DIARY
KEITH WATERHOUSE
Passing briefly through New York immediately after Christmas, I had no diffi- culty at all, and inconvenienced nobody, in making three business appointments for 27 December, when all offices were working as usual. The only reason I couldn't make them for Boxing Day, a festival unheard of in the United States, was that it happened in 1993 to fall on a Sunday. By contrast, of course, Britain was in the middle of its annual ten-day torpor. I have resolved never again to spend that post-Christmas no-man's-land of time in London. It is not only that there is nobody to be found but that it is the gloomiest of holidays, with the restaurants three-quarters empty and noth- ing to do but watch videos, meander around the sales and eat up the stale mince-pies. In short, a yawning void to be endured rather than enjoyed, which makes it a peculiarly British holiday. That's why the Government may as well declare it offi- cial.
Just before Christmas, I flew to Dublin with Ned Sherrin to audition contenders for the supporting cast of Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell which Dennis Waterman essays at the Olympia Theatre later this month, and which Jeff himself threatens to grace with his presence, if well enough. I hope he does, for he is no end of a celebrity in Dublin, where his Spectator column is reproduced in the Sunday Independent. Everyone I met seems to have encountered him in one or other of his favourite pubs on a famous assignment when the paper brought him over to get drunk with Stan Gebler Davis. But how many really met our man? On my rare visits to Dublin, I have always been impressed by how everyone seems to know everyone else from the Pres- ident down to the doorman at the Shel- borne Hotel. Very villagey. But I begin to suspect that no one in Ireland would ever wish to lose face by admitting that there is anyone else in Ireland they do not know. I have never met, for example, an Irishman who didn't have a night on the town with Brendan Behan — but even he just couldn't have had a drink with so many people, particularly since a growing propor- tion of them must have been in their prams. I am reminded of all the Soho bohemians who were friends of Dylan Thomas and often lent him a fiver — I must be the only person of my age moving in those circles who never set eyes on the fellow. But Dublin, as always, was exhilarating, even in the driving rain. The Jeff producers have been sold on the mad idea of inserting a daily racing tip in every theatre programme — a wheeze that would have appealed to Edgar Wallace years ago and will probably appeal to the racing-mad Irish. How the play will go down it is not for me to predict, but it will be the only show in town where you can follow up a good evening out by losing your shirt the next day. Good idea, whoever thought of it. I know him well.
How often have you heard the expres- sion, 'laughing all the way to the bank'? After Frank Muir rang me to ask, I began to count, and notched up a good dozen examples of banking laughter within the week. The point of Frank's call — word- watcher calling to word-watcher like mastodons calling across the primaeval swamp, to quote Wodehouse in the context of aunts — was that it is one of our most persistent misquotations. The original phrase belongs to Wladziu Valentino Lib- erace, the dreaded pianist, who when he got bad reviews, which must have been often, was apt to say, 'I cried all the way to the bank.' Now that's witty. Laughing all the way to the bank is crass.
Ido not see the Journalist of the Year award going to Mr Camillo Fracassini, the young Hendon Times reporter who shopped a chief superintendent who remarked to him that women attending a domestic vio-
. . and a Happy Nuclear to you too.'
lence conference were 'a bunch of lezzies', with the consequence that the police officer was fired. I do not suppose, either, that the little sneak has done anything for good relations between his newspaper and their police contacts. Don't they teach cub reporters on their training courses that when a public person makes an embarrass- ing gaffe the place for it is on page one, not in the ear of a borough councillor? But I imagine that Master Fracassini has enhanced the reputation of the press among Hendon civilians, who like most newspaper readers would regard us hacks in general as a bunch of ratbags and would welcome this example of a journo behaving, as they would have it, with rare public spir- it. Newspapers keep reporting that the stock of their own trade has never been lower. Certainly, so far as reputation goes, we have seen better days. One of my Christmas presents was Christopher Sil- vester's bumper Penguin Book of Interviews, in which we find Rudyard Kipling being interviewed — or, as he imagines, refusing to be interviewed — by the Boston Sunday Herald, just a hundred years ago. After blasting off at the American press, Kipling pontificates: 'English journalism is digni- fied and respectable. There is no dirty busi- ness in it. What you Americans call enter- prise is sensationalism of the cheapest sort. The English editor does not insult any respectable man by asking his ideas. They are his own, the same as his home is, and no one has a right to invade them . . . The English reporter is a gentleman and lets people alone.' Where did we go wrong, Rudyard? Camillo?
Next month is a milestone for me: I join the bus-pass generation. I start receiv- ing what I thoughtlessly used to call the old-age pension — I now prefer to call it my state pension. The state itself prefers to call it my National Insurance Retirement Pension, but since writers, like old soldiers, never retire I will stick to my own term. What does make me feel old, though, is the Zimmer language in which the Department of Social Security's letter to me on the sub- ject is framed: 'Who made the decision about your retirement pension? The deci- sion was made by someone called an adju- dication officer. Adjudication officers are people who decide whether the law says that you are entitled to benefit or not . . .' Before spouting this patronising stuff, shouldn't they have asked if I was sitting comfortably? But why, having paid through the nose for it as all self-employed people have to, do I feel guilty about drawing this pension? Can it be that it tallies, practically to the penny, with my weekly champagne bill?
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