Low life
Not floating into oblivion
Jeffrey Bernard
Ihave had to weigh in again, this time at University College Hospital. I tipped the scales at a horrific 48 kilos which means that I could make a come back as a fly- weight especially since both Benny Lynch and Jackie Patterson are out for the count. Just for once the medical staff didn't hang about for too long or keep me waiting on a stretcher in a corridor, but quite quickly gave me some morphine. Yesterday, in the light of day, I turned around and, to my alarm, saw that the patient in the next bed to me was none other than Joe-Joe, the Maltese odd-job man who hangs around Soho. I once employed him myself to put up some book shelves and now the poor chap has had a tracheotomy and can't speak at all. Do all the roads in Soho lead to hospital?
But if I still feel slightly sick, it is not because of my pancreas but because of a news item in last week's papers about a two-year-old girl who fell into a river but floated and was rescued by a German tourist. Her parents said she had been play- ing by the river bank and that she had fall- en in because she was trying to reach the quack-quacks. There is something I found slightly awful and disgusting about teaching a child to call a duck a quack-quack and moo-cows may be slightly worse. But it is not surprising nowadays. What is amazing, though, is that the child should have been rescued by a German tourist. An American or Japanese tourist would have simply taken a few snapshots of the incident and allowed the child to drift on out to the North Sea.
I fear there are other people floating on out into oblivion and I'm sorry to say that three of them are Dawn, Trudy and Bran- wyn, my three district nurses, who say that their alternate days visits are no longer necessary and there will be no need to take my left leg off. Poor Mr Cobb. He must be having withdrawal symptoms by now at having no excuse to stick his scalpel or saw into me again. On top of all that, Vera is taking ten days holiday and in her place there reigns the Australian girl who irritat- ingly says, 'No problem,' in reply to every- thing from a fart to a scream of phantom pain. The trouble is that she means well, and doesn't everybody, including the moth- er who teaches her daughter to say quack- quack instead of bloody duck. Mind you, I must admit to having involved myself for years with those brutes called gee-gees.
But back to the hospital. Unlike the Middlesex, there is no landing by the lifts where I used to smoke endlessly. In here, instead of that we have a room not much bigger than a police cell furnished with four chairs, a print of a Manet painting and the walking wounded who are suffer- ing too much even to moan about it. I might do a little moaning myself after I have had a pancreas scan done this after- noon. Let us hope that it looks to be its usual disgusting self — like sweetbreads in a butcher's shop window — and not entertaining any uninvited guests. At this moment, I would give you a fiver for a cup of tea and the teabags lie dried up in my locker.
On the mend, I wonder where I should go to recuperate — not that I need to but I find myself thinking a lot about Syd- ney as opposed to the usual haunts of Barbados. I find the jagged hardness of some Australians refreshing after the gig- gles of those that do the caring.
I wonder what will be the first mouthful of food to pass these dried up lips. The odds go 5-4 cottage pie, 2-1 macaroni cheese, and 3-1 what they call steamed cod which is a preparation made from wet cotton wool. It just remains for me to pray that Norman will not arrive in his usual charitable way armed with forbidden luxu- ries from the Harrods food hall. A plain digestive biscuit will do very nicely, thank you.
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