When Jeffrey Bernard wrote the Low Life column in The Spectator, it was memorably described as ‘a suicide note in weekly instalments’. His successor in the role, the late Jeremy Clarke, chose similar weapons of self-destruction: barely a page of this book, a collection of columns written between 2013 and 2023, goes by without him tucking into a gin and tonic, a cigarette, a vape or a Viagra, sometimes seemingly at once. Given that he has been diagnosed with cancer before the book even opens, the reader is left in no doubt as to how things are going to end: badly.

Clarke came quite late to a career in writing, having bounced around from one dead-end calling to another, doing stints as a binman, a football hooligan, a factory worker and a psychiatric nurse. His colourful apprenticeships provide fodder for some of the columns collected here, which have titles such as ‘Night in a Cell’, ‘Trev’s Fight’ and ‘Beware Super-Skunk’. None of these barfly anecdotes are boorish or mock heroic; they don’t even present Clarke as particularly hedonistic. Misbehaviour seems to have come as naturally to him as breathing.

Although the columns were written as stand-alone pieces, when read together they gradually cohere into a touching love story. The twin objects of his affection are his girlfriend, Catriona, who marries him on his deathbed, and the village in Provence where they live, their house partly cut into the mountainside.