Low life
Big noise
Jeffrey Bernard
',keep meeting women, employed either wh alluY Lord Matthews or Rupert Murdoch, o think that because they can type they ) therefore write. Normally I don't burnt) into these creatures but recently I've ,een having to pop in and out of Fleet treet since bread needs butter. And what a, ghastly place it is. The pubs are the pits °`V the restaurants are rather shabby. -,orse and worst is the conversation in the Pc°ubs, II you can call talking incessant shop iyersation. Journalism is a function, like go' to the lavatory, best done at home uoad not talked about. Richard West is the s:tly Man I know who can talk about it nee he realises just how ridiculous it is. And last week I took my little niece to see an editor in an attempt to get her lift-off in Fleet Street. The next thing I'll know is that she'll be drinking large gins and tonic and wearing her sunglasses on the top of her head — a disgusting female habit, being, I suppose, the female equivalent of macho. Could there be a word for it? Facho? Whatever it is Germaine Greer has bun- dles of it. As is a red rag to a bull, a chocolate eclair to Bernard Levin and a sheet of typing paper to an office girl in Fleet Street so a television camera has become to Ms Greer. The trick is to get her to stop talking. Oh, how I envy people who like themselves. One could just sail through life. It's always fascinated me to see and watch just what success, 'making' it and fame do to people. The effects can be extraordinary. With women, like Ms Greer, they just can't stop talking and they, of course, always know best. Men usually and quite simply become dreadfully self.important. Some of them, idiots, crack. A few years ago, I went on the piss with Mick Jagger and in a club called the Kismet, but known as the Iron Lung, he suddenly burst into tears. Solicitous as a spider to a fly I enquired as to the cause of the dreadful stream of tears and mucous ruining my lapels. 'I can't take it,' he howled. 'What can't you take, you fat- lipped twit?' I asked him gently. 'The success. The money and all those birds.' At the time, I happened to be short of both requisites and suggested a transfer of both cash and crumpet into my safekeeping. He soon stopped crying and left without paying. My turn to cry. George Best went to pieces. I took him to lunch one day and he turned up with three girls. Three. I've done some strange things in my time but I've always found two to be quite ample. You can't get near Michael Parkinson any more and Colin Welland, known to all and sundry in Gerry's Club as Smelly Welland, is damn nigh certifiable.
But all this strange behaviour is the result of deep seated fear, the cause of halitosis. A lot of famous people suffer with halitosis (or, to be more accurate, it's their friends who do the suffering). And I believe it to be fear that makes Ms Greer 'No wonder your wife wanted a surrogate mother.' talk too much and fear that has motivated her into acquiring more knowledge than you or I have on any subject in the conversational repertoire. She also needs to be told that an unhappy childhood is not a suitable topic for conversation. It is not unique. I too had no sticks to my lollipops and had to wet the bed standing on my head. An introductory chapter on an un- happy childhood is permissible in an auto- biography but you should never go on television and whine to the viewers that your mother in Wagga Wagga didn't have a reading ticket to the London Library when you were five.
It may surprise you to know that I've had a little of all this nonsense, albeit on a small circuit. In 1970, when I was the Sporting Life columnist, I was quite the little Jack the Lad on the racecourse. Strangers kept buying me drinks and I was pissed from Christmas to Marble Arch. But it didn't make my breath smell and I refrained from telling my hosts that my mother once clipped me over the ear for having a dip into her handbag while I thought her back was turned during An air raid. Anyway, at least my daughter thinks I'm famous still. I must be careful not to breathe all over her — just in case it's catching.
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