Low life
Travellers' tales
Jeffrey Bernard
after all. I came home last week, though, to find I have been served with a bankrupt- cy order. You win some, you lose some. way, the weather was splendid and the grilled sardines, chips and salads kept me in surprisingly good nick. The only trouble was that the boat's bilge pump was out of ..aketicln. This meant we had to run ashore at lavatory crack of dawn every day to use the lavatoy in the nearest cafe. Once there it was lovely to have a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, but you can't drink that all morning so at about 8 a.m. I had to switch to lager, not that I like it much. At 10 a.m. I reckoned it was a sort of opening time and so went back to the orange with some vodka in it. Now, dear reader, I must warn you of the perils of falling asleep in the sun. Don't. Prickly heat is ghastly and I had such an awful headache I had to hold a chilled bottle of white wine to my fevered brow. It was very soothing in much the same way as a cold lavatory pan is when pressed against the forehead when one is being sick. (This happens frequently after opening buff envelopes.) But talking of being sick, what about Scandinavian tourists? They must be the most boring travelling circus in the world. Can it be because of their long nights? Tom Baker thinks the rot set in when English critics pronounced that Hedda Gabler was boring when it was first produced. Perhaps they feel obliged to be boring. You hear men verbally drooling about Scandinavian au pair girls but in reality those blue eyes are vacuous and even the blondeness is boring. Their hair looks like cornflakes. I once had a few hours at Stockholm airport and a single gin and tonic cost £3.50. Perhaps that is why they look dumbstruck and it probably explains the high suicide rate.
But the English in and around Faro were fascinating. I suppose it is because the Portuguese are our oldest allies that we import their port and they import our bank robbers. There must be some sort of trade agreement between the two of us. I got the impression that it is obligatory to have knocked over an English bank in order to get a resident's permit there. There was a delightful con man there too who was a mine of information on the subject of the English penal system. But most amazing of all was an alcoholic woman who claimed to be a psychotherapist. She was legless from Marble Arch to Christmas. Now although I realise that social workers feel obliged from time to time to murder the children in their charge I do think it is reasonable to expect a little sobriety from a brain man- ipulator. I mean somebody's got to be sober. I must say, talking of psycho- therapy, how much I enjoyed the tiny spell of it I had when I was banged up in the addiction slammer. One day an awful fellow patient enraged me so much that I leapt upon him and tried to strangle him. It took half the ward to pull me off him. It was quite delightful. Forty years of anger out of the system in a few seconds. I'd quite like to meet that man again because there's some subsequent anger been build- ing up. Anyway, this woman had a delight- ful little girl — her husband had left her — and I kept wondering what will become of her. With luck she might react and grow up to be something of a Puritan. I sometimes wish that my parents had been a little more wayward. Had they been so I now might be a magistrate or a milkman. The sentences heavy and the milk sour. But funny things holidays, aren't they? I can't wait for them and yet I am always pleased to get back to this rat hole which I feel so safe in despite being surrounded by danger. Danger of duns. They'll be coming through the win- dows next. I actually had a man in the sitting-room this morning who made me write out eight post-dated cheques. I tried to imagine I was writing out betting slips or signing traveller's cheques but the hand was shaking too much to fool the imagina- tion. But before the final crunch comes shall, like Custer, have one last stand at Ascot on Saturday to see the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes. It will be overcrowded, expensive and sweaty with anxiety when Shahrastani comes into the straight but it will be some sort of punctuation mark in the financial story. It's like turning over an old leaf.
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