Low life
The mad fair sex
Jeffrey Bernard
Readers of this column may have noticed by now that my admiration for women is tempered by a conviction that they are moderately mad and often extremely silly. I read confirmation of this the other day in a report which said that a dozen or so women are planning to walk to the North Pole.
This sort of insanity can afflict the female sex, though, at an even earlier age than the would-be snow queens, as is born out by the news that a 13-year-old school- girl has just married a Turkish waiter. You could, I suppose, give the child bride the benefit of the doubt and concede that she made a shrewd move by marrying the wait- er if that was the only way she thought she could get served. But I think it's rather sin- ister that she did so with her parents' bless- ing. She will be a grandmother by the time she is 30 but still young enough to walk to the North Pole.
But I saw that the ladies who are The Maxwell case solved my pension problems.' embarking on the expedition proper to the North Pole practised and rehearsed their forthcoming venture with a 12-hour hike across Exmoor at night time and in the dark. They said that that little outing made them a trifle wet and chilly and they might as well have prepared for a feast or ban- quet by having a tiny picnic.
I would very much like to hand pick a team of women to walk to the North Pole as I know a dozen of the hardiest survivors of the sex who, by their very natures, are already well acclimatised to sub-zero tem- peratures. Pity the poor poodles who will pull their team, and I can't think of any woman who would cast herself in the role of a Captain Oates, although there is no doubt that women are extremely brave. The journey will doubtless be covered by a journalist from the women's pages of the Guardian.
My own favourite mad women have never bothered to venture far from home to exercise their lunacy. Janet, who wants to be close to nature, still sunbathes when- ever she can stark naked in her backyard next to the dustbins so that she is usually covered with bluebottles. No Knickers Joyce is still accepting cheques from her mean and nasty clients who then stop them, and Elizabeth in Norfolk still makes her soup with potato peelings while giving the potato proper to her two pigs.
But there are less obvious forms of female insanity. I know a famous lady, a journalist who haunts Canary Wharf and one who had her own television show, who will not go anywhere at all without a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets in her handbag and that is affectation carried to madness. Oddly enough, I still have a postcard she wrote to me 20 years ago which just reads, `Dear Jeff, How could you?' I can't remem- ber what it was that I did or didn't do but it serves to bring me up short whenever I come across it and read it.
I am even beginning to get worried about my daughter who is in India and whom I haven't heard from since she went there three months ago. If she was being held hostage, I should have thought I would have heard by now, even if only from the bandits holding her prisoner offering me money to take her away since she talks too much. The last I heard from her was when she wrote to me saying that she was travel- ling south to what she called the dessert. So much for English spelling and English classes at Holland Park Comprehensive.
And I wonder what sort of postcards and letters the Turkish waiter's wife is sending home to her loving parents in Essex. I noticed from a photograph of her in the newspaper or on television that she is a dumpy little thing, and I wouldn't be sur- prised if the poor girl isn't responsible for the reintroduction of the yashmak, in spite of Kemal Ataturk's efforts to get a look at his fairly hideous subjects. But frost bite doesn't make people look very attractive either.
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