Jeremy Clarke: Laughing in the face of death – a story of the final years

With his sharp wit, Jeremy Clarke was the natural heir to Jeffrey Bernard’s brilliant ‘Low Life’ Spectator column, and when he was diagnosed with cancer, he used it to chronicle his experiences until his death a year ago. Today, those columns have been collected in a book extracted here…

Clarke, a revered writer, chronicled his battle with the disease in painstaking detail (Supplied)

But you look so well!” How many times have I heard that lately. Kindly meant by most, but for a few, it’s outrageous, after all, they have heard or read about my health, and they feel cheated of the mushrooms growing out of the side of my head that they’d been hoping for. Either way, I’m surprised by the compliment. Yes, the tan and this expensive shaving balm Catriona bought me, and now hair again, make me appear unravaged from the neck up.

“But you should see the rest of it,” I laugh gaily, detailing the bulge in my neck where the chemotherapy tube remains in place; the young Brigitte Bardot breasts; the scarred, punctured jelly belly; the spindle shanks; the lizard-skin calves; the knobbly feet; the black toenails oozing some sort of clear liquid that I don’t enquire about.

“But you do look fabulous,” they insist. And vanity whispers: “Perhaps it’s true!” Maybe some sort of psychic flaring is making me attractive to those with an eye for that sort of thing.