Low life
Spare ribbing
Jeffrey Bernard
I suddenly thought: Hang on a moment, it was never like this. The one sounding off like a Mrs Beeton I met in a pub in the Portobello Road in 1966, who changed her name to Bernard, and the other one ten years before in the French Pub, when she was said to resemble the 'Oomph Girl', Anne Sheridan. They both now, quite obvi- ously, live behind net curtains in Majorca and Oxfordshire when they aren't hoeing vegetable patches and feeding the chickens. You would not believe the tales I could tell you of bygone days, when you see them now in leather trousers and mink, talking like do-gooders about to press baskets of rotten apples and religious tracts on you.
And now it seems that I have made little waves in Soho or, at least, the Coach and Horses. Writing in the Oldie for the series 'Places Not to Go To', I chose Soho and said,
Norman Balon's egomania and what passes for his wit have all but emptied the Coach and Horses. A few faceless customers remain from inertia, but gone are the days when one might look up at the sound of a door opening and think, 'Oh good. Here comes so-and-so.'
The Daily Telegraph picked it up, tele- phoned Norman and asked him what he thought. Norman told them, 'I took him ice-cream last Saturday. Bugger him. I'm full up and rich and I don't care what he says.' Well, he does care, because he phoned me up to complain of what I had said. I explained that I had only been jok- ing and that seemed to mollify him. Of course, I hadn't been joking.
Norman has not been short of self-confi- dence since the day he left school and joined his father behind the bar. Then, after the first night of Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell at the Apollo, when he claimed to be immortal, I first began to wonder about his ego. It finally became palpable when he took time off from losing at chess to dictate his magnum opus, his autobiography, You're Barred, You Bastards. No amount of diabetic ice-cream could ever sooth this throat of mine that choked when I read his self-effacing, homespun, cracker-barrel phi- losophy of life.
Then yesterday, owing to the Telegraph fuss, I suppose, the Daily Mail telephoned to ask me to do a bit more about Soho. Where there have been Christmas cards there will now, I suppose, be writs. Nearly everybody on this wretched manor claims to be able to withstand a little ribbing, but in truth ribs are ticklish things. It is all a matter of self-importance, and the girl I yelled at for putting a chicken in my oven without putting it on a baking tray has not spoken to me now for three months. This is less to do with my yelling at her than the fact that she now gets the odd byline. Heady stuff.
Not only Norman but Mick Jagger too, one afternoon in the Colony Room Club, told me that the pressure at the top can become unbearable. Well, the pressure in here today is pleasantly low. Vera has just brought me a hot croissant, the Vintage House has just delivered the vodka and a lot of people I don't like in Soho are being rained on.
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