Low life
Dynamite
Jeffrey Bernard
Last Saturday at Sandown Park I ex- ceeded my humble expectations. The Eclipse Stakes, now the horribly named Coral Eclipse Stakes, is one of the best events in the calendar and I try not to miss It. The 'first man I met walking through the entrance was Robert Sangster, who is a delightful fellow in spite of having £100 million in his current account. (It's extraor- dinary to think that he wins the pools every week.) He told me that he and Vincent O'Brien strongly fancied Sadler's Wells so I steamed in immediately and had £25 at 4-1. Not a lot,/but quite a lot if that's all You're holding. Then I had a tenner on Grooming, which obliged at 3-1, and final- ly £50 on Special Vintage, which won at 5-2. For a moment I began to wonder whether maybe I'm not quite as daft as I know I am. I then had a quiet celebration in the bar, was driven back to London, had another private party, then passed out in Takes flat and woke up at midnight sur- rounded by a bevy of beauties. One par- ticular beauty seemed strangely more in- terested in sitting on Taki's knee and
climbing all over him than she did in your low life correspondent. Perhaps the girl who told me last week, 'You're a mean, little, alcoholic, diabetic shit,' could have been near the mark.
Then Sunday was pretty awful. I read an obituary of Flora Robson in which she was quoted as having once said, 'I have had little personal love in my life.' What an awful thing to be able to say. I brooded about that over a cocktail or two, forgot that I'd been invited to lunch by my favourite author, Alice Thomas Ellis, and spent the evening kicking myself for my bad manners and embarrassing amnesia. (I've got a lunch today but where and who with?) Apart from Sandown Park the other good thing was verification of another trip to Barbados in September without anyone from the Sun, Honey, the Guardian woman's page or Spare Rib. It has taken me two weeks to recover from the thirst in Norway inflicted on me by the impenet- rable handbag of a Fleet Street colleague I mentioned last week. Should my man who has fixed this West Indian jaunt inform me at the last minute that we are, after all, to be accompanied by a similarly overpaid hackette carrying a replica of Fort Knox over her shoulder I shall take a stick of dynamite with me.
When I think of these people it comes as no surprise to read that 30 per cent of 2,000 American women recently interviewed claimed that they would do 'better than average in a fist fight'. What happened to women? Where did it all go wrong? Again, like the decline in the quality of life, I think it must have started with rock and roll. By the time the Beatles were established and the Wolfenden Report had wrecked Soho 'My compliments to the chef.' and established the porn industry, all life was low unless you happened to be holding bread. In 1962 a women ironed a shirt for me. She didn't engage me in a fist fight, she even went to bed with me which is the next best thing.
Looking back on that sort of behaviour I feel as though I'm peering at a distant Restoration comedy.. I think they might well have been the good old days although most of them were spent scratching around for the price of half a pint of bitter. I didn't get trips to Barbados and the horses I backed ran rather slowly. I was once three months late with the rent of my Suffolk cottage which was five shillings a week: But then I remember lying on the lawn in the garden of my pub in weather like this pretending to sleep but looking up the skirts of lady tourists and just listening to the bees buzz and the ice chink in the Pimms. Their Pimms. What days they could have been in Soho and Suffolk if I'd had my enormous wealth then.
Meanwhile it's Newmarket. The sales in the morning, lunch with Charles St George and then the races in the afternoon. Days like this can be dreadfully exhausting. It's all the standing. Just you try drinking champagne for eight hours on your feet with just a snatched five minutes at the table for some fresh salmon. Well, it knocks me out anyway.
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