To Hell in a Handcart. Richard Littlejohn

could actually read.

      Ricky was replaced by a former lap-dancer who dispensed sex advice in the form of a comic strip with voice bubbles, True Romance-style. When her first column appeared, readers were invited to take part in a competition to describe in no more than twenty words why they’d like to give her a bikini wax. The winner got to give her a bikini wax. Ricky entered under a false name and came second.

      Ricky had frequently appeared on Voice FM, Bulletin FM and Shoot FM as a guest pundit, filling the voids between callers with sarcastic banter and mock outrage. It didn’t pay much but there was always a steady supply of drink in the studio, which Ricky reckoned at least saved him a few bob. He was quite good at it, too.

      When Rocktalk 99FM was launched, Ricky received a call from Charlie Lawrence, the programme director, who offered him a job as the mid-morning presenter.

      Lawrence was a former salesman who started off selling solar-powered boomerangs to tourists at Circular Quay in Sydney, wound up in newspaper telesales and graduated to promotions manager at an ailing talk-radio station.

      He transformed the station, turning it into Down Under AM, Australia’s first all-gay on-air chatline.

      Lawrence shipped up in London, headhunted by Rocktalk FM’s Australian management in an act of desperation.

      ‘We need controversy, we need to provoke people. We need someone who’s not afraid to speak his mind. You’re the man, mate,’ Lawrence had insisted over a bottle of Polluted Bay Chardonnay.

      Ricky didn’t take much persuading. He was also available. What Lawrence didn’t know was that Ricky had already been told his contract at the Exposer wasn’t being renewed and that he had nowhere else to go.

      Ricky was almost potless. Although he had always been handsomely paid, his prodigious thirst and the mortgage on his flat in a mansion block at the back of Westminster Cathedral swallowed his earnings. He could just about manage to service his credit cards and his extended bar bill at Spider’s.

      He could have lived somewhere cheaper, but he needed to be at the centre of town. He also liked being driven, especially since the London Taxi Drivers’ Association had blacklisted him following a column in praise of minicabs. Ricky only discovered this when he clambered into the back of a black cab in Soho one night and asked to be taken home.

      The driver looked at Ricky in the mirror and checked. He took a newspaper cutting off his dashboard, held it up to the vanity light, inspected it and turned to get a better look at his dishevelled passenger.

      ‘You’re him, aren’t you?’

      ‘Eh?’

      ‘Sparke. You look older in real life. And fatter. But I can tell it’s you.’ The driver was clutching Ricky’s picture by-line, torn from the pages of the Exposer. It had been taken some years earlier in a professional studio and enhanced by Fleet Street’s finest photographic technology. Although Ricky had worn badly over the years, it was still recognizably him.

      ‘OK, so it’s me. Give the man a coconut. Now take me to Westminster.’

      ‘You must be kidding, mate, after what you said about us. You’re barred.’

      ‘Then take me to the public carriage office. You can’t do this.’

      ‘I can do what I like. Now get out. Go on. Out!’

      Ricky stumbled out of the cab and retraced his steps downstairs into Spider’s. Dillon laughed when Ricky told him the story, gave him another one for the strasse on the house and called a local chauffeur firm to take him home.

      When the car turned up, it was being driven by former police sergeant Mickey French, an old mate Ricky had known since the Seventies, when he was a local newspaper reporter and Mickey was PC at Tyburn Row, although he hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. Mickey took him back to his flat, declined an offer of a drink and said he’d call Ricky in the morning. Since that night, Mickey had been Ricky’s regular ride around town.

      Not today, though. Mickey had taken the family off for a long weekend at Goblin’s Holiday World and Ricky was left to his own devices. Lunch loomed. Ricky had no wife to go back to. He was married once, to a copytaker on his first newspaper, a printer’s daughter from Lewisham, south-east London.

      But it wasn’t going anywhere. Ricky refused to go south of the river and she could never settle north. Since he never came home, it didn’t really matter where they lived. She moved out, filed for divorce after less than a year of marriage and ended up with a used-car dealer in Eltham, three kids, a facelift, a tummy tuck and a villa in Marbella, where three times a year she topped up her fake tan with the real thing.

      Ricky never remarried, was never bothered about children, rather liked his bachelor existence. The booze had taken its toll over the years, but had never taken over. Ricky prided himself that he always got up for work, no matter how rough he felt.

      ‘I’m a milkman. I deliver,’ was his proud boast. And he did deliver. Abuse and insults by the bucketloads, tipped over the heads of the great and the gormless, the rich and fatuous in a succession of newspapers. He’d always been good for circulation but his off-the-ball antics cost him a string of jobs, right back to the time when still in his teens he clattered the long-serving chief reporter of the long since defunct Tyburn Times, sending him tumbling downstairs, in a heated dispute over punctuation, and caused his first employer to tear up his indentures.

      A quarter of a century later, he had mellowed, rather like a top-class single malt. Probably because of single malt. His fighting days were over, ever since he had mistakenly stripped to the waist on the Central Line and offered violence to half a dozen Millwall fans making a nuisance of themselves on the way to Loftus Road. He spent three weeks in hospital as a result of that piece of foolhardiness. It cost him three teeth, replaced with some expensive bridgework. Ricky had been knocking off a divorced dental hygienist at the time and had been able to negotiate a discount for cash from the South African dentist with whom she shared a surgery. She eventually gave up on Ricky, hooked up with the dentist and moved to Jo’burg, where she was killed in a drive-by shooting. Some people never know when they’re well off, Ricky remarked when he heard the news.

      ‘How’s it going, mate?’

      Ricky looked up and saw Charlie Lawrence standing in the studio doorframe.

      ‘This isn’t a job for grown-ups,’ he replied, running his fingers roughly through his hair, massaging his scalp as he did it, trying to relieve the tensions of dealing with the great unwashed and their uninformed, unfocused view of the world, three hours a day, five days a week.

      ‘You look plenty grown up to me, mate. A little too grown. Not so much grown up as grown out. You should take up squash,’ said Charlie, indicating Ricky’s middle-age spread.

      ‘You must be joking,’ Ricky said. ‘Anyway, this is all bought and paid for. Once you’re older than your waist size, it’s not worth the bother.’

      ‘Oh, no? Take me, mate. We’re, what, about the same age? I’ve still got a six-pack.’

      ‘So have I. It’s in my fridge and it’s full of Guinness.’

      ‘You should take more exercise. It’ll do your temper good, too.’

      ‘There nothing wrong with my fucking temper.’

      ‘That’s not what it sounded like to me this morning.’

      ‘What are you going on about, Charlie?’

      ‘I thought we were a little bit on the grumpy side today.’

      ‘We? You mean me. Well, it’s all right for you sitting in your strategy meetings. I’m the one who has to handle all these fuckwits. Who needs them?’

      ‘That’s where you’re wrong, mate. They may be fuckwits, but they’re our fuckwits. And we’ve got fewer of them by the week. Who needs them? We need them. The advertisers need them. You need them, mate.