Low life
Farewell to a fighter
Jeffrey Bernard
In a couple of hours time I have to go to the funeral of a friend of mine, Mick Tobin, whom I wrote about here a short time ago. I have been asked to give an address and I am not sure why I have been asked, neither do I really know why I have agreed to do so. In recent years I have done the same thing for Muriel Belcher who owned the Colony Room Club, Eliza- beth Smart and Peter Dunbar, who was the art director of the Economist. It seems a bit daft and I certainly felt it having to recap on all the things that all the congregation knew about anyway.
'Good grief! It isn't even sleazy enough for a children's book' As far as Mick Tobin goes, I can only reiterate the fact that I worked for him in the theatre and that he was an awesomely good street-fighter and a very nice bloke. So what's new? The whole thing is reitera- tion and with everyone and anyone I can think of giving an address about, all the best stories are not repeatable in the house of God.
At the other end of life's spectrum, I have just been asked to be godfather to a baby boy called Fred who is the new son of the couple who made the Channel 4 docu- mentary about me. That requires another speech, and what on earth is there to say about someone who has not even started to do anything more noticeable than cry a lot? But with my own advancing years I care less and less about babies and children — and young people can look after them- selves — and any tears I could shed now would be for the elderly who might be cold, hungry and unable to look after themselves properly.
There should be a law against people leaving £1 million to a home for animals. A friend of mine, a racing man in Lambourn, had an aunt who died recently and she left £350,000 to a cats' home and left him with an old armchair that he had once admired in passing. Somebody else who died a month ago was Tony Harris, the fixture and fitting in the French House, who 30 years ago once tried to make a book on who would be the next person to die in Soho, and he installed me as the 6-4 favourite. That was a joke of sorts that I thought was in bad taste but I suppose the odds since then must have shortened frac- tionally, and I suppose I am now the 5-4 favourite. In the event, I would guess that any address about me would be extremely short and in some ways unjust enough to simply say that he was a hack who drank a lot.
But I still can't think of what to say about dear old Mick and the time to say it is drawing closer. There are bound to be rela- tives there since I know he had a whole company of brothers, only one of whom I knew who is a tailor. I shall probably make them angry by not being too serious, but then there are so many things about death that are not too serious unless you count your own and even that will make the win- try, thin lips of friends and acquaintances distort into a smile.
Most people round here end up dying in the Middlesex Hospital and this is one thing that I dread, although the idea of being carried downstairs by the police and council workers in a zip-up black plastic bag is slightly gruesome. I should have made up an excuse concerning dialysis to get out of giving this address, which will somehow seem even more bizarre coming from someone sitting in a wheelchair. But although Mick had hardly a thing when he was alive, it is definitely going to be cheer- ing to see how many friends and well-wish- ers he had and truly deserved.
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