I left the door of my apartment open and returned to my seat but after five

I left the door of my apartment open and returned to my seat, but after five minutes Pratley hadn’t appeared. When she was going to withdraw my supply for a while, she’d say: “I’m off to the Seychelles with my fat American. I’ll phone you from there.”I cancelled everything and stared at the telephone, defying it not to ring She never called, but Pratley did This was Pratley’s chance. When you’re waiting for your dealer to call, you do not want to pick the phone up to a wheedling yet defiant voice saying “Long time no speak!” How’s the battle in this vale of tears?”All the odder, then, that I left if off on Saturday, thus allowing Pratley to get straight through to me just as I was settling down to watch the rugger – a game which, since I wanted to follow up my point last week about the England selectors’ pig-headed refusal to pick both our most talented players (the little lad Catt and the little lad Hull), I was keen to see.Further, I had intended to ex-pand the point into a general argument against our sports administrators, who, unlike those of other countries (before scoring his first hundred in a test match, Brian Lara’s only experience of the game had been beach cricket with his sister, bowling at him with an orange; Pele’s, before his first World Cup, a backyard kick-about with his mother and a grapefruit), fail to encourage youth.Jolly Jack Rowell, I would have said, seems, in his refusal to play the little lad Hull at full-back (allowing the little lad Catt to replace the fat, selfish and rapidly slowing Guscott in the centre), to be hell-bent on following the example of his cricketing counterparts, the upshot of whose arthritic deliberations down the years is that the English team is now bloated with squeaky-voiced seniors who, when they bend over in the slips, might be mistaken for the European butter mountain.Pratley took care of that, ringing me half an hour before the kick-off and, which seemed odd (Pratley recently moved to Shropshire, where he has taken up archery and, for therapeutic reasons, spends time spreading concrete), alerting me to his imminent arrival on my doorstep.”I thought you lived in Shropshire,” I said.”And so I do,” he said, “but I have taken a room in Putney, where I practise as a nutritional therapist.”He rang my front-door bell 10 minutes into the game, thus causing me, while I went to press the intercom, to miss Carling’s try. It was at the height of my addiction, a time when, twice a week or so, and fortified by a water-pipe and a Bunsen burner, I and my dealer (otherwise my baby, supplying me, as it were, with an imitation woman) would, amusingly – we supposed – satirise reality.It was entirely inauthentic, what we did, quite unreal and therefore imperishable, I thought – continuing, like any performance, to live on as a fiction in World 2, (or is it World 3?) Then one day, my dealer invented an exciting new game. It was the nearest I have ever come to social work, but I always felt better afterwards, just as my mother must have felt after visiting a retainer in a home – a nanny or parlour maid.It was due to this Pratley, in fact, that I adopted the habit of having my calls fielded by an answering machine. Pratley, you may remember, is everyone I’ve been trying to shake off for 20 years, embittered men of my own age who ring at the wrong time, whose telephone manner is wheedling yet defiant, who start with a joke or a funny voice, sometimes a Goon impression.
This particular Pratley was a colleague of mine in the Seventies – a friend almost – and, judging that it would be nice for him to see me, I consented, until recently, to have dinner with him occasionally – giving him an hour of my time and, to make it clear that I was in a hurry, insisting we ate in a pizza bar.

Pratley’s back in my life. On Saturday, just as I was settling down to watch the England vs Ireland game on television, he rang to ask me whether, since his own set was on the blink, he could watch the match on mine. The evidence suggests that it will best be done with honesty and realism, not hot air and rhetoric.. More interestingly, they dine a la carte politically, backing ideas from either left or right: a minimum wage for low-paid workers from the left, workfare for those claiming unemployment benefit from the libertarian right, for example.Appealing to Generation Y will be a challenge to politicians and opinion formers over the next few years. Having grown up in the full shadow of Aids, it is hardly surprising that they are well-informed and unromantic about sex.As one would expect, they share in the general contempt for party politics and the antics of parliament Nor are they tempted by great crusades or ideologies.

Their pragmatism finds expression in their support for campaigns that tend to be local and causes that are winnable. Drugs are so widely used, despite their illegality, that there is no more need for a drug culture than there is for an alcohol culture. In fact, a drug is subjected to a simple and practical test – are the dangers outweighed by the pleasures? This consumer psychology has important implications for future drugs policy.They are also the inheritors of the gender revolution. The label of feminism may not be popular, but in their thinking this generation has come closer than any other to accepting its tenets Girls don’t demand to be treated as equals – they expect it.