Remember me
It’s not been the greatest week. It started well enough, with the news that my friend K—, with whom I am collaborating on a book, was going to come down to Brighton for a couple of days. Hurrah!
“Do you think I could crash out at yours?” Not hurrah. Not because I don’t enjoy her company – I enjoy it very much – but because it would mean tidying the Hove-l. I described it a couple of weeks ago and I was not exaggerating. But I didn’t want to turn her down. I thought: maybe this will be the thing that finally gets me to clean this place up. Also, there’d been a vacuum cleaner sitting by the front door for a couple of weeks – a version of the Henry, but smaller, and in black, called a Henrietta I believe, although I might have hallucinated that. Well, Henry or Henrietta, I’d be wiping that smile off their face soon enough. I have a vacuum cleaner, but it is feeble beyond utility; you’d be better off getting someone with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, eg me, to suck the dust up through a straw.
Then I got a call from the debt collection agency. Remember when I said last week that I’d tried to pay some ancient bill to the tune of £350 back but they’d said the account had been closed down? I even double-checked with them. But no, two different people confirmed that I didn’t have to pay a bean. How to explain it? A glitch in the matrix? Some kind soul, perhaps even a fan of this column, realising that £350 was a lot to ask of a Down and Outer, pressing a few keys and making the whole thing go away? Or a miracle? Well, they called me to ask where their beans were. You see? Miracles don’t happen, whatever my friends in holy orders might have to say on the matter.
I explained the situation to the bean-counter, and he was actually very nice about it. “OK, you can pay at the beginning of May,” he said, kicking the can a welcome distance down the road for me. But that still meant I would have a problem eventually. I’ve been working hard lately, but some of the publications I work with (not this one) have been showing a disinclination to pay me. I’m sure it’s all in the works, but when it’s only two-thirds of the way through the month and you have minus £25 in the bank, you kind of wish they’d hurry up. Borrowing money off friends and family is wearying for the soul. (“Ask us how we can help,” says the NatWest app on my phone as it has noticed that I have less than no funds. “Well, you could increase my fucking overdraft limit for a start,” I said to myself. This has remained at the same figure for, ooh, how long now, 20 years? I asked a couple of years ago and the computer said no, even though – you might find this less hard than NatWest to believe – the cost of living has changed somewhat since 2006.
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Anyway, this all put me in a bad mood, which has not been helped by the fact that I have still don’t have a working fridge, and the scaffolding outside my living room window now seems to be a permanent fixture. I look out through a forest of pipes and planks, and am reminded of the story about the zoologists who taught a chimpanzee how to draw, and the first thing it drew was the bars of its own cage.
Back to my co-author. The low spirits caused by all the above made me strongly disinclined to get out of bed. I began to despair of tidying up the Hove-l at all. I told K— this. “I’m very tolerant,” she said. I took photographs of the bedroom and living room floors. The silence that followed was like a non-verbal expression of the word “ah”. Or perhaps “oh”.
Then the vacuum cleaner disappeared. Back to its proper home, perhaps, or to that place where good vacuum cleaners go when they die. It might well have been dead. I asked my neighbour about it when it was still all present and correct, and he said it might have been left by the electrician, and the electrician might have done that because it had gone phut. (Speaking of which, my laptop went phut yesterday but luckily the Dodgy Laptop Shop down the road was able to make it work once more, but that’s another £50 I won’t see again.)
The matter resolved itself in the end: my eldest son was having a birthday party at the family home on one of the nights K— was due to stay, and Lezard family occasions are not the soberest, and tend to go on till late, and there was no way I was going to go back to Brighton that same night. So I told K— and she decided that it would probably be best if she didn’t come to Brighton but we would meet in London. As I write, the children are drawing straws as to who will be putting me up. The owner of the family sofa, which is usually where I stay on occasions like this, has been strangely silent.
Now by this stage I bet you are all fizzing with impatience about this book I’m co-writing. “What’s it about?” goes the cry from Inverness to Penzance. Well, I’m not telling you. And I’ve got another book on the go too, and I’m not telling you what that’s about either.
[Further reading: Let children into restaurants]
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This article appears in the 29 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The cover-up?