Senior moments of mirth

Love Under Lockdown

IT’S REFRESHING – a tonic in fact – to read about older people fully realised as funny, complex, entertaining and even sexy individuals. And author Michael Estorick has a firm handle on the absurdity – and the potential – of age.

Two old, and best, friends, Bill and Pete, meet — in Bill’s recently flooded wine cellar — on the eve of the 2016 Referendum. The flavour of their pendulously intimate relationship can be gleaned from the following exchange:

“I didn’t know you were into photography,” Pete comments at one point.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” Estorick has Bill replying, and adds — “‘Not that much,’ Pete thought, but said nothing. ”

Both men are retired. Bill from advertising and Pete forced out “by a new art-school principal keen to give jobs to his mates.” Bill’s wife Carol died three years ago. Ivan, Bill’s son (and Pete’s godson), a disillusioned youth with a grand sense of entitlement and an even larger burden of grievance, makes up the threesome, in which the clamorous conflicts are all too authentic.

Bill rants entertainingly about the state of the nation and Pete fields his monstrous certainties with a cool detachment. He also listens patiently to the furious resentment of young Ivan, whom Bill is about to kick out of the house, along with his hippy girlfriend.

“Mel and me, we’re, like, just friends OK?” Ivan humphs.

“Sorry to hear that,” his father replies as Ivan retorts:

“And stop salivating , it’s disgusting at your age.”

“I was trying to read her tattoo.” “Sure you were.”

And on they parry and bicker with Bill at his Golf Club (most members are furious with David Cameron for “not seeing Brexit through” apparently) and Pete is in anguish about his estranged wife until old flame Andrea reappears in his life. “You still with what’s her name? The serious one. Miss No-Sex?” she asks.

“You mean my wife?”

“Sorry, Mrs No-Sex.”

Into this thickening plot of crisscrossed sexual history, the mysterious Guy appears in Pete’s lecture room. Guy had disappeared from their Cambridge College during their second year to live incognito in a tower in rural France. He was presumed dead, possibly assassinated. “I didn’t recognise him,” Pete explains, “He looked so ancient.”

This book, with its sustained wry badinage fashioned to include real life events and personal progress, could be three times longer and still great fun.

Some plot lines do arise, but vanish without resolution. And there is room for more adventure — I kept thinking something dramatic would engulf their world. Possibly in the sequel? Should there be one, I would buy it.