Low life
Getting away from it all
Jeffrey Bernard
This week's home help, a kindly Irish- woman standing in for an injured Vera, seems to think I have Alzheimer's disease. She talks to me as though I am completely gaga. I am trying to work out just how she has arrived at that conclusion. She may think my wheelchair is for my head and not my legs or it may be because of my moan- ing and groaning as I watched England's struggle against Australia on television with a hand over one eye to keep the set in focus. She might also have thought that the empty bottles she cleared away were a sin- gle day's consumption and not a week's. In any event it is not a pretty picture up here and I did shout at somebody on the tele- phone the other day. Perhaps she thinks I am Hitler's long-lost son. I don't know.
And now the windows have been open all night and the wind has scattered papers all over the sitting-room so that when she arrives she will conclude that I have had a fit. I will have one soon if I don't get out more often. I get so bored here that I am actually beginning to miss the boredom of pubs. The drone of people talking rubbish would be as sweet as the bee-loud glade today. Or do I mean booze-loud glade?
I may not be the only one to feel a cap- tive. Even my ex-wife has just invited me to her house in Spain for a while so she must be pretty desperate. I have been reminded that one of the corniest lines ever to have come out of Hollywood is, 'I must get away for a while to discover myself. God forbid. What would one find?
Anyway, the ex, my daughter's mother, lives in Majorca and it is improving rapidly, becoming slightly more up-market and less liberally sprinkled with football fans and lager louts. I first went there in 1949 and then on to Ibiza, Barcelona and Valencia. Franco may have been in power but at least Spain hadn't been overrun by tourists then. I remember marvellous restaurants in Valencia particularly and I even managed to get a fight in Barcelona for which I was paid the princely sum of £10 and I won it on points. Perhaps I should have hung around for a bit because the featherweights out there weren't up to much and if noth- ing else I was fairly fit until I was intro- duced to vino tinto.
Even now that the place has deteriorated I would still rather live there than in France, play with the tapas and soak up the sun. As it is we are in July and I have turned the radiators on this morning. Maybe that is why the Irish home help thinks I am mad. I have to shout at her because she is a bit deaf and shouting even looks nasty. She doesn't say anything and I wonder what she thinks about. I miss Vera chatting. It brings life to this 14th-floor tomb.
There was a little life at the Spectator party, but I don't remember it all that well. I missed Margaret Thatcher who I wanted to have a word with and I know that my friend Bill Haddow had a chat with Ger- maine Greer on the subject of plumbing. I would guess that that was the most inter- esting conversation in the garden that evening. The duchess came along but for me it was mostly a haze seen through the bottom of a tumbler after an afternoon of rehearsing for the occasion.
And talking of a haze I have just received a letter from a kind woman reader offering to be my escort 'after dark'. It is always dark, Ms Hill. Come around any time after breakfast.
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