The joy of Spectator readers’ letters

Sometimes, when the weather is fine, Treena calls up the stairs: “Why don’t you sit out on the terrace and get a bit of sun?” Our little terrace faces nearly due south over the village pantiles and a succession of forested ridges as far as the littoral mountain range. It’s a sheltered, sunny spot with a great view. First-time visitors gasp and reel and whip out their phones when they go out through the kitchen door and clap eyes on it.

But before I came here to France I lived on the south Devon coast and I’m an acute and severe critic of views. One might say that, lacking a winding river or a glittering seascape, it’s a bit monotonous. I give it an eight out of ten.

Anyhow I’m now too sapped to be much interested in creation or long views of it, preferring introspection or the printed page, and I would rather lie propped up on pillows than sit outside on a folding chair. This bedroom has become my world, with its two square windows flung open in daytime to the high air and birds soaring at eye level. I’ve everything I need to hand on the bedside table: my pharmacopoeia, reading light, chargers; my little sentimental row of treasured old books, some from childhood; a tea caddy for useful small objects such as pencils and scissors; and my solid brass pill pot. Mine is now a torpid, interior world; it’s cerement cotton pajamas and fluffy socks. So I decline Catriona’s healthful invitation and stay put.

I’ve recently finished a bout of palliative radiotherapy and now I’m starting on another round of chemotherapy, also palliative. Dr. Deville the oncologist is doing his level best to keep his English patient afloat and I go down to Marseille for an infusion once every three weeks. I’ll keep my hair this time, he promises. But while this new chemical might be all right for the barnet, it feels doubly poisonous for the body and soul. After the first lot, I felt far from exhilarated for about a week. Sunbathe? I could barely raise the energy to keep breathing.

Then I improved. I found myself up to small tasks such as cleaning out the wood burner and laying a fire in the mornings. For firelighters I used the commemorative English newspaper editions of the Queen’s life and funeral, kept in half-hearted memoriam since the summer. Page after page of huge photographs of Her Majesty aged from three months until three days before she died. That confident, delighted, radiant smile folded longways, then sideways and laid between a couple of small, dry logs and covered with kindling. It seems somehow sacrilegious. And final. Our unimpeachable Queen is gone. The dogs of hell — if you’ll excuse my language — are in full cry and streaming in for the kill. And here I am making origami firelighters out of newspaper photographs of her.

Once I even went outside and picked up the ax and set about reducing in size the largest logs from our annual delivery. I’ve always been handy with an axe. Splitting a pile of logs and stacking them tightly has a similar psychological effect as going out and getting deliberately falling-down drunk — it “defecates the standing pool of thought.” However, a couple of knotty ones that nearly gave me a heart attack forced me to admit that even this simple pleasure now belongs in the past.

My new physical activity limit is to wobble down the path as far as the letterbox to see if there is any mail. Once in a while there’s a packet of readers’ letters, accumulated and forwarded by The Spectator office in London; wonderful letters — intelligent, witty, generous, kind-hearted letters, from all over the English-speaking world from people who have been reading The Spectator for a generation, many of them praising the Low Life column as being well-written.

Of course it’s a pleasant surprise to receive praise for any large or small accomplishment. But 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. I don’t have much of a grasp of English grammar for a start. Therefore I’ve always been careful not to take too much pleasure in praise; to accept it only as a courtesy of the heart, rather than its exact and fatal opposite, a vanity of the mind. But after reading three or four emails and letters a day for a month from strangers all over the world telling me how much they’ve enjoyed reading this column over the years, my head is now so pleasantly swollen I couldn’t get through the kitchen door and out on to the terrace even if I wanted to. (Thanks to all!)

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2023 World edition.