Gone to pot
Jeremy Clarke
Tast Wednesday morning I was sitting on the living-room floor of a very small flat in Torquay studying my toes. Our yoga teacher says we should love our toes. Too many people pay too little attention to their toes, she says. At the end of each yoga session we make amends for our neglect by caressing our toes and thanking them for all the hard work they put in. I don't mind thanking my toes, but I can't love toes as hideously crooked as mine are. Nevertheless I looked down at my toes last Wednesday morning and tried to think well of them.
'Has that accident been reported?' said the cynical commentator inside my head that always strikes up whenever I smoke pot. I don't know who this commentator is. But his commentary is designed to demolish me as a man, as a father and as a human being. I'm a hopeless fake, apparently. A fake and a liar and a cheat. And if, in my defence, I draw his attention to any noble actions or genuine thoughts I might have had, he points unerringly and convincingly to the underlying base motive.
The subtlety of his perception wins me over. I remain convinced of his thesis as I am incapable of a single authentic thought or action long after the cannabis has worn off. For this reason I normally shy away from the proffered joint like a spooked horse. Hashish, to me, is the most debilitating drug of the lot. When I trained to be a mental nurse we saw far more acute psychotic breakdowns as a result of smoking cannabis than we did from, say, glue-sniffing.
But we'd stayed up all night drinking wine and sniffing amphetamines and cocaine and I imagined I was invincible. I'd fatally accepted the proffered joint because I thought it might make me sleep. It didn't. And here was that cynical cannabis commentator on the airwaves again, making the most of his opportunity to trash any small gains in self-respect I'd made since the last time he held court.
It was a lovely day outside. The sunshine filtering through the drawn curtains was hot. The party had broken up around dawn. There were three of us left in the flat: me, our hostess and whoever it was I could hear making strenuous love to her in the bedroom. I wanted to be out and about enjoying what was probably the last hot day of the year. But the subtle and perceptive analysis of a fraudulent wasted life was transfixing.
The commentator and I studied my toes. 'Pity you weren't born a generation earlier,' observed my commentator. 'Mr Churchill could have threatened Hitler with them.' I lay down on the floor of the tiny sitting-room and closed my eyes. Sleep wouldn't come. The wall-shaking activity in the bedroom seemed far from reaching a resolution, and the lozenge of sunlight let in by the curtains moved on to my hair and made my head hot.
I sprang up and thumbed the television switch. It was one of those reality programmes. A man with an arm in plaster was consulting either a doctor or a vet — I'm not sure which. The man was a cheerful, balding man in a mackintosh and unflattering glasses. He'd been out with his dog, and although his dog was on a leash, another dog, also on a leash, had savagely attacked it. In trying to separate them, he'd sustained a laceration to his arm requiring 47 stitches.
And was he insisting on the other dog being destroyed? He was not. 'It were just one of them things,' he said. But clearly it was more than that. The drama of a dog fight and the visit to casualty to have his arm sewn up had brightened up a dull week, even a dull life. Also, he and the lady owner of the other dog had become friends. And to top it all here he was being interviewed on telly. He bounced his plaster cast negligently on the table to show of what little account 47 stitches are when you've been a hero and made a friend at the same time. 'There,' said the commentator inside my head, 'is a man. A more genuine, unselfconscious, unassuming, authentic man than you can ever hope to he.' This was the stark truth. I was too paralysed by paranoid doubt even to venture out of doors on a sunny autumn morning, let alone to intervene decisively in a dog fight.
The commotion in the bedroom reached a crescendo and subsided. A few moments later our hostess appeared in the sittingroom wearing a towel. 'What's this?' she said, peering at the screen. It's a man,' I said. 'He's made a friend. What do you think of my toes?'
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