehow managed to gel over a three, then four, day festival of drinking, gambling, storytelling and, of course, enjoying the racing too. I might have also suspected that that tagline promised a degree of acerbic social commentary. I might have been wrong about that last bit. But, meanwhile, he was diagnosed in 2013 with prostate cancer and introduced to “the Elizabethan drama of the oncologist’s consulting room – always a door opening and someone coming in bearing grave news”. The habitual joie de vivre of Low Life was thereafter tempered by frequent medical bulletins, sometimes signalling remission, more often something worse ahead. Jeremy Clarke, who chronicled his experiences of living a “low life” in the Spectator magazine for more than 20 years. We have a tribute from Eric Idle. As one of our readers put it at a recent Spectator event, the end of life is a phase that awaits us all – but Jeremy had a handle on it. And that we can all live better, savour life better, because Jeremy lived. That’s how I’ll always remember him.June 4, 2022: ‘I’ve often wondered whether Her Majesty the Queen glances through The Spectator from time to time. And if she does, I wonder whether her kindly eye lights on this column. And if it does, I wonder what she thinks of what she reads there. June 18, 2005: “My friends told me that halfway through the ball they’d gone to look for me and found me unconscious outside, flat on my face on the lawn, next to the naked girl. Someone had taken off my shoes, arranged them neatly side-by-side and set fire to them.” Lower living July 30, 2022: “And I think: is this how it ends? Lying in bed watching TikTok videos? At the weekend I had planned a retreat in a nunnery. Three days of silent prayer and contemplation. But two of the nuns have caught Covid and the technical nun thought it best that we postponed. And at the weekend the tumor pain in my armpit, shoulder and shoulder blade intensified alarmingly. For the first time, the usual dose of the usual painkillers didn’t touch it. An escalation. I have always imagined that when it was time for me to die I would make a serious effort to prepare myself. And now that the warning light is flashing, what do I do? I tap the TikTok app and there’s Bernard Manning saying, ‘A man walks into a pub with a crocodile under his arm.’ Shoot me.” Spectator readers

And the new, improved penis vacuum pump (combined with a tolerant partner — ‘Hold on a minute, love…’) means sex is no longer totally out of the question.” Iain Johnstone, the film critic and documentary maker who told the stories of stars like Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand and John Wayne.

Broadcasts

April 19, 2014: “The young amateur boxers dash over to their father — their favorite punchbag — climb up on to his chair, and administer a damn good leathering. Their father cowers weakly in his chair as the blows rain down. ‘Good day at the office?’ I ask him. He looks out at me between the blows and I get another one of those desperate looks.”