Alan Coren, August 23, 2000

If I shove up the sash of my loft window tonight, for the last time, and I risk my neck with the fraying sashcord, for the last time, by poking my head out, for the last time, to cock, for the last time, an ear to the nocturnal hum of Cricklewood, shall I hear, above that hum, the cheery song of a Cockney ghost? Why not? She is, after all, just a couple of hundred yards away, and tonight is her cue, if any night ever was, for song. True, she has been silent in her grave, in the cemetery at the corner of my road, since 1922, but what of that? I shall hear Marie Lloyd singing, even if nobody else does.

Because she will be telling me not to dilly-dally on the way. And she is right: I shall not dilly-dally long. Just long enough to tell you, who have dallied here with me over the long years, that, an hour or so ago, off went the van with my home packed in it. I, however, did not walk behind with my old cock linnet, I stayed behind with my old cock typewriter, because I wanted this empty house to echo, for the last time, to the skeletal rattle of the old Remington boneshaker which took down my first Cricklewood communiqué, 28 years ago.

I shall not pass this last one to you from there, mind, because a lot has happened in 28 years and newspapers do not take typescript any more; I shall, in a bit, pocket it, and go off to my nice new house, and sit down in my nice new sweatshop, and transcribe it on to a computer which will phone it to The Times.

I am not, if you are reaching for the Kleenex, doing this out of mawkishness; I am doing it because if I just went off and did it on my computer, I could not write about being in Cricklewood, since my computer is in the van, and when it gets out of the van, in an hour or so, it will not be in Cricklewood.

All right, pluck the Kleenex: I cannot fib to you, you know me too well, I am doing this partly out of mawkishness. Anyone leaving the house in which he has spent half his life will be a bit of a mawk. Do you, by the way, know what a mawk is? It is a maggot. At least, it was when Old Norsemen were naming things, but if you were pondering why this word should gradually have turned into what it means now, stop. Especially with Marie up the road, and with me feeling, tonight, a trifle mortal, too, and, furthermore, sensing around me the ghosts – though sceptics among you are welcome to call them memories – of all those who have passed temporarily through this house during those 28 years, and have now passed permanently elsewhere.

If I look down into the garden from this open window, I can see them all on the lawn, drinking, talking, eating, laughing, sniffing the roses, plucking the raspberries, peering in the pond for fish, poking in the shrubbery for cricket balls, all that. It is, of course, pitch-dark down there, so you wouldn't be able to see them, but I can. I can even see me, though it requires something of an effort to recognise him, because it is his first day in the garden: he is slim, he has hair, he has one child on his shoulders and one in his arms; a feat he would find a little tricky now, since, in a trice, both have become a mite more cumbersome.

I can hear the trees in the dark tonight, because there is a breeze. The slim hairy one garlanded with kids could not have heard them, not because there was no breeze, then, but because there were no trees, except for the giant acacia in the middle of the lawn, the focus of my eye-line for 28 years every time that, stumped, I looked up from the keyboard. Could be, what, a million times? Two million? A lot of stumping has gone on, up here.

But all the other trees – the maple, the cedar, the cherry, the chestnut, the beech, the hawthorn, the fig, the crab apple, the eucalyptus, the thuja, the pear, the photinia – came to the garden in little tubs, and most of them are higher than this loft, now, which is why the breeze is having such susurrant fun in them. It is probably having so much fun that some of the leaves are falling, though I cannot see them, because what I can do is sniff autumn on that breeze, not the best of scents for mawkies. We should have sold the house in the spring, it was in our minds, it was on the cards, but the trees looked so good, and the lawn so lush, and the plants so buddie, that we thought, OK house, one last summer.

There is only one song about Cricklewood. The wizards in the BBC archives found it for me a few years back, when I was, as so often, banging on about the place for Radio 4. Its opening couplet runs: “Cricklewood, Cricklewood, you stole my life away/ For I was young and beautiful, but now I’m old and grey.” Not much of a song, perhaps, hardly one for Marie, but it’ll do for me, tonight. It is time to close the typewriter and slip away. Tomorrow to fresh woods and crickles new.”

–– October 7, 2003 I once bought a ventriloquist’s manual from an ad in The Boy’s Own Paper, which guaranteed that within seven days I would be able to throw my voice across a room or my money back. A week later, at the back of the class, I threw my voice into David Collingwood’s mouth, but it couldn’t have arrived, otherwise Mr Fraser wouldn’t have clipped my ear. So I wrote to ask for my money back. That was in 1949. I am still waiting. You can see why I don’t believe everything I read in the newspapers.

–– June 13, 2007 Having bought a G-Wiz car As I Wiz around now, the world loves me. Motorists do not fight me for every last millimetre of territory, every last nanosecond of time, they wave me in, they smile, cyclists do not bang on my roof, they lift their thumbs, they doff their helmets, marathon trainers do not sprint from kerbs to make me swerve, they jog upon the spot to let me pass, pedestrians tug down their smogmasks to gasp a pally cheer, and – best, perhaps, of all – the Bentley driver paused beside me at the lights no longer sneers, the way he used to do; instead, he looks uneasily askance, as his tick-over slides another slab of Greenland in the sea and the stunna in the glove-kid passenger seat tells him she must have one like that right now, dead cool, dead chic, in pink, wiv whitewall wossnames.

Mind you, I can gloat and bask like this for only an hour or so, because that is the way it is with batteries, but as driving hours go, very few ever got this good. Green and pleasant is what this is: I had a lot of fun as Mr Toad, but these days I’d rather be Kermit the Frog.

–– November 4, 2003 No other athletics contest attracts losers the way the marathon does: you will not see spindly men in George Bush masks and sequinned tutus queueing up to put the shot a tad farther, with any luck, than their toe, nor diving-suited crackpots trying to pole-vault a bar challengingly set at three inches . . . But convene a marathon, and anything goes – for the most part slowly, and too often facetiously.

–– December 20, 2006 After eight months away ill Where was I? Oh, right, April, and where I was was here with you, having a laugh, and after that I wasn’t, and yes, you have every right to grumble that you’ve heard nothing since, he doesn’t ring, he doesn’t write, after so many years together would it kill him?

Well, it nearly did. What the “it” was that nearly did it, mind, nobody knows for sure; but on the night of May 3, spotting me in the French moonlight, something bit me as I snored, could have been a gnat, could have been a scorpion, could have been a werewolf, it left no note, merely a breach into which a billion opportunist streptococci plunged and set up a colony called septicaemia. It is an inclement little country, where your flesh falls off, thanks to the national sport: sassy newspapers like this call it necrotising fasciitis, the redtop tabloids prefer flesh-eating disease, but however you slice it, slicing it is what has to be done, and within a couple of hours that is what the surgeons of Hôpital Saint-Roch in Nice were doing.

–– December 26, 2001 Hints on the perfect thank-you letter Dear Uncle Fritz, Thank you very much for the big round thing. I have not worked out how to play it yet because I cannot fit it under my chin and when I put it between my legs it pops out again. I have tried sitting at it, but it rolls away, and when I blow it, it just gets bigger without any notes coming out.

The boy next door says you kick it, but he is a fool, he is nearly six and still can’t play the Toccata and Fugue. Maybe you pluck it. Your devoted nephew, Wolfgang Amadeus

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