Low life
Bucket shopping
Jeffrey Bernard
Ihave never felt apathetic until now. It must be the calming effect of this flat in Maida Vale. Life is less urgent here. It is as soothing as soup. There are however still occasional spasms of angst. I am actually paying somebody to make me feel guilty, which is a ridiculous state of affairs. It is the cleaning lady. She is arriving any minute now and I have been awake half the night worrying about the fact that I forgot to buy her a plastic bucket yesterday. She needs it for washing the floor.
So bad did I feel about it in the middle of the night that I got up at four a.m. and poured myself a vodka strong enough to nobble a Derby favourite. I played some Sibelius but whenever I closed my eyes I saw orange-coloured plastic buckets in- stead of the bleak but enchanting land- scape of Finland. When she did arrive I fled and left her to a bucketless flat. I went to Soho to seek some sort of comfort in the old faces I hadn't seen for days and that was a mistake.
There was a racehorse once called Hill House that won the Schweppes Gold Tro- phy at Newbury and by so doing got his trainer, Captain Ryan Price, into all sorts of trouble. It was alleged that he had doped the horse, but some time later he was exonerated when it was discovered that the horse actually manufactured his own cortisone. My recent visit then to the Coach and Horses leads me to believe that crashing bores possibly manufacture their own Valium. A glance at them and an earful of them made me think I should have stayed at home with the cleaning woman sipping tea while watching her wash the kitchen floor.
I don't know why I should have thought that anything might have been different in the pub — I had only been absent for five days — but I did. Those five days had seemed like an age, but I swear the same conversation was still going on that was on when I was last there. They say that some very close twins can finish each other's sentences for them; well I can start Charlie's and we aren't remotely related. When I walked in I knew he would tell me that were I a convict in Strangeways then my legs would be too weak to get me up on to the roof of that nick. (His are too because we both smoke too much.) And I knew he would comment on Arsenal, his wife's prowess at making steak and kidney pudding, a certain person being as pissed as a pudding last night and the price of cauliflowers in the market.
If I didn't feel obliged to check on Norman's physical and mental health I wouldn't need to go into that pub. But there is an ironmonger around the corner in Earlham Street that sells orange- coloured plastic buckets and my daughter does work downstairs in the engine room of the Groucho Club so I can visit her. She is working on making starters at the moment and I hope to God there aren't any complaints about them. She gave me a lecture about the cost of living — hers and I could see that coming.
The hints about her cost of living amuse and puzzle me. She is not starving and when she came around for supper later that day she made a bee-line for the gin bottle in a manner that suggested that she was familiar with that little trip. I couldn't afford to drink spirits until I was much older than her. But now that I have got a cleaning woman in my employ the daugh- ter thinks I am a case of rags to riches.
So do the idiots in the Coach and Horses. In actual fact the Inland Revenue have had a stranglehold on my end of the Apollo Theatre since November, but I am not complaining. It is not everyone who can hail a taxi in darkest Maida Vale and go to the West End to buy an orange- coloured plastic bucket.
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