Low life
The pipes are calling
Jeffrey Bernard
Ican't say that I have been seriously inconvenienced by this week's Drinkwise Day; in fact I managed to catch the bar- man's eye on several occasions in the past few days although he was and always is in a constant state of reverie, dreaming of the green fields of Ireland. I think he is home- sick and I don't know why an Irishman should want to come and live in this dump. It isn't as though there is a potato famine at the moment over there but he must have found out by now that there is a conversa- tion famine in the Coach and Horses. He stares out of the window and I am sure that if you put your ear close to his head you would be able to hear fiddles, pipes and harps. How odd it is that for the most part the English stick to England like limpets, apart, that is, for ex-bank robbers who flee to Portugal and the Costa Brava.
I hope to visit Dublin in August and I shall investigate the possibility of getting a flat in that city. Doctor Johnson's dictum about a man tired of London being tired of life doesn't stand up today. It probably stayed true until 1960. Thirty years on I have become a compulsive reader of travel brochures and I constantly peruse various Michelin Guides with my magnifying glass. Not even Edmond Dantes wanted to escape from the Château d'If more than I do from West Hampstead. If I remember correctly I think he spent 18 years extract- ing himself from that place. A mere blink of the eye. And yet, like our Irish barman, there is a constant stream of people tunnel- ing their way into the pub, London and Soho. Lemmings of a sort. It sounds like the name of a suburban house, Lemmings.
And now I can't put it off any longer. I must go out and buy a walking-stick this week. Two would be more to the point but then I wouldn't be able to carry the shop- ping. There is another worry. Could a walking-stick in the hands of a man with a sometimes short fuse lead to charges of criminal assault? There are a handful of people on the manor who deserve a whack. But a stick might be some protection against mad dogs, or maybe they could eat walking-sticks. Anyway, I find it all a little humiliating. I think my brain is living in a corpse. When you have to lean on a friend's arm to walk from the Ming restau- rant to the Groucho Club you know that it is time to go to bed with a hundredweight of Ovaltine, a hundred gallons of milk and wait there for the grim reaper who, I am sure, is not all that grim but a man with a sense of the absurd.
And Charlie came into the pub this week after a long absence. He is still selling oranges in Chapel Street market but his legs too have gone and he has just been told that he has diabetes. I have never heard of anybody falling victim to that at the age of 65. But he is not yet insulin- dependent and he will survive. His Dicken- sian face is one that I miss and it is good to talk to a man who is streetwise from time to time. It was Charlie who claims he caught John Stonehouse cheating at bridge when they were in the stammer together. I find that there is something almost charm- ing about cons playing bridge and not crib. I expect Magwitch played chess and per- haps the Krays play patience. Perhaps it might be good for convicts if prisons had cricket teams. The final at Lords between Dartmoor and Wandsworth is something I would pay to see. And I wish I had been at Headingley to see England beat the West Indies. What an uplifting game cricket can be, only marred by the odd unpleasant inci- dent such as my bowling Michael Foot a bouncer some years ago. I shall never for- give myself for that.
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