Low life
Spaced out
Jeffrey Bernard
It is quite extraordinary to me that so many readers of newspapers and maga- zines should overreact as they do to what a hack may write. Two weeks ago, under the heading 'A Patient Writes', I wrote a piece in the Observer Magazine about the fact that I don't much care for doctors. Big deal. To judge from the subsequent hate mail I received you would have thought that I had blasphemed. One letter from a woman doctor who has obviously lost her marbles made me wonder, just for a second, whether I had written a satanic verse. Well, I didn't. All I said was that a lot of young housemen in hospitals are daft and that their masters tend to be a pom- pous lot fond of playing God. So what? Most young people are daft and most middle-aged men with a bit of power tend to be pompous.
Now, if somebody wrote that they didn't like journalists because they stabbed you in the back, then went and got drunk and talked shop all bloody day, would I go to the trouble of writing an indignant and paranoid letter to them? Not on your nellie. Get the typewriter out of her case, put a sheet of paper into her, write for nothing, put it in an envelope, stick a 20p stamp on it and then walk to the postbox? You would have to be mad.
Just a little, anyway. I like making generalisations and I stick to my guns small-bore ones — and I don't think much of the doctors I have come across. May I not say so? And to upset about one quarter of the population I must add that most people under the age of 21 are daft as far as I am concerned.
There is an even bigger generalisation I
must make which embraces fractionally More than half the world's population. I had thought that all women are mad, but it is not so simple. One of the basic plots in science fiction is the business of aliens from outer space taking over the bodies of human beings and I realised yesterday in the pub in a flash of horror that it is science not fiction. I was standing at the bar with the 12-year-old daughter of a friend, an 18-year-old girl and her mother, 50ish, and it hit me suddenly that they were from somewhere else. Not here. I now believe that the convent that Alice Thomas Ellis is to open in North Wales with the help of Beryl Bainbridge will be a sort of landing pad for flying saucers. And I had thought of them as being so very sweet when imbibing with them in Camden Town. And it is odd to think that our own Queen Mother came from another galaxy.
It also explains the strange behaviour of the ladies I have been involved with. When I was in hospital two weeks ago my second wife, Jacki, telephoned because she had read about my accident in the papers. We haven't even seen each other for five years although we are friends. After offering me her condolences she said, 'I know just how awful you must feel. One of my whippets was run over by a van.' How can she possibly know how a whippet feels when it ' is run over? Come to that, does she regard me as being no more than a whippet? Why drag me to the phone in agony to compare me to a whippet on a summer's day?
Well, I am taking her out to lunch soon and after all this time. Only an alien from outer space could contrive for you to get run over just to come to London for a free lunch. Ruthless. I shall take her to the Rossini in Greek Street. Yesterday, their idea of a cog au yin took half a hour to arrive by which time it was cold. The sauté potatoes came as I was finishing it. I ordered a modest chianti and an opened bottle of expensive barolo turned up. The chef is probably a woman from Mars. Jacki and she should get on. I shall have the roast whippet.
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