Low life
Little irritations
Jeffrey Bernard
It is five weeks now since I was invalided out of Soho and the days are beginning to drag. Even the telephone has stopped ringing and it isn't even cut off. It is a bit like doing time in comfort. That's to say, I sit in warmth and eat like an educated pig, but I have begun to make mental notes of odd and trivial matters. Yesterday, for example, I heard ambulance sirens in the street outside 15 times. They probably consisted of 14 heart attacks and one baby. I don't like those odds. When the buses aren't rumbling past I can hear the chimes of a grandfather clock in the flat above me and I can also hear their lavatory flushing. They seem to go to it at 15 minutes•past the hour and I'm quite unreasonably beginning to hate them for it. I think it reminds me of school. Round about tea time a disgusting pigeon arrives at my window-sill and it is a bloody intrusion and I don't like the way it looks at me. Why do people feed them? They aren't clean and simply greedy like wood pigeons, they are close to vermin in London and I am thinking seriously of pasting the ledge with a mixture of ammo- nia and iodine crystals which should blast its under-carriage off the next time it alights.
Meanwhile, hypnotised as I am by my television set, I gather that the Animal Rights people are planning to spring from capacity the American chimpanzees that are assisting scientists in finding a cure for Aids. It'll bloody well serve them right if they do come into contact with them. And when they decide to stop the Danes from killing the pigs that provide us with insulin I shall go in for manufacturing cyclonite never mind ammonium iodide. I've seen quite a few irritating people and things on television recently and not the least irritat- ing was the American girl who burst into tears because Princesss Diana stopped to speak to her. Such people are about to negotiate in Geneva. I find sentiment that strong a bit sinister. IRA terrorists speak highly of their mothers. But the weeping girl apart, who will probably be grinding a husband into dust in five years' time, these people have actually given power to a man with the name Caspar Weinberger. Are they remaking Duck Soup? What a relief to see our side on television. Lord Stock- ton's attack on Mrs Thatcher was like a solo bassoon trying to make itself heard above an entire percussion section. I would very much like to see his King Lear. Other things that are driving me mad thanks to being housebound are scalding myself and writing off for some kitchen pots and pans that I saw advertised in a Sunday paper. Any reader with an ill- equipped doll's house is welcome to the kitchen stuff and I shall never send away for anything again. The right arm Is swathed in bandages and that comes of making tea. You don't have to cook vodka and accidents in pubs are long-term and internal. I have discovered that steam hurts more than flames and it leaves the parts looking like a peeled plum. No wonder then that with the pain I am full of hate for ambulance sirens, chimes, flushing lavator- ies, pigeons, Animal Rights loonies and soppy American girls. The only relief came with a visit from that excellent woman and writer, Elizabeth Smart, who brought flo- wers and smoked salmon. In Elizabeth, Alice Thomas Ellis and Rosamond Leh- mann do I know the nicest three women writers in the land? Almost certainly. Which reminds me. Having failed to win the Booker Prize I think I might have a shot at the new prize for the best children's book of the year. Mind you, Kenneth Grahame and Beatrix Potter apart, I couldn't trust a man who wrote for chil- dren. You'd have to think like one all day. At least Mr Toad and Mr Todd are proper grown-up people. I know what I'd do with Goldilocks, and the Wolf should have done it to Little Red Riding Hood. Perhaps the Arts Council might give me a grant to write a treatise on why the Wolf was a transves- tite. I think we should know. I would also like a grant to investigate the role of the bear in children's fiction. Perhaps the Animal Rights people could cough up to have hushed up just how lacking in moral fibre Winnie the Pooh, Paddington Bear and Rupert Bear are. But, of course, we've got no chance of winning the Smarties prize. Keri Hulme will come up with a book about a deaf, mute kiwi and sweep all before her.
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