I have thought of giving out some tips for those of you who aspire to being thrown out of their home and having no fixed abode. Some of this is instinctive: keep your chin up, travel light, don’t stay at your mother’s, that kind of thing. No need to say any of that. But I think I now have something worthwhile to say. Sit down and read the following story.
I had been to the Foundry in Brighton with my great friend S—. I have mentioned the Foundry before. It is a pub lit largely by candles and with basic furnishing and bare brick and tongue-and-groove wooden walls. It is, you could say, literally groovy. I love it. It was enhanced this evening by a wood fire roaring away in the fireplace. (Which is where, after all, you want a wood fire, or indeed any kind of fire. This is not, as you will see, an irrelevant observation.)
The beer, as always, was excellent. The bar staff were attentive, intelligent, amusing, and in both the man’s and the woman’s case, extremely good-looking. So what with one thing and another, S— and I didn’t want to leave. We got chatting to a noisy poet who recited one of his poems, even though it was rather long. He looked like a student but was a landscape gardener. It was that kind of evening.
Eventually, though, I made it back to Crickhollow (Laurie P’s adorable name for her demesne). I had, on the way, picked up some fish and chips, or, strictly speaking, fishcake, battered sausage and chips. Something had happened to the sausage on the way back. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered eating it.
Still full of the joys of the evening, I settled down with a glass of wine to catch up on Star Trek: Discovery. The ennui which had been plaguing me for months seemed to have lifted.
Well, you know how it is. One episode of Star Trek: Discovery turns into two, and before you know it you’ve only got two left, and you’ve promised to watch those with Laurie when she gets back, so you start watching The Day of the Jackal, which is even better than you remember, and then suddenly it’s about three in the morning and you’re hungry all over again, and what you fancy is something like cheese on toast. In fact, what you fancy is exactly cheese on toast.
So you cut some bread and put it in the toaster – the very toaster you bought Laurie last time you were here, because she hadn’t yet bought a toaster, so you bought her one as a flat-warming present, and told her she must address it as “Nick”.
A few seconds later, and I am looking blearily at the flames roaring out of the toaster. They’re not meant to do that, toasters, are they? I turn it off at the mains, dampen a tea-towel and spread it over the top, then lift it off to see whether it has magically doused the flames, and it hasn’t. Eventually they do die down, and I discover that every socket in the flat is now non-operational. I spend the next ten minutes looking for the fuse box. It is not a large flat, and ten minutes’ searching covers it twice. I go to bed with a book.
In the morning, I look again for the fuse box. I go to the shared hall and look inside the big cupboard of Really Scary Fuse Boxes. I prise open the one to Laurie’s flat and look at a whopper of a 60-amp fuse. I’m out of my league. I call the emergency number on the laminated card on the wall. As it is a weekend, the charge for a visit will be £100.
£100! I could have spent that on the greatest debaucheries known to humanity. But I bite the bullet. I have copy to file, and the router is dead.
Hours later, the electrician arrives. He looks barely old enough to drive. He has a look around. After three seconds, he looks up and says, “ah”. I follow his gaze. It is resting on the fuse box – the one with the dinky trip switches – in a corner of the ceiling where one would normally only expect to find cobwebs.
Let us pass over the rest of the visit in silence, except to say that he had arrived in a white convertible Mercedes.
Well, of course. I hand over his cash, weeping a bit.
“I’m in the wrong line of work,” I say.
So here is my advice. Become an electrician.
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This article appears in the 21 Feb 2018 issue of the New Statesman, Sunni vs Shia