When I read out that final paragraph to her just now, however, she says:“Early doors yet, as they used to say.”’ Fans of the column – he's described as a cult columnist so there must be some such – will no doubt welcome the chance to reacquaint themselves with past episodes. Newcomers like me may have no idea what to expect.

Jeremy Clarke’s last Spectator column, on “the pros and cons of kissing”, appeared in the magazine’s issue of May 6. August 20, 2005: “Once you’ve been doing it for a while, it’s not easy to stop being a low life. There’s nothing people enjoy more than watching someone going to hell on a poker, and they rather resent it if that person suddenly decides he wants to get off. No one objects in principle to an idle, self-centered, addicted life, as long as it ends prematurely in lonely and squalid circumstances and everyone can read about it in the papers. Renege on the deal, like a footballer in mid-contract, and people feel cheated.” Jeremy, with his fellow columnist, Taki, in 2015 Drugs After his love for Catriona and his family came West Ham United. In his younger days he was an active supporter, relishing the intense fanaticism of a football hooligan. He occasionally referred to the odd punch-up in his column with an almost wistful sense of nostalgia. He remained a loyal supporter to the end, seeking out bars in and around Cotignac to watch the games. Even Jeremy’s great optimistic spirit was becoming severely tested by his aggressive cancer. The French health service was remarkable in its support for him, greatly assisted by Catriona who had been a nurse herself. He was in severe pain and became increasingly restricted in his daily habits. Yet every week he produced a searing, often moving, column. Lesser mortals would have thrown the towel in a long time before Jeremy. His readers followed his demise with a mixture of admiration for his courage and sadness at the impending conclusion. He was greatly touched by the messages of support sent by many. He was especially proud of a librarian from Oxford who revelled in the literary references in his articles. From time to time Clarke slips updates on his condition into Low Life, a weekly diary he writes for The Spectator magazine. These bulletins — witty, erudite, self-effacing, and rigorously unsentimental — are about prostate cancer as a tragicomedy. INVITATION: Readers are invited to a memorial service for Jeremy at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in central London on the morning of Monday, 10 July. Details are yet to be confirmed but anyone who might like to attend can register their interest here.So why am I? Mainly because life can be stressful and sometimes I want to read something light and frivolous and funny. The magic colouring book feel of the cover with its scattered sketches of an isolated house, fag-smoking car crashed into a lamp-post, open bottle and spilled glass of vino suggested this was about as frivolous as it gets. It also promised some humour. If any kind of social commentary is intended, I simply failed to spot it. Or perhaps I'm just on the wrong side of the political divide to appreciate it. Either way, if a point is being searched for, it won't be found among these covers. There are few I know just what you mean moments, and yet nothing obnoxious enough to be offensive. June 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 sidebyside and set fire to them.’ On lower living

In spite of what Gilles says, and the recent drug adjustments, I’m going downhill fast. The numb fingers of my left hand are barely strong enough to unscrew the cap from a tube of toothpaste. And the morphine dose occasionally still fails to mask the pain, which achieves an unsurmised, unimaginable, unsupportable level. It makes one wonder what role in nature that level of pain is supposed to be playing. ‘Treena,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I want to live any more.’ Then I swallow a big short-acting morphine dose and after half an hour the pain subsides slightly, and I have a sip of tea, and I can hear a choir of village children singing over at the school, and a soppy dove almost flies in through the open window, and life has interest once more. My hangover was what the great Kingsley Amis describes in his Everyday Drinkingguide as a ‘metaphysical’ hangover Pamplona October 12, 2019: “Fumbling outside my door in dripping swimming trunks for my room key, I was hailed cheerily by the maid from a doorway further along the corridor. I hadn’t met her, but her greeting was not without a touch of familiarity, if not intimacy, I thought. The latter, I guessed, must be predicated on the fact of her coming into my junior suite when I was out and restoring it to a holiday-brochure photograph, then arranging my tawdry collection of toiletries into little islands on the marble counter. What she made of my penis vacuum pump, I couldn’t guess. I rather think that while she could only speculate as to its function, she probably imagined it to be the latest Western bourgeois ‘must-have’ gadget. This patronizing thought was based on the way she polished the Perspex tube and deified it and the heavy motor unit by arranging them side by side and centrally on a glass shelf lit by four spotlights.July 2021: ‘I sat between Philippe and the detached French woman. She was quite old. She hadn’t yet got over the death of her lover, she told me, even though she’d passed away a decade before. After telling me this she rested her head against my chest as though exhausted by grief. Offered wine, she sprang to life and filled her glass dangerously close to the brim with red. May 2023: ‘When Marketa leaves, Treena supervises the cleaning of my gob. On the bed table she lays out a hand towel, a tooth mug with warm water in it, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste and three paper towels to spit into. She also places upon the table an anti-fungal mouthwash. Mouth fungus, apparently, is an inevitable side result of these cancer treatments. Unfortunately, by kissing her too frequently and too passionately, and vice versa, I have passed mine on to Catriona. But Clarke was not, as he feared, a short walk from the gallows. He learned that new drugs and immunotherapy treatments meant that most men with prostate cancer were alive 10 years after the diagnosis:

Clarke’s cancer had spread to his abdominal lymph nodes. That metastasis required more aggressive treatment than the “active surveillance” American doctors often recommend for early stage prostate cancer. 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.Eight years ago the British journalist Jeremy Clarke learned that he had metastatic prostate cancer. Iain Johnstone, the film critic and documentary maker who told the stories of stars like Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand and John Wayne. November 2013:‘The delusions began; the usual delusions; my ordinary neuroses writ large, I think. An unshakeable conviction, for example, that these confident, consummate actors gathered here in the bar were operating on a higher plane of consciousness than I was, and that they knew something of crucial importance, perhaps about me, that I cannot imagine nor will ever be permitted to know.’ On Mayfair 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.”

If I’m honest with myself,I’ve never completely known or understood what I was doing, or supposed to be doing, every week when writing this column On dancing December 2013:‘I couldn’t believe it: 3 a.m.in the bohemian quarter of the greatest city on earth and you can’t get a reasonably priced drink anywhere? What was I supposed to do next? Go home? Boris! Are you listening! It’s an absolute disgrace!’ On grandsons 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. 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.

For twenty-three years his Low Life column proved that any life, no matter how humble, can be riveting if the writing is good enough. He poured his heart and soul into what he wrote; it read effortlessly but was written with incredible thought and effort. He was able to magnify his own life in a way that makes you reflect upon your own. To say that I was his editor for fourteen years would be to vastly exaggerate my role. I didn’t edit a single word of his: he filed word perfect every week. When I became editor, I actually wondered if he exaggerated his stories. He’d begin by saying: “I woke up on a Leicester Square pavement at 4 a.m.” and you’d think, “No, he couldn’t possibly have done that; he’s using artistic license.” Then you’d meet him and realize: yes, it’s all for real. Hence the unmatched power of his writing. 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. When I read out that final paragraph to her just now, however, she says: ‘Early doors yet, as they used to say.’”