In Hove, I am a slob. But East Finchley has made me a gentleman

On the whole, being here has been good for me

I am sitting in my mother’s kitchen late in the evening when I hear the peep of a whistle as a train emerges, half a mile away, from the tunnel just before East Finchley Tube Station. The noise is ancient, unchanged since my childhood; I’m amazed it endures. I find other surprising things from my youth here. A collection of poetry, written by me in the 1980s, which is also amazing in that it isn’t that bad, really. I mean it’s not great but it isn’t complete garbage, either, and that’s something. The other amazing thing that I discovered during my stay in north London is that I am one of those people who smile, rather than frown, when 30 noisy children in school uniform overrun the bus in one swift movement. There wasn’t a single bad vibe in their clamour, as far as I could tell. The ethnic mix was, in my impression, minority white, and they were clearly getting on so well that it was the exact opposite of the forewarning given by Enoch Powell in his “Rivers of Blood” speech. This was a river of noisy happiness. Their blazers were green, but I didn’t get a look at their badges (that would have been creepy), so whichever school lies close to the Highgate Hill bus stop on the 263 route, hats off to you for producing a decent bunch of children, aged about 11, I’d say, who were loud and cheerful in the way children are meant to be.

It hasn’t been all grim here while I look after the cat during my mother’s stay in hospital. She is not as gaga as she was when I wrote about her last week, but she’s still too frail to go home. Today I’m going back to Brighton to get some more clothes and also because I miss Brighton. London is inconvenient and East Finchley an inconvenient part of it. In Brighton, if I want to go to the shops for anything, be it food, tobacco, a USB cable, a second-hand shirt or book, it’s two minutes’ walk away. The sea is a five-minute walk, my friends a ten-minute walk away.

Actually, I do have friends who are two minutes’ walk away from the Whittington Hospital, where I have been a daily visitor: K— and her daughter, the Pint-Sized Polis. (I use the Scottish word for police officer because I am fond of it, and the nickname has stuck.). They form a most engaging couple – the P-S P’s brother, A—, is engaging too, but he’s travelling at the moment. The P-S P is an extremely intelligent young lady but sometimes she betrays her lack of experience. We were putting together a Spotify playlist for K—’s forthcoming birthday party, and the P-S P asked: “How did you make a playlist when all you had were physical records? Did you have to, like, pick them up and put another one on?”

K— and I looked at each other.

“Yes,” I said. “And not only that: to make the records go round you had to wind the player up with a really big key.”

“That’s right,” said K— leaning in to my little ruse, “and at some point during the party you’d always hear someone shouting, ‘Where’s the key?’ It was usually behind the back of the sofa.”

The P-S P swallowed this all, hook, line and sinker. Suddenly I felt very old.

But on the whole, being here has been good for me. I am a slob in the Hove-l but in East Finchley I keep the place tidy and do the washing-up on the same day I dirty the plates. This must be what being a responsible adult is like. I still drink a bit, though, and as the wine is free, paid for from my mother’s funds, I go rather hard at it. I asked my brother to arrange another delivery from the Wine Society and he expressed surprise that I had got through a case so quickly.

“It’s only a bottle and a half a day,” I say. (It’s more.)

“A bottle and a half a day? Well, I suppose you’re not looking too bad on it,” says my brother. Even though he’s five years younger than me, people often assume he’s the elder one. Maybe it’s his beard.

“It’s been like that for, I don’t know, 30 years or something,” but later I remember I started at this level when I was 18, and living alone in Paris, where I developed a taste for some enamel-stripping Vin de Table that cost the equivalent of 40p a litre, and probably still does.

The cat is living the life of Riley. She knows that I am at her beck and call. “Miaow,” she says to me, which is cat for “feed me now”.

“Are you serious?” I say. “I just fed you.”

“That’s as may be,” says the cat, “but you’ve just had a glass of wine and now you’re pouring yourself another one. Come to think of it,” she adds, “you’re going to open another bottle pretty soon, aren’t you? So stop being such a hypocrite and make with the Sheba.”

There’s no gainsaying this logic, and the cat rewards me by hanging out with me and being beautiful, like cats are meant to be. (I can write about the cat this week because my ailurophobic editor is away.)

Meanwhile, the awkward realisation that our mother can’t live alone here any more looms over me and my brother. I might have to live here as a caretaker for a while. But I want to go back home.

[Further reading: The vanity fair of 70 Up]