As for specific wheezes, one thing I like to do is sit on my own in the Duke at a table that would normally be expected to hold four people eating its excellent-but-slightly-out-my-price-range food. The guv’nor, Alan, who has taken pity on me and yet in some bizarre way sees me as an adornment to his establishment (I helped him get a glowing review in the Standard), or at the very least an amusing curiosity, will then shove me over to a less prominent table, but top up my pint by way of compensation. This takes timing, but I’ve got it down, I would like to think, to a fine art. If some real high-flyers come in he will even give me a large whisky just to get me away from them.
Poncing off your friends is another matter. Most of mine are in almost the same boat as me, so I can’t. My housemate, Razors, and I scrounge off each other, because even though he earns a fantastic salary, it all goes straight out again to sort out his own tormented domestic issues. He gets paid in the middle of the month, I at the end, so we help each other like mountaineers scaling a cliff that would have defeated the solitary climber. And you do find, when you get divorced, that some of your so-called friends never call you again; and some of them lend you £500 when you really need it and say “pay me back when you can”.
